The idea that men should remove their whiskers is one that has been around for a long time, but it also definitely goes in and out of fashion. In the United States, for example, we’ve gone through roughly three eras of facial hair. You can see this most clearly in portraits of US presidents. The first 14 American chief executives were clean-shaven. Abraham Lincoln was the first president to grow a beard, and the story is that he did so upon the urging of a little girl, who wrote: “You would look a great deal better for your face is so thin.” (That sounds like an apocryphal story, but the girl was named Grace Bedell, and her letter is on display in the Detroit Public Library.) Nine of the next ten presidents to follow Lincoln wore some kind of facial hair. President number 28, Woodrow Wilson—who held office during World War I—began a line of clean-shaven chief executives that continues to this day. The first great war, in fact, acts as a dividing line between shaving trends, and marks the beginning of Gillette’s ascendance via a confluence of technology, marketing, and tragedy (more on that in a bit).

When you read histories of shaving, the earliest versions of the practice are often dated back to prehistoric times, when hunter-gatherers smoothed their faces with the edges of clam shells or honed obsidian. The first to institutionalize shaving were likely ancient Egyptians; archaeologists have unearthed fine-edged copper discs that were the first manufactured razors. The Egyptian elite likely had a ritualistic reason for removing hair, since they shaved their entire bodies, but the technology—according to a history published on Modern Gent—was then adopted by ancient Greek and Roman soldiers, who kept their faces smooth for a more pragmatic reason: In the close-quarters combat of those days, an opponent could snatch your beard, draw you near, and run you through.

As is often the case, military traditions were brought home and became custom. Shaving became a way to distinguish one culture from another. The Romans, especially, saw their smooth faces as evidence of superiority, referring to their hirsute opponents as “barbarians,” from the Latin word barbe, which means beard, and from which we derive today’s “barber.” The use of facial hair—or the lack of it—to distinguish and demonize cultures other than one’s own continued as early Christians sought to separate themselves from Jews and even others of their own faith; in 1054, when the Roman Catholic Church split from the Eastern Orthodox church, Western European clergy began shaving as a way to show what side they were on. When Peter the Great—czar of Russia from 1682 to 1721—sought to modernize his country, he went against Orthodox church teachings through financial coercion; noblemen who kept their facial hair were taxed.

Beards returned to fashion in Europe in the 19th century, following the Napoleonic Wars. British and French soldiers both considered facial hair to be an intimidating factor against opponents, with wild beards and sideburns widely described—though the origin of the phrase is unknown—as “appurtenances of terror.” The beard era of the late 19th century got pretty ugly, and I’m not (just) talking about Chester Allen Arthur’s grotesque muttonchops, an instance of facial topiary so extensive that rumors claiming the 21st president had secreted an entire kidney pie within his sprawling undergrowth spread throughout Washington, DC. In 1861, a US publication called The Medical and Surgical Reporter asked of shavers: “When you feel your cheeks and chin with the hand, after every vestige of manliness in the face has been hacked out almost by the root, do you not feel as if the cheek did not belong to yourself?” Using a razor was even considered immoral by some. In 1847, esteemed British religious scholar/kook William Henry Henslowe published a 15-page pamphlet titled “Beard Shaving and the Common Use of the Razor: An Unnatural, Irrational, Unmanly, Ungodly and Fatal Fashion Among Christians,” in which he directly compared men who did shave to transvestites, continuing, in verse: “So spake the arch-traitor and ever since then/The Razor disgraces and mutilates men; The Pagan; the Persian; the Jew; and the Turk, Are they who most manfully spurn the vile work.” (You can read Henslowe’s entire opus here.)

But the backdrop of the pro-beard movement was a pull in the opposite direction: Technology was advancing, making shaving easier and safer. That was bound to make it more popular, too.

When that practice was banned in 1307, a symbolic shorthand was adopted: a red-and-white pole to represent the clean rags that would soon be streaked with crimson following a procedure.

