Thread: What got you guys into straight razor shaving?

Originally Posted by PaulFLUS

My father had one when I was a kid. I'm pretty sure it was my grandfather's which he got from him when he died. He didn't really use it much but he did also own a sharpening business. He would go out to job sites and pick up saws to sharpen but also people would bring him knives, scissors and occasionally razors to sharpen. He had a knack for those kinds of skills and could get anything "razor sharp." Anyway, I just always romanticized about that thing; the shaving, honing, stropping, the whole bit. One Saturday night when I had just started shaving I got out his straight and tried it out. I can remember thinking, "wow, that was harder than I thought but, huh, not so bad." Next morning we went to church and the youth director looked at me and said, "did you get attacked by a cat?" I hadn't even noticed because they didn't show up right away but I had all these tiny cuts all over my face. I think the thing that really got me started shaving with one though was that I started cutting my own hair (flat top/ whole other story) and I could shave my own neck with a safety razor in the mirror (you need three mirrors BTW) but it was never as close as the barber got it with a straight and later shavette so I went out and bought a hair shaper razor from the barber/beauty supply which I still have today and use occasionally. One thing > another I remember my first foray with the straight of my Dad's and started shaving my face with it.
Years go by and I wound up getting his razor which I still have. I also wound up with his barber hones and the old belt he used for a strop and a bunch of his other hones. It was still just a casual interest until one day my wife took me to an antique store as a novel thing to do. In one case were some straights which were affordable so I bought a couple. Took them home, cleaned them up, tried to hone them on the barber hones, tried to find information on their history, found SRP, segue, segue...+/-200 razors, a wheel barrow full of rocks and a string of dead animal skins and cloth later here I am writing about how I became obsessed with this hobby; The End
.....or is it just the beginning???

Im gonna say only the begining

Originally Posted by Axeman556

Reading that last sentence made me grin! No truer words my friend!!

...

So first of all this site is a family rated one so watch the language please.

I was using a DE and just almost by accident stumbled on the old Straight Razor Place on Yahoo Groups and it got me interested.

I was suffering from very dry, easily irritated skin. I absolutely hated shaving. At this point in time I was using canned goo and disposables. (All the Gillette ads said 'more blades were better' and their goo was for 'sensitive skin'.) A visit to the dermatologist confirmed a case of rosacea. The doc suggested I only shave if necessary and to throw away the canned stuff and use aqueous cream in its place. This helped but I still wasn't happy. I thought there surely had to be a better way to shave and take care of the skin. So I started looking online for a better way and stumbled on SRP. Thanks to all the info and advice gathered from here I now enjoy my shaves and dry, irritated skin are in the past.

All I can remember is I was sick of throwing money away on disposables.
Now after 40 years of collecting straight razors & everything that goes with 'em I wonder if if I actually saved money

Originally Posted by onimaru55

All I can remember is I was sick of throwing money away on disposables.
Now after 40 years of collecting straight razors & everything that goes with 'em I wonder if if I actually saved money

Most likely not, but it is way more fun.

I came to straight shaving via shaving with safety razors. I took up the latter when Gillette had introduced just another cartridge that was better than anything else before (or so they said ) and, surprisingly , pricier than anything before as well. I had enough.

I gave safety razors a try and found it not half as difficult as I had expected and as some people make it sound.
After I started looking forward to my morning shaves, I became inquisitive and wanted to find out what it took to shave with a straight.

That, of course, took a bit longer to master and required some perseverance and resilience (and included some moments of doubt whether it was really worth it), but the more I progressed the more I liked it, until at last I got better shaves from straights than I did from safety razors, and shaved for some years exclusively with straights.

Now, I shave again with safety razors from time to time, as I found that some of the skills I had learnt from straights improved my safety razor shaves too.


B.

I watched my Grandfather shave with a straight razor when I was a kid and was impressed by it. That was over 60 years ago. However, I didn't pick it up until I retired 9 years ago. I haven't shaved with anything since.

I was hanging out on another shave forum. Learning and enjoying DE and SE razors. Then a guy with more straight razors than he knew what to do with made up pass around boxes of straight razors. 5 per box. I put my name on the list. When i got the box i got to shave with all the razors and keep one for myself. I paid to send the box to the next guy and the man who started the boxes would send a replacement razor so everyone got to try 5 razors.

I still have my gifted razor. I learned to shave with a straight pretty quickly and moved over to this forum. Here i started the learning of honing and fine tuning my straight razor shaves.

Then these idiots, i mean fine people asked me to be a mentor. I was hooked to SRP forever at that time. The hardest part was keeping the mentor refrigerator full of beer. Lol

I started when I inherited my grandfathers straight razor, mug, and Frictionite in 1997.
It took a few years before I found Classic Shaving and their link to SRP on the Yahoo forum.
Then I started to learn.