For my purposes, a good razor is one that responds well to my lead.Quote:
What is a good razor?
That means when I do the things I've learned, it consistently responds favorably - whether I am honing, stropping, shaving with, holding, buying, selling, or just looking at it.
But what have you learned? And what do you expect from your razor? And which qualities do you admit help define what is good even when you realize you are not qualified to make a determination for? These will be different in different degrees for different people. Maybe you don't hone - or maybe you don't shave. How the razor responds in these areas don't even factor in for you. Maybe you'll recognize that even though you don't hone, a good razor should hone easily, or maybe only hone well, or maybe you won't recognize that it should, and rather that it should only shave well. Even which benchmarks someone might use to say what is good are subjective. That's why I agree with you if you mean that what you call good I may not, and vice versa.
So how can I tell from your review whether a razor which I've never used is a good razor? I can't, really, because I've never used it. I can choose to trust your judgement criterion by criterion. Or I can choose to trust recognizable factors of reliability and consistent indicators of quality, but these are not foolproof. I guess I take an empirically-based approach to determining a razor's goodness :)