Though some men shaved themselves, the job of removing hair from faces was, through most of history, left to barbers. In the Egyptian, Greek, and Roman eras, that job was defined pretty much the way it is today—as somebody who provides grooming services. But in the Middle Ages, the practice of bloodletting—draining the body’s vital fluids in order to eradicate “ill humors,” which were believed to be the cause of disease—became popular. Since traditional surgeons at the time, mostly monks, were forbidden to cut into the flesh (the body was considered holy) barbers—who knew their way around sharp tools—were the logical choice. In addition to trimming hair and beards, the barber of the Middle Ages would cheerfully siphon blood for any patient who needed a pick-me-up. The service became so popular that local shops would advertise by placing freshly filled bowls of gory fluid on their windowsills. When that practice was banned in 1307, a symbolic shorthand was adopted: a red-and-white pole to represent the clean rags that would soon be streaked with crimson following a procedure.

The Enlightenment that began in the late 17th century reestablished the separation between grooming and medicine, and by the 1750s, most barbers in Europe and the Americas were statutorily limited to the duties they still perform in the modern era. (Well, sort of. Today, you can determine what somebody in the tonsorial profession does by the category they’re assigned on their state license. In California, for example, a cosmetologist is allowed to cut, style, and color hair, and may also perform manicures, pedicures, and waxing. An esthetician can give facials, or apply makeup, and can remove hair with tweezers, chemicals, or wax, but not scissors or a razor. Like cosmetologists, licensed barbers can cut and style hair, but unlike all the other categories, barbers —and only barbers—can shave).

Though most states still require barbers to pass a shaving test, the truth is that very few barbers offer shaves these days. That’s due to an evolution that winds up with today’s five- and six-blade razors, but began with a product the most ardent shave hobbyists still exalt today: the straight, or “cutthroat,” razor.

The idea that a man could shave himself took hold around the same time barbers and surgeons were parting ways. It is likely that some shavers came to understand that special skills weren’t needed to remove facial hair the way such skills might have been needed to evict a demon from one’s gall bladder via a few pints of blood drainage. At the same time, metallurgic processes advanced far enough that relatively inexpensive blades could be purchased and maintained for home use, according to British medical scholar Alun Withey, who has traced advertising for DIY razors as far back as 1740. In 1762, a French knife maker named Jean-Jacques Perret published a book called “La Pogonotomie—ou l'art d'apprendre a se raser soi-meme” (“Pogonotomie, or the Art of Shaving One’s Self”). The term “pogonotomie” comes from the Greek word πώγων, or pogos, meaning “beard”; so, in English, “pogonotomy” means “to remove a beard,” while pogonotrophy means “to grow one.”

The advent of self-shaving also led to the advent of shaving products, especially creams and lotions—then called “shaving pastes”—designed to smooth the razor’s movement across the face. Razors got cheaper and better, but a basic problem remained: A straight razor was hard to use, potentially dangerous, and required a lot of maintenance. Such devices needed to be stropped and honed. (What’s the difference? Stropping doesn’t involve removing metal; instead, it smooths the edge of the razor after it has been worn down during use. Honing actually reshapes the edge after it has dulled.)

As soon as people started shaving at home, entrepreneurs began experimenting with simpler, cheaper, safer ways to do so. In 1847, William Henson—who’d tried and failed four years earlier to build a steam-powered airplane—was issued a patent for a more quotidian device: a so-called hoe-shaped razor that featured a “cutting blade … at right angles to the handle.” It was the first razor to adopt the T-shaped profile that characterizes all modern shaving utensils.

But the Henson razor still used an exposed, permanent blade. In 1880, brothers Frederick and Otto Kampf introduced a product they called—using the term for the first time—a “safety razor.” It added a metal guard to Henson’s compact head, reducing nicks and cuts while guiding beard hairs toward the cutting edge. The Kampfs' Star razor still required honing and stropping, but that process was made easier by a simple accessory that accomplished the job. Kampfs' American Safety Razor company sold 5 million Star shavers by 1900, and the company still exists as today’s Personna, the generic and house-brand division of Schick/Wilkinson (those two powerhouse shave companies also date back to the early era of shaving; they merged in 1992).

