In my never-ending search for some interesting content for our shaving blog, I stumbled across some old classic shaving videos available here at Archive.org. It’s pretty unbelievable that the 1960’s and 1970’s are now referred to as vintage and “classic.” I do suppose that was some 50 to 60 years ago now.

Some of the ads include a nice jingle like this one:

Your Trac II shave. It’s a perfect shave, yes it is. It feels so smooth. Twin blade smooth. Perfectly smooth, the best there is. You took your perfect face and gave it a perfect Trac II shave. You saved it close and save now you’ve got that perfect Trac II shave. Get the closest thing to a perfect shave: the Gillette Trac II shave in regular or adjustable Trac II cartridges. That perfect Trac II face.

Another video is really peddling the idea that two blades is better than just one:

15 million people have switched to the Gillette Trac II razor. And that’s not all: lots of them have recommended it to their friends.

I told him, “Look dad, this Trac II works great.” He used mine and that’s what sold him.

Barber: I told my customers that the Trac II gives them the best shave you’ve ever had.

My favorite part of this particular video:

There’s two blades, set close together and at the angle they’re set the first blade cuts your whisker and before it has a chance to snap back, the second blade cuts it. And, I know it works on my face because it’s a lot closer shave than what I was getting with a single blade.

I know it’s an oft-repeated argument had between single blade shavers and cartridge razor shavers, but looking back on history, it’s apparent that genius marketing and engineering truly had its hand in pushing multiple blade razors on the consuming public, mostly because there were opportunities for greater margin and thus greater revenue.

But, I would compare some of these campaigns to the oft-repeated frog in the pot of water proverb. As the temperature of the water is slowly increased, the frog begins unknowingly begin to boil until it’s too late. In this case, the price just kept going upward until people not only started questioning the reason for the high prices, but also whether or not the shave was more than marginally better (if not sub-par) to what they could get with a classic double-edge safety razor.

My second observation is that it was a younger generation of shavers in the 1960’s and 1970’s introducing their parents to this then “new” technology in shaving. I find it interesting that today’s wet shaving (mostly hipster) millennials are doing the same thing to previous generations. As a millennial myself, I have convinced several men in their 60’s that wet shaving is the way to go.

The pendulum has begun to swing the opposite direction. Tell a friend. Get the word out. Shaving never was supposed to be

In the meantime, we also recently finished our own little shaving promo video. Enjoy.