The mileage on my face.

The Mother of all Shaving Videos

As I’ve been exploring in my last couple of posts - desultory as they’ve been - there is a wealth of shaving information available on YouTube. Some of it is very good. You can gather a lot of useful instruction about how to build a lather, what sort of brush is best suited for the task, and why you’d want to opt out of the top-down, corporate driven dominant model of how to shave from the pioneering series of videos posted by Mantic59. He goes into great detail about the whys and wherefores of various razors, blades, brushes, soaps and techniques. Of late, he’s also been including information about straight razor shaving. 

Mantic gets a good run for his money from another self-proclaimed expert, Geofatboy, who has, from the start, been a more enthusiastic proponent of the straight razor shave, both for its undeniably machismo appeal, as well as for its less often touted but, for my money, more significant lure as a lower impact alternative to the wasteful misery of multiblade cartridge shaving. 

From there, it runs the gamut, from lonely guys sharing notes on technique with nameless friends to runners up from People magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive issue, and everything in between. 

There’s something all the shaving videos on YouTube share in common, though. It’s a kind of inchoate grasping at what it is to be a man, and how a man should best be most comfortable with his most intimate aspects. Try as they might, none of these videos can rival what, for me, is the very template of men’s grooming. It was the original, and it remains the best. With that, I give you: the Mother of all Shaving Videos:

Video. Shaving. Pussy.

A friend told me tonight he wants back the eight minutes of his life he spent watching the video I posted in my last entry. And here I thought I was doing a public service; sorting the wheat from the chaff, as it were. While it may not be the best, I think that video is quintessential of the alarmingly populous demi-monde that is YouTube shaving culture. 

I haven’t seen the statistics, and I hope I never will, but I imagine shaving videos rival cat videos for sheer volume online. And while cats may be caught on camera doing anything ¹ from talking to playing the piano, men who upload videos of themselves shaving are, with a predictability reminiscent of porn films, always doing the same thing; again, and again and again. 

You could, in fact, devote a whole tumblog to selecting and sharing the most ridiculous, most embarrassing, unintentionally hilarious or humiliating shaving videos. But that would be mean spirited. And way too easy. 

Not that there aren’t shaving videos worth watching. Among all that chatter there are some treasures. Two in particular stand out. The first is part documentary, part homage:

Chimensch’s video is a simple record of one man’s devotion to a practice he has been perfecting for thirty years. That in itself is interesting enough, whether you give a cat’s meow about the particulars of shaving. 

And if you are interested in how to shave with a straight razor, a better, more artfully done instructional video would be hard to find. 

In contrast to the studied calm of the Chimensch video, this one has the air of something done on a dare, extemporaneously. The onlookers seem to be bemused dinner guests. There’s an antic glee about the whole thing that takes it beyond the realm of the solitary fetishist, alone with a camera in his bathroom. It could be an outtake from some lost or abandoned Werner Herzog film. Just imagine a voiceover by the brooding German director: “The unsmiling blade is a tool without purpose of its own. We don’t know whether the shaver fears the blade or the blade fears the shaver more. In the end it doesn’t matter. Either way affords us a glimpse into the unfettered void.” Or words to that effect. 

^{1. I haven’t come across any videos of cats shaving, or of anybody shaving a cat, but if you’re naive enough - as I was - to type the hashtag “shaving” into tumblr, you’ll find lots of pussy shaving. ↩}

The Winter of our Discontent

And now this:

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Hazards of the straight razor shave

There’s a Reddit devoted to shaving, called Wicked Edge. Earlier today someone asked whether he should continue shaving with the multiblade gizmos you find everywhere nowadays or take the plunge and start shaving with a straight razor. I’m relatively new to the arcane art of the straight razor shave, but what I lack in experience I make up for in enthusiasm. I felt compelled to chime in, and I repost here, for your delectation, my response:

If you start shaving with a straight razor - not a shavette - you will run into problems you will not encounter with the plastic wrapped stuff. With the Walmart stuff, you can expect the usual chore of shaving to be what it’s been for you and thousands of others for years now, and leave it at that. Start down the straight razor path and you will find yourself thinking about your next shave while you’re still smooth from the last one. You’ll be wondering about what heavier grinds or wider blades or more ornate scales might add to what had been your humdrum routine. You’ll start to wonder why three strops wouldn’t be too many. You’ll be bookmarking obscure webpages full of japanese vocabulary to describe antique rocks mined from Kyoto neighborhoods long ago. You will know things like what “Thuringian” means, and you’ll be unembarrassed to wax poetic about it at parties, should you manage still to be invited to any, which will be weird that you’re not, given how good that Eucris smells on you. You’ll devote time to posting nonsensical advice online to neophyte strangers when you could be doing something your old self would’ve thought more productive. Save yourself, man. Don’t do it.