AimlessWanderer
Remember to forget me!
This episode came about when I was gifted a razor by our good friend, Cal.
The Gillette Super Click weighs only seven grams when loaded, which utterly defeats the concept of “let the weight of the razor do the work” favoured by many people. As I started trying to adapt my own techniques to this razor, it made me become a lot more consciously aware of my actions. It was like learning those techniques all over again. I felt it might be useful capturing this awareness and writing down the development of those skills again, might serve as a follow up to The Wanderers Guide To DE Shaving
So, how do you get a pressureless shave with a 7g razor, with no irritation? The lack of rigidity and inertia in this razor, places more responsibility on the skills of the operator, and if you can get a great pressure free shave with no irritation with this razor, I’d wager that you can do the same with pretty much any DE razor. It’s entirely up to if you wish to try and track one of these razors down from the Asian marketplace to try, it really can be a challenging razor to use with no pressure, or you can just follow along with your existing equipment.
I will say right now that this guide might not be suitable for total newcomers to DE shaving, and The Wanderers Guide To DE Shaving may be a better start point for you. Likewise, if you already get a perfectly close shave with zero irritation, this guide is not aimed for you. It’s written for those intermediate shavers, who have got the hang of the basics, but want to up their game from good shaves to great shaves. This guide is written from the perspective of what I personally have learned in the last 30 years. Others may have learnt differently, and reached different conclusions. As always, your needs and your experience may vary.
Just like the previous guide, there are foundation elements that need to be in place before a truly pressureless shave can be achieved. For this guide, those foundation elements are grip, angle, lather, and familiarity. We’ll explore each of these in turn, before we consider the final pressureless shaves.
When pressureless shaving has been discussed in the past, I have seen comments suggesting that people are concerned about dropping the razor if they shave with no pressure. Pressureless shaving does not mean zero pressure between the fingers and the razor. Control of the razor is paramount. How can anyone expect top shave closely without nicks or irritation, if they don’t have have full control of their razor? Control comes from having a secure and stable grip. Note that I didn’t say tight grip. There is a difference between secure and stable, and tightness. Tightness in the fingers, will also lead to tightness in the wrist and forearm, which will impair your ability to let the razor “flow” around the contours of the face, and will also reduce the feel in your fingers, and mute the feedback of the cutting action. Your grip needs to be stable and secure so that the handle will not spin in your fingers unless you command it. Also, should a dull spot on your blade hit a stubborn bit of stubble, you will be able to feel it and stop.
How you grip the razor will most likely vary between different ones. It certainly does with me. One significant characteristic about the Gillette Click, is that not only is it light, but it will also flex. This in turn affects angle and pressure, and I had to modify my usual grip significantly in order to feel the razor was both secure and stable. For me, I found that I had to grip the handle directly under the head of the razor to prevent/mitigate the flex. It was this change in grip which made the angles so different from other razors, and why I had to go right back to basics to master it’s use.
More rigid and differently weighted razors, will need a different grip to feel secure and stable. Finding the natural balance point will help massively. The nearer that you are to the to the razors centre of gravity, the lighter you can hold it securely, and you gain more control in effortlessly manipulating the angle of the head, horizontally, vertically, and rotationally about the central axis of the handle. That lightness in touch while maintaining the security and stability, will in turn give greater sensitivity when you come to pressureless shaving. One standard grip for all razors, will mean that balance, stability or feel may well be compromised. Take time to find that sweet spot for the razor, and experiment with different ways of manipulating it. This is why the previous guide suggested sticking with one set up, instead of switching kit all the time. Allow yourself to tune in to what the razor needs to get the best from it. When you get comfortable with a razor, it will feel like a natural extension of the fingers, and you will be able to shift your awareness to your face, confident that your fingers will automatically make the correct adjustments - just in the same way that when driving a car, your awareness is outside the vehicle, and your hands and feet know where everything is, and when to do what, and by how much.
With the grip established, the angle becomes easier to follow. Nowhere on our face is truly flat, and therefore every shaving motion needs to be accompanied by some kind of adjustment to maintain the angle or the razor head relative to the skin. Whether this is the convex structure of our jawline, or the hollow curve from out neck to the underside of our jaw, it is not enough to maintain a fixed angle position relative to the floor through out the stroke, we must be able allow that angle to change as we flow around our facial contours. The shaving stroke should not be done with just the wrist. This will result in a “scooping” action of the razor, which can cause undue pressure. Instead, allow the whole forearm to make the stroke.
