The imminent arrival of the six-blade shaver: a sloppy unscientific analysis
(Dear Readers: I promise to get back to insightful technology punditry very soon — but this was too good to pass up.)
A lot of people have written about the new five-blade razors from Gillette (including one of my new Yahoo! co-workers, Jeffrey), but I haven’t seen anyone ask the obvious question: when will the six-blade arrive? I decided to do some analysis, thinking that there must be a corollary to Moore’s Law, except for shaving.
Let’s look at the facts (thank you Wikipedia for your history of Gillette — and who knew their stock ticker symbol was plain ol’ G? Or that their market cap was $53.9B as of today?):
Time elapsed between key blade-related technologies:
Single blade safety razor (1901) to the double-blade Trac II (1971): 70 years
Trac II (1971) to triple-blade Mach 3 (1998): 27 years
Mach 3 (1998) to quad-blade Schick Quattro (2003): 5 years (note: Schick was sued for patent infringement in the process)
Schick Quattro (2003) to quintuple-blade Gillette Fusion (2005): 2 years
I put a graph together to help me predict the next logical advance: six blades:
My prediction: we’ll have six in late ‘06.
Update: Now I realize that I had just gotten behind on my BoingBoing reading. Lots of stuff on this there.
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Comments
Call it Kent’s Law
The big news is that Proctor and Gamble (NYSE: PG) division Gillette has upped the blade barrier once again, and is now ready to offer a 5-blade razor dubbed Fusion besting Schick’s 4-blad Quattro. Here’s some stuff from Business Week:
The really cool thing about that graph is that it suggests that within a few years, we’ll be shaving with shavers that sport infinity blades, which suggests that our beards must then exist at all points in time and space simultaneously, which for me was really the point of growing my beard in the first place.
Who knew Mad Magazine and Saturday Night Live were such vanguards when it comes to razor science?
I used the Mach III and was amazed at how well it worked (just bled a lot during the first week) then that Christmas I got my first electric and haven’t gone back.