Thread: Growth and Developmental Stages of a Shaver

(LONG POST)

While growth charts for children are useful for monitoring their growth and health, I put together this description of the Growth and Development Stages of a Shaver for no useful purpose whatsoever…except for a little fun. Feel free to add your two cents and refine the descriptions…

• Newbie
  • Everything is new – Even the basics are overwhelming…what equipment do I need? …new or used, soap or cream, boar or badger, Norton or some other shameful heresy? My first shave was a mess!...stubble, blood and burns! What did I do wrong? What can I do to save myself from a morning ritual of pain?!
  • Buy it! – Gotta have another razor/soap/stone/strop/video to unlock the secret of a good shave!
  • Agony and ecstasy – The dream of a comfortable, BBS straight razor shave is ecstasy…except when it turns to agony on those 5-6 days a week when the whiskers win and your skin looses. Darn razor, what’s wrong with it…stupid strop, I gotta get a new one…dumb soap, dries out too quick, I need a better brush.
  • Duration of Newbiness – It depends. Some boast it lasts mere days. Prodigies and liars aside, most would admit weeks, perhaps a few months. Its end is signaled when you begin each shave confident you will finish uninjured and presentable and you haven’t used the styptic in more than a week.
  • Exception – some of the old-timers were newbies of a different sort. They had no shaving father like today’s newbie. No SRP, B&B, DVD…they just sort of became shavers on their own, stropping razors on truck tires, learning from the Three Stooges, surviving Zeepks and all the other ignorant bliss and failures that come with going it alone. Their newbiness may have been similar to the modern newbie, but it was likely longer with many a colorful tale to tell.
• Post Newbie
  
  • Refined RAD – By the time the Newbie stage is over, you’ve bought a few treasures and a few duds. Some of your soaps, creams and potions will never see the outside of the medicine cabinet again. Some lucky razors found themselves in your hand on good days; those days when your fledgling techniques for sharpening, prepping and shaving aligned in Zen-like magic to give you the kind of shave that keeps you coming back. Those razors became favorites while the ones unfortunate enough to run afoul of your bad and bloody days got labeled losers. So now, your tastes are refined. Unlike your Newbie brethren, you have educated opinions based on vast weeks of experience. Now you know that you just have to have that Vulfix Super Badger brush, or a set of Vlad original scales or a gleaming restoration from Joe (and of course you long for a Maestro original). You’re using your Dremmel well enough to know what accessories are absolutely necessary for your budding skills to develop into the razor restorer you are meant to be.
  • Helpful Advice – Your world is colored by fresh memories of breaking free from the growing pains of newbiness with great discoveries that nobody else has ever known. Excited postings encourage newbies with your confident advise and experiences…based on weeks or even months of occasional (but spectacular!) successes. From week to week, the “most important” shaving principle changes and you share pearls of wisdom to help others unlock the secret. While these advices are not likely to as revolutionary as the post-Noob thinks, his enthusiasm and fresh voice make for helpful posts never the less.
  • Humble Pie – Sure as the Post-Newbie posts a discovery the next day they’ll be humbled by it. Try a new stropping technique, get that perfect edge, post it as a tip, dull the razor the next day. Get a BBS because of the new stretching technique, post advice on that, and burn that nice stretched skin the next day. Somewhere there’s gotta be a Murphy’s Law that says the day after you post advice on the SRP, your technique will turn and bite you.
  • Rotating “most” important principles – During this post-Newbie stage, techniques are being refined with one “ah-ha!” after another as you experience more and more good days. Got an edge sharper than ever? It’s because you did X passes on Y stone, followed by Z passes on the strop with some special technique. A week later, when you finally conquer that trouble spot on your chin, you’re convinced your new skin stretching gyration is the secret to a great shave! Another week or two and you are reminded how critical a light touch is. Another month it’s the razor angle that carries you to Nirvana.
• Seasoned Shaver
  