The same applies with major contour changes. The wrist and fingers will be able to handle minor contour changes, but the whole arm should be used for significant changes, such as rounding the jaw. For example, I am right handed. When I am shaving downwards over my right cheek, my elbow is high, and drops down to my side as I pass over the jawbone, correcting the razor angle relative to the change in landscape, and maintaining the angle to skin correction around the curve. Likewise, when passing from there onto my neck, the elbow rises again, bringing the handle back out to a more horizontal position. The fine tuning of the razor angle throughout all this, is done with the wrist and fingers. If you try to go round the corner with only angling your wrist, your razor is moving on a different radius to your face, and you’ll end up inadvertently applying pressure, or lifting off. To develop the pressureless shave, this angle adjustment all over your face needs to be as automatic as scratching an itch. You don’t have to consciously decide where that itch is, and how to get your hand there, your fingers just go straight to it. After a while you will get that automatic with your razor angle. This can be a slow learning curve for some people, particularly if their muscle memory has been trained with a pivoting cartridge razor. It takes a while to unlearn that original motion, and incorporate the angle changes for a rigid razor that can’t make that adjustment for you.
Again, familiarity is a significant part of the equation with good angle management. Different razors need slightly different angles, and swapping between different kit is going to throw those angles off. It usually takes me three of four shaves to properly reset my technique to a change in DE razor, so if I swapped the razor weekly, I’d only be getting three or four good shaves a week, and I’ve been shaving a long time. Someone newer may struggle a bit more to make the changes that quickly, and never quite make the transition properly from one razor to the next, before they’ve swapped again.
Here’s where a lot of established shavers will start to feel disagreement with my views. There’s no easy way to tiptoe around this, so I might as well just blurt it out. Cushion is bad. There, I said it. I have said it before (much to some people’s consternation), and I will continue to say it in future. Cushion, or density of lather as I understand it, truly gets in the way when it comes to pressure free shaving. Not only can it potentially hold the razor off the skin, particularly if your razor only weighs seven grams fully loaded, causing cutting high on the hair shaft and tugging at the root, it also muffles the feel of the razor. You can neither feel the passing of the razor over your face, not the resistance in cut and subtle change in pressure on your fingertips, as accurately as you can with a thinner lather in my experience.
In the last six months of shaving (before that, I had a full beard for two years), I have not cut myself once with a DE razor. Not a single weeper. Why? Because I can feel the difference between a razor trying to cut hair, and trying to cut skin, both on my fingers and on my face. To my mind, cushioned latherers sacrifice this for a “luxurious” feel of a rich lather. Personally, I would rather have the “luxurious” feel of zero skin irritation, and keeping the red sticky stuff on the inside. I choose to do this with pressureless shaving, and you can’t have a pressureless shave and cushioned lather. You must choose one or the other, and I give higher priority to how my face feels after the shave, than to the few minutes during it. A thinner lather gives you more feel. More feel gives you more awareness of what is happening, and more awareness gives you more control over the subtleties of the shave. The devil is in the detail, and the enhanced feeling in your face and fingers will let you tune in much finer to the shave, and get better results in terms of closeness and comfort. Remember what was said in my first guide, the prep softens the stubble, and the lather lubricates the skin. Anything more is just baggage which will get in your way.
With a light but secure grip, good angle control, and a light cushion free but slick lather, we are now able to start eliminating pressure through each shaving stroke. As mentioned in the original guide, to get good results, we need to be cutting at skin level. Cutting high, either through bad angle and the cap or comb holding the blade off the face, or through thick lather and impaired feel letting the whole razor lose face contact, will result in tugging and trauma at the root. We also don’t want to cut low, as we’re either planing strips of epidermis off, or cutting through it and letting the red sticky stuff out.
The truly pressure free shaves come from having a good understanding of your own face too, both in terms of which way your stubble grows in all the various locations, but also in terms of of how much resistance they put up to being cut as the razor passes lightly through them in whichever direction. If your beard is like mine, shaving against the grain puts up more resistance than shaving with the grain. Mine also puts up more resistance on the left side of my face than the right. You need to be aware of the characteristics of your own shave, and you need to be able to feel it (good grip, thin lather, and good angle), so you can determine when you need to adjust to it. The reason that you need all this, is that skin moves. Here is one of the most important aspects of the pressure free shave. You need to be in full control of the razor, and not just resting it on your skin, as there is a good chance that due to resistance of the hair being cut, irrespective of whether you tension (stretch) your skin with your fingers, your skin might shift inwards a little. The amount this happens by, depends on how well you softened your stubble, and whereabouts your blade is in it’s lifespan (I get roughly 14 shaves on average from my blades). The most difficult part of the pressure free shave is this:
When the skin moves in a little, do not try to follow it!
