Cartridge Razor Hacker: Self-Experiments, Cost Math, and Uncommon Hacks for the World's Most Overpriced Shave (Shave Hacker)

You are spending about two hundred and sixty dollars a year on razor cartridges, and the reason you have never done anything about it is that four dollars at a time does not feel like anything.

There is no moment where you hand over two hundred and sixty dollars. So there is no moment where you notice that you have.

I paid it for twenty years knowing roughly what was happening.

Here is what this book is not. It is not a man telling you to buy a safety razor and learn a hobby. The entire wet shaving world's answer to somebody holding a cartridge razor is to tell him to buy something else, usually with a certain tone, and then walk away. You have four minutes in the morning and you are not switching, and that is a completely reasonable position.

CARTRIDGE RAZOR HACKER is about making the shave you already have as good and as cheap as it can possibly get, without changing your razor, your routine, or your four minutes.

Inside:

Four ways to buy the exact same shave, priced across a year. The spread between the most and least expensive is over two hundred dollars and the only difference is where you clicked.

Why multi-blade cartridges give you ingrown hairs. It is a real mechanism, nobody has explained it to you, and it is the same mechanism that makes them shave close. Once you know it, the fix is free.

The two week recalibration. Same razor, same cartridges, different habits. My own log is in the book, including the days it got worse.

Eight weeks measuring whether drying the cartridge extends its life. Five shaves became seven and a quarter, for four seconds a day.

Why going down a blade count is more comfortable and cheaper at the same time, which is the rarest thing in this entire category.

What the lubricating strip is doing, why it fails before the blades do, and what that means for when you throw a cartridge out.

Plus the time The Onion announced a five-blade razor as a joke in 2004, and Gillette shipped one two years later, using almost the same words.

Eighteen routines. A troubleshooting table. A cost worksheet for your own numbers.

And at the end, once I have been useful to you first, an honest account of what every alternative costs and what it asks of you. Including the fact that staying exactly where you are is a legitimate answer.

The tool was never the problem. The price is.