Meet Your Shaving Ovelord

This came via UPS yesterday, ushering in a new era of personal shaving.

It's a Braun Series 7, the 760cc to be exact. It has a bevy of features including a base that serves as both a recharger and a cleaner, and some crazy ass vibrating head that uses micro-oscillations to help slice the hairs off of your face. It is both more expensive and more complicated than any razor, sorry, shaver, I have ever had, but I feel it's worth it, given how gorgeous I am.

If you follow my Twitter feed, you know that a week or so ago I was shaving and my Norelco broke apart on my face. I had broken the housing that contains one of the blades a week or so prior, but up until that time, the breakage was contained to when I was cleaning the thing and not actually using it. See, when they advertise these "washable" shavers, they always show someone running it under water, but what they don't show is all of the wet hair that stays in the blade housings gunking the damn thing up, and they really don't show what all of that gunk looks like in a week. To clean it, you actually have to get in there and scrub the damn thing out, so I was giving my shaver head a fervent tapping to clean it out and apparently I tapped too hard.

On a couple of occasions the blasted thing flew apart, with parts of it landing on the bathroom floor. As I am tasked with cleaning the bathrooms and I tackle said task with the same attention to detail that I apply to the rest of my life, on any given day the bathroom floor is somewhere between slightly dirty and downright repulsive. So now, not only am I smearing wet bits of cut hair on my face when I shave, but also whatever horrible virus that the shaver part picked up from the bathroom floor. Oh sure, I could clean the floors better, but that wasn't going to happen. Time for a new shaver.

On a side note, what the Norelco people also don't tell you is that if your shaver head does come apart, you have to put the spinny blade things back in the exact same position they were in when they popped out or you'll carve such deep grooves in your flesh that your children will run from you in terror and men will hunt you down and wipe you from the face of the earth. I don't know why you have to be so specific with the blade placement, no doubt to save Norelco from lawsuits brought on by people who ripped chunks of their faces off, but the instruction manual is very specific about making sure that you don't misplace the blades. I guess this means that you also can't shave with the shaver upside down as that will totally fuck things up and you'll be picking pieces of your chin up out of the sink.

When I did my shaver research, the Braun came out on top every time. The usual caveats applied though, that you won't get as close a shave as with a blade, leading me to believe that these people use some mythical Vorpal Razor or some shit. I have never, ever gotten a clean shave with a razor blade. I don't know if I'm just not using the right blades or I'm not using enough of them. I understand there's a razor with nine blades, vibration and possibly a ham sandwich to eat whilt shaving so maybe I'm just not forward thinking enough with my three blades and lack of lunch meat. The point is that whenever I use a razor, I always get a crappy shave and end up bleeding. No doubt the error exists between razor and floor and I'm ok with that.

Really the main complaint people had about the shaver was that it was expensive and at about 200 bucks, it is expensive. I groused at the price until my wife pointed out that I have no problem dropping almost that amount on a DSi when I have a perfectly good DS and this was something that I'd be using it every day to make myself look as presentable as someone that looks like me can. She had a point. The unfortunate truth is that I have to shave every day as the combination of white hairs on my face and purple bags under my eyes from being perenially under served in the sleep department means that a day of growth pushes me right over the edge into "sickly" territory. I can't pull off the grizzled, cool, tough guy look that some people can when they don't shave for a day or two. I look like I have Typhus or some cough that died off in the 1800's. So, if I'm going to be shaving every day, I might as well do it right.

So far the shaver has performed admirably. It charged up quickly enough, gave a pretty damn good shave and then cleaned itself. Course it sounds like a jet engine when it's cleaning itself and I have no idea if the blades are actually clean or if I just paid 200 bucks for a thirty dollar razor that puts on a nice light and sound show, but I have to assume that the good people at Braun wouldn't pull one over on me. Plus, because I bought it at Amazon, and the cleaning solution is flammable, I can't send it back to them. Apparently Amazon has a special fire retardant spray that they use when mailing flammable items and it wears off the moment the package hits your doorstep.

I can only hope that this is the last shaver I have to buy for some time. I would much rather spend my money on something cool like a DSi. Oh wait. I did. Never mind.