Barber using a straight razor in Naples

[Captain Flint]

This might seem awkward but believe me there's a reason why this gests posted in B&B.
Here follows a part of a French documentary about castrato/counter-tenor singing where we get to see an italian barber shaving a historian in downtown Naples. In fact, this is a section of the documentary dealing with famous XVIIIth century Italian castrati and how they used to be ... huh... surgered in Naples by common barbers. Patrick Barbier (I'm not kidding, that's really his name), that has already written two books on Baroque music, leads us to a traditional barbershop and has his beard shaved by a guy using what seems to be an Omega Professional boar brush and a white tub of shaving cream. We briefly see him stropping his razor before attacking the lather on Barbier's face while the latter explains how the XVIIIth century Neapolitan barbers employed the same kind of instruments to perform castration on kids so that they could keep unaltered their original vocal qualities throughout puberty. In the end we get a glimpse of this barber's other shaving parafernalia.

The interesting part starts at 6:06 min.

[YOUTUBE]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h146LqtL-PE&feature=related[/YOUTUBE]

 

[Leche]

Interesting. I think you're correct on the Omega call. His stropping was

 

[northpaw]

I'm always fascinated at the way some of those old barbers stropped. Looks wrong according to to the way we're encouraged to do it, but I bet whatever they were doing worked well. That move he did where he slapped it into his palm was pretty wild, too. Never seen that before.

 

[rm71]

Cool vid. Thanks for posting. Pity I didn't understand a word that guy was saying( although I did understand the barber's Italian at the end).

 

[napoleon]

What did he put on the strop?
And that hand stropping is perfect... when you sit in a tub of warm water

 

[bladebuff]

Wonderful video, thanks for sharing.

 

[bisbane]

Fascinating to watch. Thanks!

 

[Captain Flint]

One thing funny about that barber is the fact that he doesn't seem to build a big ammount of lather, much like the case of the blind Indian that shaved Michael Palin in Bombay (seen in a previous thread). And the way he loads his brush is also quite odd. I wonder if that's the real traditional barbershop shaving...

 

[Saxmoore]

The guy won't shutup long enough for the barber to shave him!