... with the Sword Edge Cheadle slant
The Razor: Sword Edge Cheadle
The Blade: Gillette 7 o'clock Super Stainless
The Soap: Taylor of Old Bond Street Sandalwood Shaving Cream
The Brush: The Guv'nor Pure Badger
The Balm: The Bluebeards Revenge
The Shave:
What better way to mark the tenth Dave's Shave Of The Day than by doing something special and using a razor I've never used before. Not only a razor that I haven't used before, but a type of razor I haven't used before, namely a slanted-head DE safety razor. So, I summoned my minions and bid them to go forth and bring me such a thing.* And when they returned, they carried with them a branded pouch containing the Sword Edge Heavy Duty Slanted-Head Safety Razor, or 'Cheadle' for short.
The Cheadle is a weighty, roaring beast of a razor, weighing in at 150 grams. Shave with this over the space of a month and you'll have arm and chest muscles like Charles Atlas.** I'd read that there's no real difference in technique when it comes to shaving with a slanted-head safety razor, so went at my face with gusto.***
Look, I'm going to be honest. The Cheadle is ridiculously cheap. As I write this, you can pick one up for £17.99 from the Sword Edge website. I wasn't expecting miracles. But actually what I got was an aggressive but comfortable shave with – shock! horror! say it isn't so! - no nicks, cuts or irritation, which for the first time use of a razor is pretty rare, for me. But no. Not a weeper in sight. There were no issues with blade alignment and the only problems I did have were down to being unfamiliar with the razor itself and the size of the head. It was a little tricky getting right under the nose, for instance, but I'm sure that will sort itself out as my familiarity with the razor grows. And it will, because this is definitely a razor I'll be putting into regular rotation. Also, I found that the ideal cutting angle for me was probably around 20%, but I wasn't measuring it with a protractor so can't be exactly sure. But it was definitely steeper than I would normally be used to.
The sandalwood shaving cream performed as expected and the Gillette blade – which isn't one I would normally use but will happily use again after this experience – did a great job of returning my face and neck to the required baby-bum-smooth state.
In conclusion: 10/10 for the Cheadle. Now. Where did I put the Stanway?
* I didn't. I simply ordered one from the Sword Edge website.
** The creator of Dynamic Tension, with a series of newspaper advertisements in comic-strip form featuring a skinny weakling who gets sand kicked in his face by a bully at the beach, loses the admiration of his girlfriend, goes home, kicks a chair, orders the Charles Atlas Dynamic Tension exercise booklet then returns to the beach at a later date having transformed himself into a muscled hunk through calisthenics and punches the bully on the jaw and is proclaimed 'Hero Of The Beach'. And he gets the girl, who is portrayed as being shallow enough to judge her boyfriend entirely by the size of his biceps.
*** Actually, for 'gusto' read 'trepidation'. The design of a slanted-head razor dictates that you're shaving your face with an angled blade, rather like a gullotine. I'm sure I don't need to emphasise the potential for cutting, slicing, slashing and gouging your face. But I just have.