Thread: What got you guys into straight razor shaving?

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.

Originally Posted by Elnones

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.

There really doesn’t seem to be as much out there as there used to be. Even the classifieds here were once full of great stuff with new ones coming onboard almost daily. eBay has a lot of razors. But the amount of garbage seems really high.

So then I'm not imagining that? It seemed to me that there were less on the market that were worth looking at. Especially fleabay seems to be more junk now than it was. I thought maybe I was just getting harder to please or maybe it is some of both.

Originally Posted by PaulFLUS

So then I'm not imagining that? It seemed to me that there were less on the market that were worth looking at. Especially fleabay seems to be more junk now than it was. I thought maybe I was just getting harder to please or maybe it is some of both.

I don’t think so. Even the one that would need work seem to be bottom of the barrel. I was looking at some this week and a lot of them had pitting so deep that Inwould never be able to judge if it could be cleaned up. And I’m seeing some that are already supposedly restored with pitting right down to the cutting edge. It makes it hard to evaluate what is a good price when there is nothing to compare things to.

Yeah, and the ones that are in decent shape sellers are putting 1849 gold rush prices on; things that aren't even rare.

Being the eternal optimist though, maybe it's time to send some to market that I restored to sell them couldn't let go of.