collision detection: The Gillette Singularity

June 26, 2006

The Gillette Singularity

I'm coming to this one late, but some wits at The Economist recently plotted out some interesting trends in razor-blade design. They charted out the dates in which single, double, treble, qadruple and quintuple-bladed razors emerged, and noticed that the rate of increase in the number of blades per razor-head has been accelerating. It took 80 years for the industry to add a second blade, about another 15 to add the third, then only two or three years between the four-bladed Schick Quattro and the five-bladed Gillette Fusion. The story is here, and Avram Grumer wrote a funny post pointing out where this is all headed:

Now, that power-law curve predicts 14-bladed razors by the year 2100, but that's not the interesting curve. The interesting curve is the hyperbolic one, for two reasons: One, it matches the real-world data. And two, it goes to infinity in 2015. And how are you going to get an asymptotically-accelerating number of blades onto a razor? Why, you'd need godlike super-technology to do that.

Friends, it's clear what's upon us: The Gillette Singularity -- the moment at which the act of shaving becomes so radically unlike any shaving before it that history no longer provides us a guide to what lies before us.

Personally, the whole four- and five-blade thing kinda baffles me. If I try shaving with anything more than two blades, the bathroom turns into a total slaughterhouse -- blood and guts on the ceiling. I have yet to find a razor that shaves as well as the original, simple Gillette Sensor. Yet the sad fact is that as the razor industry jetpacks its way into the eschatalogical glory of infinitely-bladed heads, the companies have scaled back production of their creaky two-bladed models. Locating an actual package of Sensor razors in New York here is like trying to find a rotary pay phone.

(Thanks to Majikthise for this one!)

Posted by Clive Thompson at June 26, 2006 10:04 PM

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Comments

Reminds me of the classic Onion article: http://www.theonion.com/content/node/33930
which, when checking the date, still stands as funny.

Posted by: nw at June 27, 2006 3:28 PM

I use the mach-3 and it works much better for me than the 2 blade one. I haven't tried the 4 or 5 bladed razors, but the gillette fusion is looking good because it has that extra blade for those hard to reach spots right under the nose.

Posted by: Taybin at June 27, 2006 7:16 PM

nw, yes, that article was excellent!

Taybin, I too tried the Mach 3, but I nearly died from blood loss, so I'm not going down that road again.

Posted by: Clive at June 27, 2006 8:59 PM

I agree with Taybin. Mach3 FTW

I think the single blade on the back isn't a bad idea either. What's with the shaving articles on digg anyway?

Posted by: John at June 29, 2006 7:49 AM

I'll up you one, Clive. A few months back Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools ran a post on the old-fashioned single-blade, double-edged razors. The packs of blades are dirt-cheap, and these thin puppies are WAY sharper than any of the multi-blade systems.

For my tough beard (happiest in mountain-man form, but social niceties urge me to keep it clean-shaven...), this is definitely the ticket. I can even skip a day or two and they still slip right through the stubble. See this for the post:
http://www.kk.org/cooltools/archives/000979.php

Posted by: Jim Cummings at June 29, 2006 12:28 PM

John, I've no idea why Digg has gone shaving-mad.

Jim, ooooh, that's not a bad idea at all!! I'm going to order one now.

I never give up hope on finding my Perfect Shaving Solution.

Posted by: Clive at June 29, 2006 12:50 PM

Clive, you're probably pressing down too hard. The introduction of the third blade coincided with the introduction of spring loading, so with mach 3 on up instead of pressing into your face you hold the blades a set distance up and let the spring loading do its work.

The theory behind multiple blades is the same as the theory behind the bed of nails trick - if force is distributed over enough area, it doesn't matter if the area consists entirely of razor blades, it still won't cut. Hairs of course stick out, so they get cut despite the skin remaining uncut.

The number of blades can increase until either the width of a human hair becomes significant relative to the distance between blades, or the limits of strength of the blades are reached. (Blades have to be thin so there's enough space between them to not get clogged by hairs.) My guess is the materials give out before they get to hair distance apart. The ultimate material is probably one of tungsten, corundum (white sapphire) or silicon carbide. Most likely the ultimate one in practice will prove to be titanium.

Posted by: Bram at June 30, 2006 4:17 PM

A razor with 24 blades made out of titanium would be just beyond awesome, I must admit!

Excellent explanation razor physics, Bram. But I don't think I'm pushing too hard ... it's just that I have very coarse and very curly facial hair. I've been wrestling with shaving for 20 years now, egad.

Posted by: Clive at July 2, 2006 9:43 PM

I'm a Sensor shaver, until I die. Anything more than 2 blades feels like shaving with a bar of soap. Seems like the marketing dept. took over the R&D dept. at Gillette.
I buy all my blades at razorsdirect.com
Not affiliated in any way with them except as a customer.
It's a gray-market site (the blades are from South America, but seem to shave as well as their North American counterparts.)
I just bought 2 years' worth for about 95 cents a blade module.
Works for me.

Posted by: ShavrDude at July 7, 2006 11:50 PM

This projection of razor technology is not only fun and silly, but is a perfect example of why so much of our pseudocience, like predictions of global warming and overpopulation, for example, are nonsense.

Static analysis is, in complex systems, almost worse than random chance at predicting the future.

You're better off rolling dice than taking seriously a Federal budget projection of more than 18 months.

You can't seriously predict the economy in general for more than a few quarters.

Doomsayers demanding government intervention have been claiming society would collapse under the weight of overpopulation within a generation for two for over 200 years.

Thirty years ago the scientific consensus was that we'd be in an ice age by 1990, and now it's that we'll be suffering catastrophic global warming fifteen years from now.

Static analysis is useless, except as a means of identifying whose predictions should not be trusted at all.

Posted by: KAZ at July 9, 2006 2:38 PM