With practice and muscle memory, you will know where your skin should be if it hadn’t just moved, and that is the direction in which you must keep traveling. If you follow the deflection of the skin, you will move the blade into a small depression, and the blade is now below where the skin should be. This is the cause of the pressure, nicks, and irritation, that you are trying to avoid. If you maintain the blade height, the skin will relax a little each time a hair is cut, and retension a little with each new hair the blade encounters, but as the beard is reduced, the skin will keep returning to the proper height, and you don’t want your blade in the way when it does.
Developing this feel, and overcoming the instinct to follow any inward movement of the skin will take time. Even the understanding of what feel right and wrong takes time to learn. As you progress, and your awareness in the moment develops, you will be able to feel in your face and fingers if your blade is high or low, whether the angle is off, and whether you are about to cut the wrong stuff – and stop before you do. Short strokes do make this easier to learn, but as your confidence grows and you develop as a shaver, you might find your stroke length getting longer, while instinctively adjusting to the contours of the landscape, and hovering the blade perfectly at the correct height.
This is the pressure free shave. You no longer simply hold the razor against your skin and let your skin shove back against it. You are no longer traversing the razor below the relaxed skin level. You will find that you are able to curve the path of the razor without drag, cutting hairs without cutting skin, and without tugging at the root. You are not concentrating consciously on each action of the hand and arm, you are operating in heightened awareness of what is happening on the face, and subtly adjusting to the feedback. You are in the zone, and enjoying that Zen feeling that you hear others talking about. You will no longer need to ask questions about your technique, as you are in full awareness and understanding of what is happening at all throughout the shave.
You will not need to concentrate on the razor any more than you have to concentrate on your feet on a stroll through the park. Every park we stroll through is different, and so is every face. You might need to take a different path to me, or a different pace, or different stride length. You may learn different things as you go, and pause in different places, but one day you will go all the way through and get to the other side, and realise that your mind had drifted elsewhere throughout the whole experience. You’ll run your hand over your stubble free face, neither the alum nor the aftershave will sting, and you’ll smile and realise you’ve cracked it.
You’ve mastered the art of the pressure free shave.
The Gillette Super Click weighs only seven grams when loaded, which utterly defeats the concept of “let the weight of the razor do the work” favoured by many people. As I started trying to adapt my own techniques to this razor, it made me become a lot more consciously aware of my actions. It was like learning those techniques all over again. I felt it might be useful capturing this awareness and writing down the development of those skills again, might serve as a follow up to The Wanderers Guide To DE Shaving
The Art Of The Pressureless Shave
So, how do you get a pressureless shave with a 7g razor, with no irritation? The lack of rigidity and inertia in this razor, places more responsibility on the skills of the operator, and if you can get a great pressure free shave with no irritation with this razor, I’d wager that you can do the same with pretty much any DE razor. It’s entirely up to if you wish to try and track one of these razors down from the Asian marketplace to try, it really can be a challenging razor to use with no pressure, or you can just follow along with your existing equipment.
I will say right now that this guide might not be suitable for total newcomers to DE shaving, and The Wanderers Guide To DE Shaving may be a better start point for you. Likewise, if you already get a perfectly close shave with zero irritation, this guide is not aimed for you. It’s written for those intermediate shavers, who have got the hang of the basics, but want to up their game from good shaves to great shaves. This guide is written from the perspective of what I personally have learned in the last 30 years. Others may have learnt differently, and reached different conclusions. As always, your needs and your experience may vary.
Just like the previous guide, there are foundation elements that need to be in place before a truly pressureless shave can be achieved. For this guide, those foundation elements are grip, angle, lather, and familiarity. We’ll explore each of these in turn, before we consider the final pressureless shaves.
Grip
When pressureless shaving has been discussed in the past, I have seen comments suggesting that people are concerned about dropping the razor if they shave with no pressure. Pressureless shaving does not mean zero pressure between the fingers and the razor. Control of the razor is paramount. How can anyone expect top shave closely without nicks or irritation, if they don’t have have full control of their razor? Control comes from having a secure and stable grip. Note that I didn’t say tight grip. There is a difference between secure and stable, and tightness. Tightness in the fingers, will also lead to tightness in the wrist and forearm, which will impair your ability to let the razor “flow” around the contours of the face, and will also reduce the feel in your fingers, and mute the feedback of the cutting action. Your grip needs to be stable and secure so that the handle will not spin in your fingers unless you command it. Also, should a dull spot on your blade hit a stubborn bit of stubble, you will be able to feel it and stop.
