Thread: could you get away with using the same blade for months on end?

i know of several people who have used cartridges for months on end without a change and the results aren't horrible.. i know i've used mach3 cartridges for up to a month at times.. could you get away with using a DE blade for months? i'm really not willing to try it.. but i'm thinking about seeing if i could go 2 weeks on the same blade.. just as an experiment..

in the event of a zombie apocalypse and i'm forced to hold up in a log cabin for awhile and run out of blades.

The length of time a blade can be used depends a lot on your facial hair type, if its coarse, i would say your looking at painful shaves, what i find is that the longer i use a blade, the worse the shave becomes with stubble being left and a quicker return of facial hair, i throw mine after 3, maybe 4 shaves with certain blades, though i suppose you could still use a blade for a few weeks if a perfect shave was not required.

Originally Posted by vthomlinson

in the event of a zombie apocalypse and i'm forced to hold up in a log cabin for awhile and run out of blades.

Use straight razor and you don't have to worry about running out of DE blades in the case of zombie apocalypse.

There's no way I'd do it. Well, maybe shave once a week or something. Blades are inexpensive and don't take up much space at all compared to the rest of the supplies you'll need for the apocalypse.

Yea after 3 shaves in general I notice a difference so I wouldn't do more. Of course if you have peachfuzz you would probably get way more shaves.

I can shave 2 weeks on a single blade.. but I also only shave every other or every 3rd day because of extremely slow growth. I have also noticed it depends on the blade itself. I have some vintage Gillette blues that I actually used for a month before they started to tug feel dull. It helps having fine hair and not very coarse hair as well.

I definately notice a difference after about a week, so 5-7 shaves. Thats when I have to change blades as it starts to feel uncomfortable.

Good luck with your experiment. You may try corking the blade before shaves, akin to stropping, for better results. The best thing you could do to get a longer blade life is get the blade entirely dry after a shave. In my experience, corrosion = loss of blade longevity.

Before I switched to straights I could get quite a bit of mileage from a gillette DE. THe actual gillette ones, i.e., the bargan basement foreign made ones seemed to tug after the first coupl'a shaves. This was all pre-internet (at least for me it was pre-internet) so the scarcity of good disposable blades made me try to go as long as I could on each one.

I only shaved every other day, and sometimes I'd go 3-4 days between shaves, plus my beard was pretty close to my skin color, so I didn't really have to shave every day. My beard isn't peach fuzz, but it's not terribly coarse either. I'd say it's about medium.

That being said, I could use an individual blade for a month to 6 weeks without too much discomfort, though I did notice a great improvement when I finally did replace the blade (it got worse incrementally, so it wasn't like a giant difference from one day to the next). Like another poster pointed out, keeping the blade dry helps prolong the life, and I'll add that good preperation of the beard makes a big difference when using a marginal blade.

After five shaves I tend to notice a difference. I am six shaves into my current blade without any irritation. Usually, though, I use the blade three to four times at most.