No this is not a reminisce about the days when we thought cold fusion had been achieved… but a comment on the Gillette razor of the same name. I would normally link to Gillette’s website here, but it is so annoying [1] that I can’t bring myself to subject you to it.
Anyhow, I received one of these orange, blue and chrome marvels in the mail some many, many months ago as a promotion. Give a guy a razor and he’ll have to buy blades, right!? Wrong. I’m decidedly unimpressed. Here’s why:
First, some context.
- I regularly use a Gillette Sensor Excel which has a solid metal handle, rubber grippies and a pivoting double-bladed head with a strip of white soapy stuff. I’ve pretty much been using this kind of razor since I started shaving somewhat regularly in college 15 years ago.[2]
- I haven’t used shaving cream, gel, lubricant, etc. regularly for probably 10 years. I shave in the shower, and I’m not the hairiest guy in town, so it’s generally not an issue. If I miss shaving for a few days (like a week), I usually wish I had some gel, but most days it’s no big deal.
When I ran out of blades a month or so ago, K suggested I use the FUSION. So I popped the 5 bladed neon monster out of the box and hung it in the shower.
The next day it took me about 3.7 hours to shave. Ok, I exaggerate, only 37 minutes. There are two major problems with this razor:
- Relative to the Sensor Excel, the blade head is roughly the size of Montana.
- Relative to the state of Montana, the blade head is roughly the size of Montana.
So I find that I have to press the razor into my face with about 4x the force I used to to get the blades to actually cut anything. It sort-of makes sense, with 5 blades instead of 2, the force per linear distance of blade is reduced by 2.5 times. In addition, the surface area of the surrounding blade head has increased, so the amount of force which actually causes the blades to reach your facial hair is reduced further. On the plus side, this did seem to cause significantly less irritation per pass, since the likelihood of the blades cutting anything, let alone your face, was similarly reduced.
Now we come to the problem which has plagued razors since their inception: human bodies (and especially faces) are very poorly approximated by the planar head of a razor. As such, the side of the razor tends to bump into objects that don’t wish to be shaved off like your lips, nose and ears. So the effective useful area of the Fusion razor was about 4 square inches on each of my cheeks and my neck. It was like trying to get a stretch Hummer down Lombard Street. Good thing they put that little trimmer blade on the back (yes! a sixth blade!) so I could shave the rest of my face.
I didn’t give up though and dutifully used the Fusion for a month or so, even after K had kindly replenished the supply of my standard shaving apparatus. Although I got considerably better at maneuvering the Nimitz class razor around my face, it still seemed to take considerably more passes to get the job done. A week ago, I finally switched back.
I nearly removed my face on the first stroke (high pressure on small surface area=BAD), but quickly recovered to my previous abilities.
Sorry Gillette. No deal.
- There is an especially high-pitched chirp every time you mouse over a menu item that is overwhelming my audio “bear detector”. [↩]
- Actually, I used an electric shaver most of the time while I was in college, but in grad school I could no longer afford to replace the little foil screen that wore out every six months and switched to blades. [↩]

