Decoder Ring - “F--k Everything, We're Doing Five Blades”
Decoder Ring
Slate Podcasts
4.6 • 2.2K Ratings
🗓️ 19 April 2022
⏱️ 40 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In the early 2000s, an arms race broke out in the world of men’s shaving. After decades with razors that had only one blade and then decades with razors that had only two, the number of blades rapidly spiraled up and up and up.
It’s a skirmish sometimes referred to as The Razor Blade Wars, and it was a face-off about innovation, competition, capitalism, masculinity, and most of all, how strange things can become after you’ve created something that’s the best a consumer can get — and then you have to keep going.
Some of the voices you’ll hear in this episode include Rebecca Herzig, author of Plucked: A History of Hair Removal; Tim Dowling, Guardian columnist and author of Inventor of the Disposable Culture: King Camp Gillette 1855-1932; Dan Koeppel, razor blade zelig; and Kaitlyn Tiffany, writer for the Atlantic.
If you want to read more about razor blades, check out:
- Cutting edge : Gillette's journey to global leadership
- King C. Gillette, the man and his wonderful shaving device
- Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market
Decoder Ring is written and produced by Willa Paskin. This episode was produced by Elizabeth Nakano. Derek John is Sr. Supervising Producer of Narrative Podcasts.
If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, email us at DecoderRing@slate.com
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Before we begin, you should know that this episode contains some foul language. |
| 0:11.0 | So I'm sitting here right now looking at an old issue of the satirical newspaper, The |
| 0:15.7 | Onion. |
| 0:16.7 | It's from February 17th, 2004, though I just ordered it off the internet a few weeks ago, |
| 0:22.5 | and it's a time capsule. |
| 0:24.7 | The front page has a headline about Osama Bin Laden, and another about John Kerry, who |
| 0:29.4 | was running for president at the time. |
| 0:31.4 | There's also one about Martha Stewart, who was on trial. |
| 0:34.8 | But the reason I ordered the issue isn't for any story that ran on the cover. |
| 0:39.6 | It's for a story that ran on page four, and it was pretty timely, too. |
| 0:44.3 | It was just in the middle of that period where like the Mach 3 was the biggest shit in |
| 0:49.8 | the world. |
| 0:50.8 | Carol Cole was the editor-in-chief of The Onion, and she's talking about a razor, like |
| 0:55.1 | the kind people used to shave. |
| 0:57.5 | And the reason this razor was the biggest shit in the world, is that it was the first |
| 1:02.3 | ever razor to have three blades. |
| 1:06.2 | When the Mach 3 came out in 1998, it was a splashy new product and a huge seller for |
| 1:20.7 | Gillette, the company that dominated the razor business. |
| 1:24.3 | Not just in terms of sales, but in terms of innovation. |
| 1:27.8 | Based in Boston with a research lab in Great Britain, a staff of a razor scientist, and |
| 1:32.3 | scores of proprietary patents, Gillette had been rolling out top of the line razors for |
| 1:37.3 | nearly a century, products that had made it number one. |
... |
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