The Razor Bracket
If I'm doing it, I might as well do it
It begins at a CVS in Miami Beach. I flew down earlier that day for my first company offsite, and was lacking travel size bottles and therefore in need of some fluids. I had my Harry's cartridge razor (called the Truman, apparently) which I bought freshman year at the Fenway Target to end my 2020 COVID beard and rejoin polite society. A razor is a tool, and this one was Good Enough and the blades cheap enough that I didn't have any reason to interrogate its role.
I remember when I was a kid often hearing about how obscenely expensive razor blades are. They make the handle cheap but then the replacements are where they get you. I've never been bothered by razor prices, though I did opt for Harry's over Gillette. Maybe razors seem expensive relative to what we think they should cost, but my total annual otlay for razors turned out to be a much smaller part of my budget than these childhood impressions made me expect
It was a sticky, warm 11 PM as I walked down the boulevard from my hotel. My surroundings seemed about what I'd expect from the name Miami Beach: like being in Florida, if it was at a California price point. Away from the neon and seasalt I walked into the CVS, which like all locations of the chain seemed to be stuck in that mid-2000s wink of my childhood when I can first remember visiting the store with my mother. The cool air always blasts as I cross the sliding door threshold and I reminisce about a similar mission I had taken just a few months earlier in Chicago. In that instance I had also brought my razor but left my shaving cream and aftershave on a shelf in Boston. It was about 4 in the afternoon, and I had a ticket on the train leaving that night for California. A planned 52 hours on the train, which stretched to 61 with delays, called for the ability to shave. In that instance I had purchased a full-sized bottle of Cremo shave cream in the Original flavor and Duke Cannon mentholated aftershave balm, a blue-green substance that tingles irresisitably cool.
I've had an evolving relationship to the For Men category of cosmetic
products. The naive childhood response is of digust:
Why would I want something just for men? I'm not sexist, I'm not
afraid of floral scents!
I remember going to a hair salon somewhere around the age of 8, and
after the haircut the stylist started pitching me shampoo products.
She offered two options for flavor: FLORAL or MANLY. I
decided, being myself a man, to try manly and went home with my bottle
of AMERICAN CREW. I was loyal to that whim decision until several
years later, when a dermatologist insisted I use every anti-dandruff
shampoo on the market in a rotating cycle, to avoid a tolerance to any
type. Then came the lovely scents: everything from Head and Shoulders'
classic green apple to the inimitable coal tar, which has in its nose
all the unapologetic roughness of its name.