When a razor company is worth €47 billion, you know that getting rid of facial hair is big business. Davin O'Dwyer braves the hot towels to ask why we're in perpetual search of the perfect shave
The daily battle between stubble and razor is never quite the same once you've seen a blade slice through a beard up close. And by up close, think magnified thousands of times. The skin looks like the surface of an alien planet, the hairs like giant trees. The blades come sliding in at an angle, bending the hairs back for a fraction of a second, then slicing right through. It isn't pretty, but it's this perspective that razor companies use to see what their blades do as they cross your face.
At high-security laboratories in a research-and-development centre in Reading, west of London, a team of scientists who work for Gillette is pursuing the holy grail of shaving: cutting facial hair shorter and shorter, with less resistance and less irritation. Just as the hair never stops growing back, they never stop working on sharper blades and more effective razors.
It is largely to do with money, of course: this is a massive business, as Procter & Gamble showed last October when it bought Gillette for €47 billion. But to meet two of Gillette's top researchers, Kevin Powell and Colin Clipstone, is to understand how much thought and effort go into our daily brush with the blade. They talk of telomer blade coatings, Lubrastrips, skin oscillations and nanotechnology - their edge of their latest blade is a mere 25 nanometres, or about 80 atoms, wide.
What is it about shaving that inspires such technology? It seems first to have become fashionable in the fourth century BC, around the time of Alexander the Great, who took it up with his customary zeal. Three hundred years later, Julius Caesar was also renowned for sporting a bare face. Shaving became an industry after King Camp Gillette, a 19th-century travelling salesman from Wisconsin, developed the first disposable double-edged blade - and hit on the idea of selling the handles cheaply in order to profit from the consequent trade in replacement blades.
Whatever its genesis, shaving has remained with us, despite the obvious risk of sliding sharp blades along vulnerable areas such as the throat and neck. And shaving is a drag: what man hasn't, at some point, realised with a sinking heart that he needs to shave? Then there is the irritating way that you nick yourself when you can least afford it - it's a wonder that any groom gets to the church without half a toilet roll keeping his face together.
Consider, also, the daunting first shave, a gruelling rite of passage for every teenage boy. If he wants to get rid of the embarrassingly willowy fluff on his upper lip, he first has to learn how to drag a blade around the contours of his face, risking cuts and further embarrassment. Add teenage acne, and the possibilities for trauma are all too apparent.
This test soon becomes a ritual celebration of manliness, an exhibition of machismo - although, ironically, it involves erasing the most distinctively male facial feature. In that sense, removing facial hair is a flip side of the cosmetics industry, which promises women greater femininity if they apply make-up. And although the hair-removal industry doesn't focus exclusively on the male face - women are now expected to be practically hairless except for what's on the top of their heads, and hairy-backed men are increasingly getting waxes before visiting the beach - it's the smooth jaw that carries all the symbolism. "The best a man can get," they say, and, by God, you'd better be getting it every day.
The machismo associated with shaving raises questions about the fate of the beard. Any look at photographs from the 1960s and 1970s will tell you that all sorts of men grew beards back then - hippies and artists, sure, but also scientists. (Today there's not a beard to be seen among Gillette's boffins, although a few sport moustaches, perhaps in acknowledgment that they have yet to design a blade that can easily shave between nose and lip.)
The modern attitude to facial hair is perhaps best illustrated by a strange postscript to the 2000 US presidential election, when Al Gore took a trip to Europe to get away from it all. Getting away from it all clearly included getting away from the quotidian rigours of shaving, for when he returned he was sporting a fine, bushy beard. Gore was already the butt of jokes, but suddenly it was open season - "Bush not only stole Gore's presidency; he also stole his razor" went one line. The subtext was that this was a man losing his grip, a man for whom daily routine was proving too much. Hippies, rock stars and the occasional writer can carry off a beard, it seems, but not, in the 21st century, a man who wanted to be president.
Then there is Homer Simpson, the archetypal dysfunctional male. His bald head and beer belly make for most of the jokes, but it's arguably his permastubble that defines him. His facial fuzz tells us all we need to know about him.
It is hard, in this climate, to imagine what must be Gillette's worst nightmare ever happening: the beard's return to fashionability. What man would be mad enough to risk social isolation by allowing a few micrometres of hair to appear on his face? In the era of 25-nanometre blades, no amount of stubble is acceptable.
(A brief clarification: the finely sculpted goatees and elongated sideburns worn by Italian footballers don't count as beards, for they are surely a dilution of the masculine act of shaving. Instead of a clean swipe of the razor, doing away with yesterday's growth, they demand patience, lots of mirrors, possibly rulers or other measuring devices, and untold vanity. Beards require trimming, not geometry lessons. Ergo, those hairy affectations are not beards.)
Of course, back when a beard didn't mark you out as a radical, even before the arrival of King Camp Gillette, there was the social pleasure of the barber-shop hot-towel shave - an experience with about as close a relationship to a modern razor shave as Marmite has to Nutella.
The Waldorf, on Westmoreland Street, is one of a dwindling number of Dublin barber shops that offer the service. It is a gloriously old-fashioned place, at the other end of the spectrum from Gillette's laboratories. Cut-throat razors hang in glass cases, and vintage advertising adorns the walls, making it as much a museum of shaving as a place to get your hair cut. Instead of worrying about telomers and nanometres, they sharpen their Sheffield-steel blades with a whetstone. Liam Finnegan, who runs the shop with his daughter, Linda, knows what type of lather to use just by looking at a man's stubble.
His colleague Riaz gives my face a vigorous lather, using a brush and his fingers. He treats my skin like play dough, pulling it this way and that as he works the fragrant lather into my pores. Then he drapes a warm towel, fresh from the steamer and on the verge of being too hot, across my face. After a few relaxing minutes, he applies another lather. For my beard hairs, it's like a magnificent last supper before a cruel execution.
Never have they been so sweetly loved, and never will they be so ruthlessly shaved, for Riaz then whips out the cut-throat razor and gets down to work. Eyes closed, then, and all you are left with is the rich smell of the lather, the feeling of your skin being pulled taught and the sound of the blade scraping through your facial hair. It's deeply relaxing, and as the scraping becomes quieter and the skin more exposed, the sensation is akin to that of a pore-deep massage. Throw on another hot towel, followed by a bracingly cold one and, finally, some after-shave balm, and it's all over. The skin tingles, and to the touch it feels as if it has never known stubble.
It is this sensation, this cathartic starting anew, that ultimately fuels the multibillion-dollar razor-blade business. Kevin Powell, Colin Clipstone, Liam Finnegan, Riaz and King Camp Gillette himself haven't put such time and effort into removing facial hair because of a fad for hairless faces. They have done it because, despite the scraping and cuts and hassle and traumatic early shaves, turning a rough, stubbled jaw into a smooth turn of the face is a feeling like no other.