Blade Sheath Keenmark™

Not if you go slow. The blade barely peeks out from the head — the gap is comparable to a cartridge.

The difference is that you can't rush it. Use short strokes, don't press, and give yourself three shaves to find the angle.

About two minutes longer for the first week.

After that most men are back to their usual time, because they stop doing three passes to fix what the cartridge dragged.

Rinse under hot water after each shave and shake it dry.

Once a month, unscrew the three pieces and rinse them properly. That's it. No special products.

Not if you dry it and care for it properly.

It's stainless steel and it lives in a bathroom, so a quick shake and a towel is enough.

The blades will rust if you leave them wet — that's the blade, not the razor.

Because five blades don't shave you closer. They shave you five times.

Every extra blade is another pass across skin that was already shaved a millisecond earlier. That's four unnecessary passes per stroke, on skin that's already raw.

There's a second problem. The first blade lifts the hair before the rest cut it, so the hair gets severed below the surface of your skin. When it grows back, it grows back under the skin. That's an ingrown hair — the bump you've had in the same spot for years.

And there's the money. When the front blade dulls, the whole cartridge tugs and you throw it away. You just binned four sharp blades. You paid for five and used one.

One blade cuts the hair once, at the skin line, and costs ten cents to replace.

Try cutting anything with a knife that wobbles. It doesn't cut — it drags, catches, and tears. Shaving is the same problem at a smaller scale.

Your beard hair is tougher than you think. At the same thickness, a hair takes about as much force to cut as a strand of copper wire. Your skin, meanwhile, is soft and gives under pressure.

So you're pressing something hard through something soft, and every bit of flex in the blade goes into your face instead of into the hair. Cartridge heads pivot and their blades sit on springs — that movement is sold to you as a feature. It's the reason the blade tugs.

A Keenmark head has no pivot and no springs. The blade is clamped flat between two pieces of steel. It goes exactly where you put it.

No — Keenmark takes standard double-edge blades, the same ones barbers have used for a hundred years. You can buy any brand you like.

That said, we sell them too, and most people end up ordering from us. We stock the ones we've tested with this razor.