Thread: How does your skin differ between a great razor and a good one?

Originally Posted by Double0757

Smoothness is how the edge feels gliding down my face. This is where it gets like wine testing. Buttery smooth, smooth with a presence, edgy, and so on, terms that mean something to me. The scale is 1-5, 5 being the smoothes.

Then I rate the sharpness, 3 passes (no touchups) and then I feel my face with my wet soapy hand, if no stubbles at all, it is a 100% BBS. If I find stubbles (most of the times),

This is also how I think about it. There is smooth, there is sharp and when we are lucky we have smooth and sharp. Sometimes I'll let a razor slip a bit in sharp as long as it's smooth. Good razors and good honing get us there more frequently. We obviously notice during and right after a shave how smooth it was or wasn't- how it feels and how our skin reacts. Sharp can be measured at the end of the shave as above and I think its also good to feel the shave about an hour after the shave- after the skin has calmed down and all. Sometimes that can be surprising.

Whatever the feedback is after that I can tell if I have my acceptable level of sharpness and/or smoothness. Do I have to re-hone (or possibly re-bevel) to bring it back to the sharpness I want? or do I just need to polish to bring back the smoothness. That's what I consider refreshing the razor.

None of this is cut and dry and it varies from face to face, razor to razor, hone to hone, honer to honer and from strop to strop. But, if I'm stropping well and doing light conservative refreshings and not letting my edges go stale on me- I don't have to go to bare bones honing until 6-12 months of shaving. This figure used to be 3-6 months until I learned to use lighter pressure and not scrape the whiskers off. (which can be tempting at times but wore out the edges too quickly)

Couldn't pronounce Osvaldo? Sheesh, that's a no brainer. Xiao Qiong, maybe, but Osvaldo? They need to get out and about more.

Originally Posted by Johnus

Singlets are like "onesies" without sleeves.

Not in Australia. For clarification I know what a singlet is, I will post a photo later.