As popular as home shaving was becoming, the modern shaving era was still a few years away. Stropping and honing a blade—whether on a straight razor or a Star safety razor—was still a time-consuming process. Worse, you could ruin a razor by doing it wrong, and a badly maintained blade could cut your face to pieces. Only after a patented invention by a failed messiah, and a particularly gruesome military advance, would the modern era of shaving take hold.

King Camp Gillette didn’t know much about razors. In 1894, at age 39, he’d self-published The Human Drift, a book that called for all Americans—the country’s population was 60 million at the time—to move to a single, utopian mega-city, which he dubbed (sorry, Superman) Metropolis. But it was Gillette’s day job that led him to come up with a solution to the shaving problem: The native Chicagoan was working for a company called Crown Cork & Seal, which had invented another revolutionary product—the bottle cap (the company still exists and manufacturers about 20 percent of the world’s glass container closures). Gillette, according to biographer Russell B. Adams, was inspired by the convenience of Crown’s product, and wondered if he could apply a similar business model to shaving.

Creating a disposable blade turned out to be a huge problem. Cutting edges generally need to be stiff in order to slice cleanly. This is especially true if the edge is to be applied to flesh. But stiff meant a lot of material and expense. Gillette’s brainstorm was to make the blades thin and flexible and move the support for the blade into the razor handle. “Mr. Gillette’s efforts,” wrote the appropriately named William Emery Nickerson, an engineer who served as Gillette’s partner and was the early razor company’s equivalent to a chief technical officer, “were directed mainly toward the making of blades sufficiently cheap to realize the ‘no honing’ and ‘no stropping’ principle. What he really did,” Nickerson continued, “was to transfer from the blade to the separable holder the rigidity necessary for shaving, leaving in the blade itself merely enough substance to take a cutting edge.” [Italics added].

In 1903, Gillette and Nickerson sold 51 razors and 14 packs of 12 blades. The next year, razor sales topped 90,000, with 120,000 blades sold. By 1905, over a quarter million of the $5 Gillette handles were sold—along with 1.2 million blades.

The traditional thinking is that it was convenience—and Gillette’s business model of selling handles cheaply, locking the user into a proprietary blade forever (a model now used successfully by ink-jet printer makers)—that led to the company’s ascendancy. From the business point of view, this turns out to be a legend; one debunked by Randal C. Picker, a professor of commercial law at the University of Chicago. In a 2010 paper called “The Razors-and-Blades Myth,” Picker points out that the original price point of the Gillette Safety Razor was $5—the equivalent of $140 today. If there was “lock-in,” Picker argues, it wasn’t that the handle was cheap, but that it was expensive; a shaver wouldn’t be inclined to switch if he’d already invested a considerable sum on the base product. It turned out not to be the mundane bloodshed of a few nicks and cuts, but true tragedy: Gillette would win the razor wars because of war.

World War I brought unprecedented technology to the battlefield. Aircraft were used for the first time. New weaponry, including tanks and flame-throwers, gave combatants true potential for large-scale carnage. At the same time, the war was steeped in tradition, bringing more than 65 million soldiers to the battlefield in brutal, bloody, close-quarters conflict. Ten million soldiers died.

Military restrictions against beards had been relaxed since the Napoleonic Wars. Now, such edicts returned, thanks to the most terrifying technological advance of World War I: the use of poison gas as a weapon. Chlorine, phosgene, and mustard gas were the first true weapons of mass destruction, and along with a helmet, a gas mask became standard equipment for any soldier at the front (including my grandfather, Morris Koeppel, an Austrian Jew who was drafted to fight on the German side and was exposed to gas during those battles, leaving his respiratory system scarred for the rest of his life).

It was the gas mask—and not marketing genius—that made the Gillette razor into the world’s favorite.

It was the gas mask—and not marketing genius—that turned the Gillette razor into the world’s favorite. The company’s in-house Blade newsletter, during the war years, was filled with letters from employees who were stationed overseas. Johnnie Hurley, a Gillette worker from Boston who was serving in France, put it bluntly: “Every soldier ‘over here’ carries a Gillette Safety Razor in his kit. We have to shave almost every day, on account of gas. When a fellow is not clean shaven the gas mask does not fit good, and he is usually out of luck.”

