You're Full of Surprises, Number One

The last thing anyone would expect is to catch more hair with a less-exposed blade, but the Rimei with a Rimei blade seems to have more to teach me about geometry.

I make my daily shaves intuitively, feeling the beard from within and without, looking in the mirror, guessing the blade's disposition as best I can. The arsenal of tools and techniques is ever-expanding, but many are forgotten to save space. One such was recollected today: unscrewing the handle slightly to flatten the blade, that goes back to the first Gillette razor. I had a good shave without shims yesterday, but wanted more today... and yet, reinstalling the shims did not appeal.

Preparation was homemade shaving oil and pumpkin juice, topped by Williams. Oil applied dry, juice as a frozen stick to the face, and the palm lather residue completing the pre-shave emulsion. That was rinsed with a soaked cloth, so the lather that followed was fully firm.

Two passes WTG-ATG (basically) had me thinking I was done, as the razor went quiet. Then I thought to screw the blade back down. Suddenly, another ATG pass seemed warranted: it was catching beard again! But that got me a fair amount of irritation below the jaw. In retrospect, I remember having recommended this approach as a variation of Doug Hansford's "Two-riffic" shaving technique, which uses two razors. I wish I had made the adjustment after pass 1, and stuck to two passes.

However, my accident did reveal an interesting and unexpected increase in efficiency when the razor was tightened down close to the safety bar. It seems that the flexure of skin into the gap, which extracts hairs like a sliver, is only effective at a narrow range of moderate pitch angles, or else only when the gap is small.

New project!