In the past decade's razor wars, I have been a conscientious objector. As the two major forces in wet shaving, Gillette and Schick, traded fire — ratcheting up the technology, filing acrimonious lawsuits, launching expensive marketing blitzes — I obliviously went about my daily scrape with a trusty Gillette Sensor Excel, the sibling to a razor that debuted in 1989.
Though Gillette still sells the Excel, the razor is, as the company calls it — and did I detect a hint of condescension? — a "legacy system." It does seem quaint compared to its successor, the Mach3, and even more so compared to the newest Gillette product, the Fusion Power Phenom, which has five blades (plus an extra for detailing) and vibrates.
When the Excel was released, it was pretty fancy stuff: a spring-loaded, pivoting, two-bladed cartridge; "microfins" on the cartridge head; a lubricating strip. Aesthetically, I've always liked its design. With its sleek aluminum profile, rational geometry, and fine tip, it suggested a precision instrument. If razors were cars, the Excel seemed like an early eighties Audi, marked by rational restraint and clean German minimalism. The Fusion, like Toyota's cartoonish FJ Cruiser, just seemed to be trying too hard, with a wealth of exaggerated detailing. But what about the shave?
The best way to find out if I was missing out on something was at Gillette's Advanced Technology Centre, a sturdy redbrick building on the outskirts of Reading, England. (The company is headquartered in Boston, but considers the U.K. its foothold in Europe, hence the obscure locale.) That's where I found myself one recent morning, peering through microscopes, passing rows of little mirrored cubicles where each morning hundreds of Reading men stop by for a test shave, and talking to Kevin Powell, the center's dry-humored director. Whether shaving is rocket science or not, Powell has the credentials — he worked on jet engines for Rolls-Royce and missile guidance systems for U.K. military contractors. For Powell, your daily shave is actually comparable to battle. With heat-seeking missiles, he says, the challenge is differentiating between legitimate and nonlegitimate targets ("tanks and sheep") at distances where one or two pixels' worth of visual information may make the difference. At Gillette, he says, he used "similar algorithms" to help computers locate low-contrast hairs on the human face.
Overkill? Perhaps. But Gillette is in a perpetual arms race for innovation, almost as much against itself as its main competitor (it controls 70 percent of the U.S. wet-shave market). Every time it releases a new product, it has another one in the pipeline — one that will take, when all the research is said and done, about eight years to release. (The Economist has cheekily observed that razors, like computer chips, now seem to follow a "power law" of technological improvement; by its calculation, the 14-blade razor will be upon us by 2100.) Technological improvements, along with shrewd marketing, keep Gillette's products from becoming fixed commodities — as in just another razor. Each new model costs more, and presumably carries a higher profit margin; the fact that its latest models come with batteries is a further boon to its corporate parent, Procter & Gamble, which owns Duracell (if you think I'm being paranoid, Energizer bought Schick).
