The Part That's Meant to Go

A few times a month, you unscrew the head of the razor and lift out a blade. It comes away wet, a thin rectangle of steel with a slot down the middle and an edge along each side. You set it aside somewhere safe, seat a fresh one, and screw the head back down. The whole business takes under a minute. Then nothing about the object changes again for weeks.

That small act is the only maintenance the razor asks of you. Everything else stays exactly as it was the day it arrived, because none of it is built to wear out. One part is, and only one. The blade is the part that's meant to go.

The honest disposable

We have got used to a bathroom full of things designed to be thrown away whole. The disposable, the cartridge, the can that hisses and empties and goes in the bin. A safety razor steps quietly out of that arrangement. It keeps the object and spends only the work.

The blade is the work. It is the part that actually meets the skin and dulls from doing so, and when it has cut for a week or two it stops cutting cleanly. So you retire it. You throw away the one component that has genuinely worn out, and nothing else. There is an honesty there that most disposable things never reach. A blade is allowed to be thrown away because it has earned it.

Hold one up and it looks like nothing. It weighs almost nothing. Our blades are ground from Swedish stainless steel, evenly across the full width, to a mild edge: 12N, in the trade's shorthand, keen enough to take stubble at the surface and forgiving enough that a beginner keeps their skin. Sharpness turns out to be a shape. The steel narrows to a line finer than the eye can resolve, and that line does the shaving. Use wears it down by rolling that fine edge over on itself, microscopically, until it drags instead of parting the hair.

You could sharpen it back. For most of shaving history a man did, drawing a straight razor across a leather strop before each pass, because steel was dear and a living edge was worth the ten minutes. A blade today costs around fifty pence and arrives ground, coated and sealed. So you no longer strop it; you spend it, and open another. The edge has become cheap enough to treat as consumable, which is the one thing modern shaving got right.

What the cartridge gets backwards

The multi-blade cartridge takes that simple fact and turns it upside down. Its edges wear out too, at much the same rate, for the same reason. But to renew them you throw away the whole cartridge: the moulded body, the pivot, the lubricating strip, the several other blades that were still fine. You bin a handful of working parts to replace the one that failed, then buy the assembly back, patented and packaged, at a few pounds a time.

That is planned obsolescence doing its quietest work. Nothing breaks. Nothing is built to last long enough to break. The part that wears is fixed to a dozen parts that don't, so the whole unit gets priced and sold as though it were the consumable. It is an elegant arrangement for the people who make it. It asks the person shaving to keep buying back parts that were never used up.

The blade escapes that trap by being nobody's property. A double-edge blade is a shared standard, settled over a century ago and never enclosed: the same slot, the same dimensions, so any blade fits any razor built to it. You never buy back into one company's system when an edge wears out; you buy steel, from whoever grinds it best, at the price steel costs. The upkeep of the object stays in your hands, wherever you choose to buy your blades.

Turn it the right way round and the sense comes back. Let the edge be the consumable, since the edge is what wears. Let everything around it be permanent, since nothing around it needs replacing. One thin thing goes. The rest stays for good.

The moving part of a still object

What stays, in our case, is brass. The Kronos razor is machined to be kept: solid, plastic-free, with an enclosed head that covers the corners of the blade where most nicks begin. It does not update. There is no next model waiting to make it obsolete, and the only wearing part is the one you already know how to change. Years in, about the only thing that happens to it is that the finish warms to the touch and it starts to feel like yours.

So the blade is the moving part of a still object. Around one fixed handle, a small procession of edges passes through, one a fortnight or so, each doing its week of work and stepping aside for the next. A man might hand that handle on one day, worn smooth and perfectly usable, having gone through some hundreds of blades to get it there and thrown every one of them away without a second thought, exactly as he was meant to.

Even that throwing away is worth a little care. A spent blade is still sharp. Its edge has rolled, which dulls it for shaving but leaves it perfectly able to find a fingertip or the hand of whoever empties the bin. Loose in the bathroom rubbish it is a small hazard to someone. Steel is also endlessly recyclable, which a plastic cartridge is not, so a collected blade has somewhere better to end up than landfill. The part meant to be thrown away is still worth throwing away well.

You can tell a good deal about an object by what it asks you to discard. Most of what we buy asks for the whole of itself, over and over, and calls that convenience. This one asks for a single line of steel, once it has stopped cutting cleanly, and for nothing else at all. Keep the handle. Change the blade. That is the entire maintenance schedule of a tool built to outlast the habit of replacing things.