SHAVING IN THE 21ST CENTURY: TO BE OR NOT TO BE...

 
This clipping is from an article that appeared in our local paper late last year. Given it's from AP, it probably appeared somewhere in your paper too. It heralds the development, by our old friends Gillette, of a whole new way of dealing with facial hair.

Sounds a bit like déja vu, doesn't it? Just a hundred years ago, the original Gillette, King C., was working furiously at perfecting his new safety razor invention, the thin disposible blade. His problem was one of technology, finding a steel and a tempering process that would allow for the right combination of thinness, sharpness and endurance. It was a technology that, once perfected a couple of years later, led to an industrial empire for the heirs of  King Gillette, to vastly improved shaving conditions for the average person, and to a hobby those of us reading this enjoy very much.

And here we are on the doorstep of a new century, with the same company Gillette founded playing with a new invention that might threaten to make the old man's triumph obsolete. Vaniqa, as they call it, is a drug, which when approved for use early in this century, will be available only by prescription, and for the present limited to use by women. It appears to work on men as well, but women seem to be the easy way into the market according to the whole article. Vaniqa works by blocking the enzyme that makes the hair follicle grow, and is applied like a moisturizing cream twice a day.

We've had depilatories, electrolysis and laser hair removal for a few years now. But none of them is simple enough and cheap enough (and likely painless enough) to provide a popular mass solution to facial hair. Vaniqa apparently walks past that, and goes, so to speak, to the root of the problem. It likely won't take until Y3K for a genetic solution that simply engineers facial hair genes out of our DNA. Curious to think that we would first engineer a mechanical appliance to change our appearance, and then engineer our appearance to do away with the need for the mechanical appliance. An interesting twist on form following function!

What they are talking about is a huge social change, one that rivals the effect that Gillette and his emulators had on the barber shops of the early 1900's. But it goes farther than that. Do you remember watching your father or grandfather (gosh, or I guess mother) shaving? The ritual included stropping the straight razor, or changing the blade in a safety, lathering and then shaving cleanly with minimal need for toilet paper and alum sticks. It was something most of us aspired to, a right of passage that took us another step into adulthood. Maybe not as exciting and memorable as some other adult past times we also aspired to, but definitely one of the big steps forward.

What does that leave our children and theirs as a rite of passage? Squeezing the tube? Proper application? Cleaning up? Ensuring we don't get it where we want hair? Substituting it in some hapless brother's shampoo? I just don't see it. They were supposed to be finding a cure for baldness, not causing it.

And for shaving collectors, it bodes a most uninteresting future. No razors, no blades, no stroppers, just ....tubes? One thing for sure, I won't be rushing out to add early Vaniqa tubes to my collection!