How you grip the razor will most likely vary between different ones. It certainly does with me. One significant characteristic about the Gillette Click, is that not only is it light, but it will also flex. This in turn affects angle and pressure, and I had to modify my usual grip significantly in order to feel the razor was both secure and stable. For me, I found that I had to grip the handle directly under the head of the razor to prevent/mitigate the flex. It was this change in grip which made the angles so different from other razors, and why I had to go right back to basics to master it’s use.
More rigid and differently weighted razors, will need a different grip to feel secure and stable. Finding the natural balance point will help massively. The nearer that you are to the to the razors centre of gravity, the lighter you can hold it securely, and you gain more control in effortlessly manipulating the angle of the head, horizontally, vertically, and rotationally about the central axis of the handle. That lightness in touch while maintaining the security and stability, will in turn give greater sensitivity when you come to pressureless shaving. One standard grip for all razors, will mean that balance, stability or feel may well be compromised. Take time to find that sweet spot for the razor, and experiment with different ways of manipulating it. This is why the previous guide suggested sticking with one set up, instead of switching kit all the time. Allow yourself to tune in to what the razor needs to get the best from it. When you get comfortable with a razor, it will feel like a natural extension of the fingers, and you will be able to shift your awareness to your face, confident that your fingers will automatically make the correct adjustments - just in the same way that when driving a car, your awareness is outside the vehicle, and your hands and feet know where everything is, and when to do what, and by how much.
Angle
With the grip established, the angle becomes easier to follow. Nowhere on our face is truly flat, and therefore every shaving motion needs to be accompanied by some kind of adjustment to maintain the angle or the razor head relative to the skin. Whether this is the convex structure of our jawline, or the hollow curve from out neck to the underside of our jaw, it is not enough to maintain a fixed angle position relative to the floor through out the stroke, we must be able allow that angle to change as we flow around our facial contours. The shaving stroke should not be done with just the wrist. This will result in a “scooping” action of the razor, which can cause undue pressure. Instead, allow the whole forearm to make the stroke.
The same applies with major contour changes. The wrist and fingers will be able to handle minor contour changes, but the whole arm should be used for significant changes, such as rounding the jaw. For example, I am right handed. When I am shaving downwards over my right cheek, my elbow is high, and drops down to my side as I pass over the jawbone, correcting the razor angle relative to the change in landscape, and maintaining the angle to skin correction around the curve. Likewise, when passing from there onto my neck, the elbow rises again, bringing the handle back out to a more horizontal position. The fine tuning of the razor angle throughout all this, is done with the wrist and fingers. If you try to go round the corner with only angling your wrist, your razor is moving on a different radius to your face, and you’ll end up inadvertently applying pressure, or lifting off. To develop the pressureless shave, this angle adjustment all over your face needs to be as automatic as scratching an itch. You don’t have to consciously decide where that itch is, and how to get your hand there, your fingers just go straight to it. After a while you will get that automatic with your razor angle. This can be a slow learning curve for some people, particularly if their muscle memory has been trained with a pivoting cartridge razor. It takes a while to unlearn that original motion, and incorporate the angle changes for a rigid razor that can’t make that adjustment for you.
Again, familiarity is a significant part of the equation with good angle management. Different razors need slightly different angles, and swapping between different kit is going to throw those angles off. It usually takes me three of four shaves to properly reset my technique to a change in DE razor, so if I swapped the razor weekly, I’d only be getting three or four good shaves a week, and I’ve been shaving a long time. Someone newer may struggle a bit more to make the changes that quickly, and never quite make the transition properly from one razor to the next, before they’ve swapped again.
Lather
Here’s where a lot of established shavers will start to feel disagreement with my views. There’s no easy way to tiptoe around this, so I might as well just blurt it out. Cushion is bad. There, I said it. I have said it before (much to some people’s consternation), and I will continue to say it in future. Cushion, or density of lather as I understand it, truly gets in the way when it comes to pressure free shaving. Not only can it potentially hold the razor off the skin, particularly if your razor only weighs seven grams fully loaded, causing cutting high on the hair shaft and tugging at the root, it also muffles the feel of the razor. You can neither feel the passing of the razor over your face, not the resistance in cut and subtle change in pressure on your fingertips, as accurately as you can with a thinner lather in my experience.
