Do we ever really get over high school?
This morning I brought out the same model of Schick Injector that my step-father switched to (and thus so did I: I used his razor) when I was a junior in high school some years back (mid-1950’s). I chronically got nicks with it, and when I shaved this morning I immediately saw why: I was using a terrible blade angle, scraping the blade across my face. As with the GEMs, the top of the razor should be pretty well flat to the skin, but I had it at a relatively steep angle, which would be expected to produce a lot of nicks—and it did, Lordy, it did.
And my prep wasn’t all that good, either: very hard water. This morning’s prep was excellent. I should have given the brush one more shake—it’s a big knot, that Plisson Chinese grey, and it holds a lot of water—but I persisted, letting some water fall away, and got quite a nice lather from the (pre-reformulation) Floris No. 89 shaving soap.
Three passes with the Schick holding a Ted Pella Teflon-coated blade—I have some actual Schick Injector blades I’ll have to dig out—and the result was unmistakeably BBS. (I know my step-father got great shaves from it, but he never told me about the correct angle, and I imagine he didn’t even think about it—we just shaved and whatever happened, happened.)
A good splash of Floris No. 89 aftershave, and I got a good hit of the extremely nice fragrance, and things are moving along.
The only complaint about the razor is the common problem of single-edged razors: limited lather capacity, and since the Injector head is not very deep, this holds even less lather than the GEM: too much rinsing required. Still, it turns out to be a good razor if you get the angle right. I suppose that’s true of many razors.
Edit: This strikes me as one of those “I wish I could go back in time” things; “Bill [the name I used in high school], I’m from the far future, the year 2015, and I’ve traveled back in time to show you the correct blade angle for the Schick Injector.” That sort of thing
Edit 2: Corrected typo in title. URL still has the typo.
Filed under: Shaving