  • Settled – Buying less, enjoying it more. At least you aren’t compelled to buy something to achieve that perfect shave. You may buy as much or more than ever, but it’s as a collector…a much more respectable view of your compulsion.
  • Collector – You may not buy now for the express purpose of finding that perfect shave, but you still like collecting one or more parts of the shaving arsenal. You may support the habit by selling some of your lesser wares, or you may just keep gorging the collection. Whatever it takes to settle the account with your significant other.
  • Beyond procedures – You no longer hone, strop, or shave by steps. You’ve moved past the paint-by-numbers approach to shaving and you just do it. Your hand has learned what the right razor position feels like to strop and to shave, your face knows what it feels like to shave not scrape, and your eyes know how to inform your mind which is simply, gracefully and unconsciously conducting the whole orchestra.
  • Enjoying – This is just so much fun now.
• Aged Master
  
  • Knowledge to spare – You’re forgotten more than lesser shavers will ever know. Which is the problem. It’s hard for you to remember, or at least to articulate what you know. If you were side-by-side with the learning one, you could pass on much, oh learned one, as you watch them and they watch you and you see and hear and chat back and forth. But alas, it’s just the Internet.
  • Pearls of wisdom – Sometimes it’s not the particulars of what you share with the masses, it’s just that you share. Because so much of this art is art and not science, the pictures you paint on the limited canvas of the SRP forums encourage, enliven and enrich the shaving experience for all. They even occasionally provide a tip.
  • Informed opinions – Much of what is posted is opinion. With your years of experience, yours ought to count for a little more. Not to say your ways are the only ways, but they ought to bear a little more consideration from the rest of the shavers than those offered by their less seasoned peers.
  • More to learn – You mean it when you say you are learning all the time. It’s not a false humility, it’s just a genuine appreciation for the endless permutations of this simple daily routine…and the knowledge that you haven’t experienced your last razor nick or burn or less than perfect edge.

Interesting. I have a few more steps to go.

Martin

"always drink upstream from the herd!"

Very good
I'd like to think I'm post newbie but maybe its more pre, post newbie.

Originally Posted by Spokeshave

Excited postings encourage newbies with your confident advise and experiences…based on weeks or even months of occasional (but spectacular!) successes.

I do this. I've already managed to warn several newbies of the dangers of cheap & bad ebay razors over at B&B (not to mention entousiastic advice on lathering and brushes and so on).

Wow, it's like your inside my brain...

I grade myself as Seasoned Shaver with delusions of Mastery.

X

Originally Posted by xman

I grade myself as Seasoned Shaver with delusions of Mastery.

X

Ah, it's those delusions of Mastery that compel us all.

- Dale

I think I am still somewhere between post-newbie and the "collector" part of seasoned shaver.

Originally Posted by xman

I grade myself as Seasoned Shaver with delusions of Mastery.

X

Ditto.

But I never fell for the whole collecting/buying/RAD thing.
A razor is for shaving and that's that. I go for the minimalist approach:
1 soap, 1 brush, 1 bowl, 2 or 3 razors, 1 strop,...

I have a couple of stones, granted, and a bunch of flapwheels, sandpaper, pins, ..
I got the anvil and the bad saw for free.

But those are for restoration and sharpening purposes, and I use them to make money so that's ok then
My shaving hobby pays for itself. All it costs me is a lot of time.

I'm new to straight razor shaving, and to this forum. I have to say that I found this thread very encouraging, since I'm still at the stage where I look as though I've held a tomcat to my face and twisted its tail.

Having slashed a nostril and my right thumb yesterday I was wondering if I would ever learn to get a good shave before I bled out, but it looks as though I'm simply going through the normal learning process (apart from the thumb perhaps).

My wife and son haven't exactly been encouraging. My wife reckons I look like Frankenstein's monster without the scars, and my son suggests I should shave a monkey for practice. Actually, that's not a bad idea-perhaps I should kidnap a monkey from the local ape rescue centre (Monkey World) here in Dorset, England, and sneak it back when I've finished with it. I'm sure no-one would notice, and I could start with, say, a marmoset, and work my way up to a chimp. Better steer clear of the woolly monkeys, though.

I appear to have hit the "Buy it" stage", since I've recently bought a Fred Fenney "Tally Ho" wedge, a Dubl Duck Satinedge, a Wostenholm Peerless, a Wade and Butcher 6/8 wedge (slashed nostril and thumb - perhaps it should be "Wade & Butchered") and a NOS Genco Fluid Steel.

This morning I bought a new box of Band-Aids.