In the last six months of shaving (before that, I had a full beard for two years), I have not cut myself once with a DE razor. Not a single weeper. Why? Because I can feel the difference between a razor trying to cut hair, and trying to cut skin, both on my fingers and on my face. To my mind, cushioned latherers sacrifice this for a “luxurious” feel of a rich lather. Personally, I would rather have the “luxurious” feel of zero skin irritation, and keeping the red sticky stuff on the inside. I choose to do this with pressureless shaving, and you can’t have a pressureless shave and cushioned lather. You must choose one or the other, and I give higher priority to how my face feels after the shave, than to the few minutes during it. A thinner lather gives you more feel. More feel gives you more awareness of what is happening, and more awareness gives you more control over the subtleties of the shave. The devil is in the detail, and the enhanced feeling in your face and fingers will let you tune in much finer to the shave, and get better results in terms of closeness and comfort. Remember what was said in my first guide, the prep softens the stubble, and the lather lubricates the skin. Anything more is just baggage which will get in your way.
The Pressure Free Shave.
With a light but secure grip, good angle control, and a light cushion free but slick lather, we are now able to start eliminating pressure through each shaving stroke. As mentioned in the original guide, to get good results, we need to be cutting at skin level. Cutting high, either through bad angle and the cap or comb holding the blade off the face, or through thick lather and impaired feel letting the whole razor lose face contact, will result in tugging and trauma at the root. We also don’t want to cut low, as we’re either planing strips of epidermis off, or cutting through it and letting the red sticky stuff out.
The truly pressure free shaves come from having a good understanding of your own face too, both in terms of which way your stubble grows in all the various locations, but also in terms of of how much resistance they put up to being cut as the razor passes lightly through them in whichever direction. If your beard is like mine, shaving against the grain puts up more resistance than shaving with the grain. Mine also puts up more resistance on the left side of my face than the right. You need to be aware of the characteristics of your own shave, and you need to be able to feel it (good grip, thin lather, and good angle), so you can determine when you need to adjust to it. The reason that you need all this, is that skin moves. Here is one of the most important aspects of the pressure free shave. You need to be in full control of the razor, and not just resting it on your skin, as there is a good chance that due to resistance of the hair being cut, irrespective of whether you tension (stretch) your skin with your fingers, your skin might shift inwards a little. The amount this happens by, depends on how well you softened your stubble, and whereabouts your blade is in it’s lifespan (I get roughly 14 shaves on average from my blades). The most difficult part of the pressure free shave is this:
When the skin moves in a little, do not try to follow it!
With practice and muscle memory, you will know where your skin should be if it hadn’t just moved, and that is the direction in which you must keep traveling. If you follow the deflection of the skin, you will move the blade into a small depression, and the blade is now below where the skin should be. This is the cause of the pressure, nicks, and irritation, that you are trying to avoid. If you maintain the blade height, the skin will relax a little each time a hair is cut, and retension a little with each new hair the blade encounters, but as the beard is reduced, the skin will keep returning to the proper height, and you don’t want your blade in the way when it does.
Developing this feel, and overcoming the instinct to follow any inward movement of the skin will take time. Even the understanding of what feel right and wrong takes time to learn. As you progress, and your awareness in the moment develops, you will be able to feel in your face and fingers if your blade is high or low, whether the angle is off, and whether you are about to cut the wrong stuff – and stop before you do. Short strokes do make this easier to learn, but as your confidence grows and you develop as a shaver, you might find your stroke length getting longer, while instinctively adjusting to the contours of the landscape, and hovering the blade perfectly at the correct height.
This is the pressure free shave. You no longer simply hold the razor against your skin and let your skin shove back against it. You are no longer traversing the razor below the relaxed skin level. You will find that you are able to curve the path of the razor without drag, cutting hairs without cutting skin, and without tugging at the root. You are not concentrating consciously on each action of the hand and arm, you are operating in heightened awareness of what is happening on the face, and subtly adjusting to the feedback. You are in the zone, and enjoying that Zen feeling that you hear others talking about. You will no longer need to ask questions about your technique, as you are in full awareness and understanding of what is happening at all throughout the shave.
You will not need to concentrate on the razor any more than you have to concentrate on your feet on a stroll through the park. Every park we stroll through is different, and so is every face. You might need to take a different path to me, or a different pace, or different stride length. You may learn different things as you go, and pause in different places, but one day you will go all the way through and get to the other side, and realise that your mind had drifted elsewhere throughout the whole experience. You’ll run your hand over your stubble free face, neither the alum nor the aftershave will sting, and you’ll smile and realise you’ve cracked it.
You’ve mastered the art of the pressure free shave.
Once I've restored my Rolls Razor, that is a definite possibility 
