Thread: What got you guys into straight razor shaving?

Did you ever ask your dad why he had those strops?

Originally Posted by Axeman556

Did you ever ask your dad why he had those strops?

I suspect he bought them as a “disciplinary” threat for a rather undisciplined son ; )

He also had an old hand-sized combo coticule in his toolbox that he used to sharpen knives. We lived in a corner grocery store that had a small butcher shop with all the knives, cleavers, sharpening steel and a huge maple chopping block.

As in my job, focus on technique leads to a better performance of tools.
Studying the edge of the different DE / SE blades, I reached the honing of knives.
From there, honing the straight razor. But theory is useful just in practice.
So I joined this community to understand what to buy.
As they say ... the rest is history.

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???

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

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.

About ten years ago I started DE shaving, something I had done back in the 60s and 70s before cartridge razors took over. I really got into it and acquired a nice collection of vintage Gillette DEs. Then about 5 months ago, I inherited three vintage straights from a relative who had been a barber. I decided to try the straights, and I haven’t touched one of my DEs in five months. One way I can tell I’m getting closer shaves is that the Proraso aftershave I use stings much more than it used to. More people must be taking straights up because they don’t show up in consignment stores as much as they used to.