I avoided doing it for almost 23 years. Most of my male friends did it and I wouldn’t be surprised if a few females were doing it as well.
I had tried it for a while in my teens but gradually got out of the habit as I got older. Then about ten years ago I found myself in the bathroom about to do it again, yes it was time to get rid of the beard and have a shave.
It was the night of the last dance ever in the Mayfair Ballroom and we’d decided to pay our own little tribute in the pub and dress for the occasion, sixties style. I slicked back the hair, put on the white shirt and tie and, to complete the look, got rid off the beard.
Things had changed a lot since I’d last put on the shaving foam, the days of the one blade razor were long past and the world had entered the age of the multi blade razor. First it was the Sensor Excel from Gillette with two blades, which seemed enough for any beard, but no, it was soon followed by the Mach 3 with three and then the four bladed Quattro, all promising the smoothest, closest shave ever. There’s now the Fusion with five blades. The razors themselves are very cheap to buy, but the blades cost a small fortune and it’s not likely to end there, with huge money being spent on developing razors with even more blades.
Now there’s a handy job, going in to have a shave every morning and getting paid for it There‘s a total of 80 people, all men I presume, on the Gillette shave test panel at a technology centre in the UK. On five mornings a week, 50 weeks a year, they head in for a shave with the new range of razors. This is a serious business with tight security making sure that nobody reveals the latest developments in shaving technology. The panellists are watched through two way mirrors and video cameras record the whole procedure. High speed infra red cameras take around 2,000 frames a second and sensors measure the force used in the shaving process. This all seems like a lot of work to produce that little razor blade, but the business of getting that close shave is worth billions worldwide.
How did they do it in the old days without all the high tech equipment available now? If you are to believe the films and TV they must have had some pretty sharp blades in ye olden days. Jonathan Rees Myers is portraying King Henry VIII in The Tudors with a perfectly smooth shaven face. There’s no signs of any bits of paper stuck to his chin where he might have got a little nick. The blade on the axe the executioner uses for lopping off heads every week looks pretty sharp, so maybe he looks after the king’s razor as well.
It’s the same with all the cowboy films. The redskins might have little more than a skimpy piece of cloth covering their vital organs but you can be sure they will have had the time and equipment for a perfect shave that morning.
MORE SHAVING TRIVIA…
Well it’s a bank holiday weekend and there’s not much inspiration around, with the recession the only item making the news, so here’s a few more fairly useless bits of information with a shaving theme.
Did you know that:
1. Earlier this year, researchers from the University of Bristol revealed that how often a man shaves may be a marker of how likely he is to suffer from heart disease.
Men who shaved less than once a day were also less likely to be married, have fewer orgasms, to smoke and to work in manual occupations.
2. The owner of a bakery in Romania addressed his workers with rather an unusual request. He suggested that they should all shave their heads.
The baker’s idea was to create an easily recognisable bakery brand. Shaved heads would probably attract everyone's attention, the man thought.
Mr Presecan was the first to shave his head, setting an example to his employees. He asked them to say goodbye to their hair and promised $140 as compensation for the radical haircut. As a result, 60 bakery workers, men and women, followed the example of their boss and became absolutely bald.
“I think, this step will make our production more hygienic while the appearance of the staff will become a peculiar brand. Especially now, when similarity between the shaved heads and the bread that they bake is so evident," the owner of the bakery said.
3. The moustache, or lack of it, has become a weapon of mass destruction in Palestine between the Hamas and Fatah groups.
Hamas has resumed its policy of shaving the moustaches of rival Fatah members to humiliate them as a form of punishment, as regular readers of The Jerusalem Post will have read.
Reports of such punishments surfaced in January, though Hamas denied it had resorted to close shaves in its struggle to assert dominance over Palestinian politics.
Fatah officials renewed their allegations of this barbaric form of warfare and Hamas, in turn, claimed followers' beards had been sabotaged by Fatah officials.
Nafez al-Namnam, a top Fatah operative in the Gaza Strip, appears to be the latest target of Hamas clippers. Namnam, 51, had sported a rather large moustache for more than three decades, but after being rounded up by Hamas in the aftermath of a bombing, he emerged from prison with a clean-shaven face.
In response, the Aksa Martyrs Brigades issued a statement strongly condemning the use of shaving as punishment. Still, it has to be better than suicide bombers.
A VERY CLOSE SHAVE
That’s what Ballyhale had in Nowlan Park last Sunday. Maybe it was the warm sunshine, but both teams and spectators seem to be in a relaxed mood and there wasn’t the usual cutthroat edge to the exchanges. The teams only worked up a lather in the last 15 minutes and whereas The Shamrocks were razor sharp with the chances that came their way, The Village shaved the posts with a few frees that would have made all the difference.
