I was tricked early on. When I was sixteen I received Gillette fusion over the mail and I was so happy they knew my birthday. I didn't think about how they found about my birthday but I was happy they remembered. I used all kind of equipment for shaving from electrical to disposable. Being Asian, I was the only person in my family that had a lot of facial hair so I was more finicky about the shaving experience. Electric shavers wasn't that great for me, whenever I use them I would get ingrown hairs and pimples. Disposable razor always irritated my skin for some reason and I never found one that worked well but it beats using electric razors. Then came the Gillette in the mail and I thought it was the best thing ever. I had to say it was a great shave. Until about 2 weeks later when I feel like I had to replace the head because the blades were dulling and I couldn't get razor completely clean and I tried a lot of different methods. The replacements were expensive! I remember it was around 6 dollar a blade at that time I thought it was ridiculous. So what I did, I grew out my beard, I used a trimmer to trim it when it was unruly but other than that I had a beard not for style but because I just didn't want to spend that much as a teenager. As a couple years passed I needed to start looking professional for school and jobs so I had to get rid of the beard and I was back with the dilemma of buying those Gillettes again. So what I did was I bought a straight razor since they looked cool in movies.
Also because I didn't feel like continuously paying 6-8 dollars for a razor blade that still cause some irritation because I couldn't get the razor completely clean because the blades were sandwiched so close together. This is the point where I started to learn about sharpening.
After a couple years go by, my brother saw me shaving with a straight razor and he asked how long does that take you? It wasn't a quick process, the shave itself wasn't the fastest unless you wanted to nick yourself and also you had to sharpen it almost every week. He told me that he picked up a safety razor and I was thinking I lived under a rock because I didn't know what it was. When I saw it, I knew that was the answer to my problems.
I bought a Edwin Jagger safety razor and I still use it til this day. It was 30 USD when I bought it off Amazon. The replacement blades are roughly 18 cents each and it doesn't make me feel bad when I dispose of it since it only the blade I'm throwing away and not the entire housing with 5 blades. Whenever you replace the blades they open up completely so cleaning them becomes super easy. Which is very important because all the dead skin and shaving gel do get stuck in the other types of razor making it unhygienic.
My brother bought the Merkur another brand that was good for starters and I saw that it was on sale today which made me decide to write this post about safety razor. I realized while talking to a lot of my friends they either know very little about safety razor or never heard of it due to the fact these are rarely advertised. I hope this inspires someone to try it out cause I really enjoy using these.
I use a combo of Edwin Jagger and Gillette's Silver Blue (I guess I have a soft spot for Gillette)