Quote Originally Posted by rgdominguez View Post
mparker, the test as it is performed today never tests beard hair since we don't let it grow long enough, so what is your point? The idea is to develop a more reproducible, consistent and high-confidence test!
This is a great idea if it's useful, but I'm skeptical.

The relevance of the HHT is dependent on two semi-independent variables, the quality of individual head hair (or arm hair), and the quality of the beard hair. Reducing the variability in the hair test doesn't help much, since each individual still has to calibrate this standard test against the shave results on his own beard. But this is the same difficulty as calibrating his own head hair (or arm hair) against his own beard.

This standard HHT is also potentially less useful, since the minute variations in our own hair can be used to provide more fine-grained results. In my case I use the hair on my arm, and I can get a good gauge of how sharp the blade is by how far up my arm the blade will pop hair. But there aren't enough grades of fishing line in the range we need to provide that level of feedback. The fishing line provides a high confidence pass/fail test, but a test of what? Whether the blade can cut fishing line, which is great if our beards were all identical and that fishing line corresponded to a great shave of that beard. But that's a lot of "if's", and several of them are demonstrably false.