Starting back in Post #1672, I decided to test internet-based advice on how to extend the life of razor blades and disposable razors. EDIT: And I’ve had to change some of the answers, after further, research, as shown below.
At this point, the answers are obvious, and I’m kind of tired of having razor blades sitting around all over my bathroom. So I’m calling it a day and presenting the results. Despite not having done the purest possible tests, I’ve done enough to be confident that I have the facts straight.
It boils down to this, for three commonly-offered suggestions for extending the life of a razor blade or disposable shaver.
- Carefully dry your razor blade after use:
BUSTED. CONFIRMED
- Strop your razor blade to re-sharpen it:
PLAUSIBLEBUSTED
- Soften your beard/lubricate your face: CONFIRMED
Details follow.
Carefully dry your razor blade after use: BUSTED, for rust, but CONFIRMED for hard-water spots.
If this were 1960, “dry your blade” would be excellent advice. At that time, most razor blades were made from a hard carbon-steel alloy. Carbon steel rusts. And rust will surely destroy the delicate edge of a razor blade. But these days, you are hard-pressed to find double-edged razor blades that aren’t made of stainless steel. (Treet brand is the only one I know of.)
The key point is that stainless steel doesn’t rust. (Well, decent-quality stainless will not rust in the bathroom. Some stainless, in some environments, will rust.) In particular, there’s no rust on the blades I use (Persona), despite sitting around in a damp “used razor blade bank” for years.
My guess is that “dry your blade after use” is folk wisdom that was passed from parent to child. Once upon a time, it was good advice. But I’m pretty sure that it has been made irrelevant by the switch to stainless steel. It remains good advice only for the rare blade that is still made out of rust-able carbon steel.
At any rate, I decided to test this one “backwards”, so to speak. If keeping a razor blade wet for long periods of time does not harm it, then, as a matter of logic, drying it off does it no good.
So I took some razor blades — some new, some used — and kept them wet. The razor blades pictured above have spent the last week with one edge wet and one edge dry. They were either continuously wet (in a wet sponge) or periodically wet, and allowed to dry by sitting around at room temperature. The other edge of each blade was either kept dry, or dry-and-oiled. Presumably for extra protection.
Below see microscope view of the results. Each photo contrasts one blade edge that was subject to the “abuse” of being kept wet, for the better part of a week. The other blade edge was carefully kept dry.
Can you guess which one is the abused, wet edge, and which is the carefully-cared-for dry edge?
In all three cases, the wet, abused edge is on top. I surely see no difference between the two edges.
I then tested both edges of the dry-and-oiled blade on my crude D-I-Y sharpness tester (Post #1684). This latest version of the sharpness tester has considerable variance from test to test, but by taking five samples on each edge, I ended up with an average of this much pressure required to split a stout thread:
- Dry-and-oiled edge: 17 grams
- Continuously wet edge: 18 grams
In other words, the two edges are equally sharp, within the limits of of resolution of my crude testing setup. Keeping the edge wet for a week did nothing, compared to keeping the edge carefully dry and oiled.
Caveats: Of course, I can’t test every possibility. Plausibly, you might be unlucky enough to have purchased carbon-steel blades. Perhaps your water is so acidic that it can eat stainless steel. And so on.
But there’s a simple-enough test. Leave your blades wet. If your blades rust, then you need to dry them carefully after each use. If they don’t, not.
Conclusion: For the typical shaver, with normal tap water, leaving a stainless steel razor blade wet does absolutely nothing to it. Doesn’t rust it. Doesn’t pit the edge. Doesn’t dull the edge. That’s not a surprise because that’s exactly what’s supposed to happen with stainless steel. But, if keeping them wet all the time does nothing, then keeping them dry also does nothing. By inference, the notion that razor blades will last longer if you carefully dry them is simply out-of-date. Great advice for shaving in 1960. Irrelevant for modern stainless-steel blades.
EDIT 2/26/2024: But that method — keep the edge wet — only tests for rust. As it turns out, rust isn’t the issue. The issue is water spots. If you have even moderately hard water, and you don’t dry your blade, the evaporating water will leave behind thin deposits of calcium carbonate, a.k.a., water spots. And, goofy as it sounds, a water spot is a hard mineral deposit that is much thicker than the edge of a razor blade. As a result, if you let water spots form on your razor blades, you’ll get a lousy shave. That’s laid out and tested in Post #1699.
The upshot is that “dry your blade” is good advice for most people, but not due to rust or oxidation. (Not if you use stainless-steel blades.) That’s because most tap water contains enough dissolved minerals (“hardness”) to form water spots.
That said, all of the other goofy advice aimed at blade oxidation — keep your blade in oil, keep it in the freezer, and so on — is useless. At least for modern stainless-steel blades. You don’t need to go to extremes to prevent oxidation, because they simply don’t oxidize under normal bathroom conditions.
Strop your razor blade to re-sharpen it: PLAUSIBLE, but ultimately, BUSTED
Here, I’ll just refer you back to Post #1673. Stropping a used blade on an improvised leather strop definitely changed the edge of the blade. Below, you see the same used blade, before and after stropping.
After stropping, the edge is much smoother and almost returns to a like-new appearance.
Unfortunately, stropping also appears to remove the double-faceted aspect of the factory edge. (Which makes sense, when you think about it. You can only strop it at one angle.)
In the end, neither my crude sharpness tester nor my face could tell that the stropped blade was better than the original used blade. Maybe that’s because I wasn’t using my blades very long — see third section below. So I find it plausible that if you wore a blade down to where it was un-usable, stropping could restore the edge enough that you could continue to use it. For some additional time, at least. Maybe?
