Thread: "A good razor". What is it?

What is a good razor?

For my purposes, a good razor is one that responds well to my lead.

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

As I recall when I set up the original reviews forum the guiding principle I initally layed out to the members was that after reading a review, if it is well written it should give the reader enough information so that he feels like he has already tried the product or now knows enough about it to make an intelligent decision whether to buy it or not.

The tough part was and still is how to get the members to write such a review eh?

Originally Posted by thebigspendur

As I recall when I set up the original reviews forum the guiding principle I initally layed out to the members was that after reading a review, if it is well written it should give the reader enough information so that he feels like he has already tried the product or now knows enough about it to make an intelligent decision whether to buy it or not.

The tough part was and still is how to get the members to write such a review eh?

I'd love to help out with those reviews but I just don't have enough experience yet to give any reasonable reviews.

Originally Posted by TheBaron

I'd love to help out with those reviews but I just don't have enough experience yet to give any reasonable reviews.

That sentence made me think ("finally", some may say). And I think you are actually wrong. Because I can write brush reviews, although brushes are the one area of straight shaving I know very little about (I do not like luxuriously soft brushes, because they do not work well for me, so I am quite happy with my bottom line Mühle, Thäter, and Simpson). When reviewing them, I tried to ensure that my lack of experience was reflected in the review.

What I have difficulty with are reviews written by people who pretend they know what they are talking about, but actually do not. Or, maybe even worse, who do not benchmark the product they review.