But, as with a straight razor or a knife, stropping has its limits. If the edge gets sufficiently worn, you have to re-sharpen it, which is a different process entirely. So I don’t think stropping will allow you to use a blade indefinitely.
Conclusion: I didn’t prove it, but it’s plausible that stropping a razor blade extends its usable life. That’s based on the much fresher-looking edge that stropping creates, as shown above. Straight razors get stropped to refresh the edge. There’s no reason that wouldn’t work on razor blades. With the caveat that stropping a razor blade will eventually eliminate the factory double-faceted cut of the razor edge.
Edit 2/24/2024: I have since gone on to try wide variety of different methods for stropping a stainless-steel razor blade, up to and including buying an actual razor strop and stropping compound, as well as stropping a blade on a knife steel. Stropping a modern stainless-steel blade makes the edge look better, but it absolutely does not restore a dull blade to usability. I think my last post in that series is Post #1692. My post-stropping conclusion was “still doesn’t shave worth a damn”. And that’s what I’m sticking with.
In the end, the practice of stropping razor blades died out as stainless-steel blades took over the market, and I think there’s a good reason for that. Those blades are just too hard.
For sure, all the goofy internet advice (strop it in the back of your arm, or on your jeans trouser leg, or on the inside of a glass, …) is wrong. For stainless-steel blades. Stainless is just too hard for that to have any effect. But I went the extra mile, and used what should have been the right materials for stropping. In this post, I used a knife steel, and in a prior post, I used an actual leather razor strop and compound. (Which is what you would use on, say, a stainless-steel straight razor.) And none of that restored a dull stainless blade to sharpness.
Soften your beard/lubricate your face: CONFIRMED
If nothing else, this razor blade test has broken me of a life-long bad shaving habit. I shave(d) with soap. Most recently I’ve been using Dove, because that’s supposed to have more emollients in it and be generally nicer to your skin.
And, not unrelated, I’d typically get three shaves out of a blade before I got the urge to replace it. Maybe five, at the outside. But by the time I got through that fifth shave, it required multiple passes of the blade and, basically, it hurt.
For this final test, I decided to shave half my face using Dove soap, and half with Barbasol. The main active ingredient in Barbasol is stearic acid. That’s the same as the main fat in coconut oil, and it is frequently recommended as a beard softening agent. (And, as it turns out, almost all shaving creams have almost exactly the same main ingredient — see the end section of Post #1688.)
Three things happened.
1: After the first shave, I was sold on Barbasol. Immediately, unambiguously, and obviously better. Vastly less skin irritation than shaving with Dove soap.
2: But, weirdly, as time wore on, the difference between Barbasol and soap seemed less pronounced. And the two edges of the razor blade (one for soap, one for Barbasol) did not appear materially different. I’m pretty sure that’s because the active ingredient in Barbasol penetrates the skin and hair follicles. In effect, it softens not just the hair above the skin but the hair below the skin as well. And by swapping which side of my face got the Barbasol, with each shave, I was actually providing some residual protection to both sides of my face, all the time.
3: I just got through my sixth shave with Barbasol. One blade, six shaves, no problems. No irritation. No nothing. That never happened with soap.
And, as importantly, almost no visible blade wear yet. Here are two microscope views of a new blade next to a blade after six shaves with Barbasol.
Tough to tell which is which, isn’t it? The new blade is on the left, the used blade is on the right. My used blades never looked like that when I shaved with soap.
So, I screwed up the formal testing on this one, by alternating which side of my face got the Barbasol. But the results are clear enough. Despite the lack of controlled test, I’m calling this one confirmed. I’ll keep counting shaves, and at some point, I’ll edit this for the final count. But I’ve already exceeded what I can get out of a blade with soap. And I’m at about twice the number of shaves I normally get out of a blade, with soap.
Whether this occurs solely due to the reduced blade wear shown above, or in addition to the increased comfort of the better-lubricated shave itself, I can’t say. But, for sure, the combined effect is to give me a lot more shaves per blade.
YMMV. I don’t have a particularly tough beard to start with. And my comparison is off-the-shelf Dove bar soap.
I guess real shaving aficionados laugh at something as pedestrian as Barbasol. I should be using yak butter, or some such. I don’t care. It’s been around forever. It’s made in America. It’s a few bucks a can, which works out to maybe 2 cents a shave. And it works.
I see no reason to look any further.
Here’s the kicker: Not only is shaving with Barbasol a lot more comfortable, it’s almost certainly cheaper than shaving with soap. The per-shave cost of the Barbasol (about two cents, best guess) is more-than-offset by the reduction in per-shave cost of the blade wear-and-tear.
As a result, I now realize that the way I shaved for my entire life (up to now) was both more painful and more expensive. Oh for dumb.
Conclusion: I can’t speak to every possible way to soften your beard or lubricate your skin. But Barbasol obviously extends the usable life of razor blades, for me. Relative to shaving with Dove soap.
Conclusion
I could have done this whole analysis better. But I think I did it well enough to know what’s what.
And, there are almost certainly other tricks that might or might not work. For example, some people carefully flip the blade between shaves, presumably so that both sides of each edge get equal wear. But this expert says no dice on that one. You get the same number of shaves either way. Which makes sense to me.
The final upshot is that I know as much about this topic as I will ever need to know.
The whole reason I started this experiment — the need to buy my next tranche of razor blades — no longer exists. By switching from soap to Barbasol, it will be years before I’ll have to buy more blades.