Soldiers bring home new habits, and when young men returned home from the war, they continued to shave—often with the military-spec Gillette handles they were issued. It isn’t a coincidence that Woodrow Wilson was clean shaven. And you got there with a Gillette razor, which, Ralph Bergengren wrote in 1919’s The Perfect Gentleman, was a “characteristically modern invention to combine speed and convenience.”

In a cosmopolitan, technological world, Gillette no longer needed to persuade men to shave—that was a given. It simply needed to prove that Gillette was the best choice for shaving.

Unfortunately for Gillette, rivals—who, like today, promised better, cheaper shaves—began to appear to take advantage of the new American habit. Initially, those competitors were stymied by Gillette’s patented head pattern—the cutouts that allow a double-edge blade to fit a particular handle—which meant that only Gillette could manufacture “compatible” blades. But patents lasted only 17 years in the early 20th century, and by 1921, anybody with the technical skill could make blades that fit the Gillette handle. Throughout the 1920s, Gillette fought back competition by introducing new blade formats and lowering prices. Though Gillette managed to put many competitors out of business (sometimes by buying them), the commodification of shaving continued to vex the company through the 1960s, especially after Britain’s Wilkinson Sword introduced a stainless steel, Teflon-coated blade, a product that was measurably superior to Gillette’s carbon steel products (Gillette had experimented with stainless blades, but didn’t feel they were necessary, possibly because they lasted too long compared with rust-prone carbon steel blades. Today, most razor blades are made of antifriction-coated stainless).

Gillette was in a dilemma. Part of the problem was that it was making really nice handles—ones that lasted virtually forever. I’m still using a gorgeous 1969 Gillette Slim Adjustable that my Dad bought after he completed his military service. It features a rotating knob that moves the blade closer or farther from the skin (a measurement known to shaving aficionados as “aggressiveness”), and a very cool butterfly-shaped, twist-to-open head that locks the blade down for maximum stiffness. In order to de-commoditize their business, Gillette executives were increasingly looking toward patentable, cartridge-based designs—Wilkinson had introduced a blade affixed to a plastic shell in 1971—that would lock users into proprietary shaving “systems.” The company opened a pair of research centers—one in Boston and another in Reading, England—that still exist today. The first product to come from those labs was the Techmatic, which used a slim, cartridge-like head, but employed a continuous strip of blades that a shaver could unroll as the working edge dulled. It was, as one participant on the Badger & Blade shaving forum reminisced, probably “the world’s worst razor.” The band didn’t stay flat, leading to cuts as the uneven blade coursed over the face.

The lab’s next product was more successful. Codenamed Rex, it was developed in Britain by a team headed by Dr. Norman Welsh. In the mid-1960s, Welsh—using a fiber optic-camera—had taken the first microscopic pictures of a razor in action, observing that, as a 1972 New Scientist article recounted, “[When] a razor blade cuts a bristle, it also pulls the hair out of its follicle.” What if, Welsh reasoned, the hair could stay pulled out—it typically retracted in about one-eighth of a second—so that it could be cut closer? This was the phenomenon Welsh dubbed—with questionable scientific validity, but absolute marketing genius—as “hysteresis.”

Gillette had an idea, but not a product. The company knew that some men were shaving this way on their own, loading a pair of double-edge blades on top of each other into a traditional razor head to create a twin blade razor. The big problem—and the one that took seven years to solve—was how to stack the blades in a cartridge that would allow the pulling and cutting to take place and at the same time, yet let the trimmed whisker and spent shaving cream pass through the space between the blades.

The answer came in 1971, when Gillette’s researchers developed perforated steel strips, cut into thin, narrow wafers. Manufacturing those blades—especially sharpening them—was, according to one engineer quoted in Russell Adam’s Gillette biography, “like sharpening lace,” but it worked. “With its two single-edged blades … gripped in parallel by a plastic cartridge, it was unlike anything shavers had seen before,” wrote Adams (Gillette didn’t note that multiblade razors can lead to more razor bumps, since the pulled hair can curl back into the skin as it regrows; to this day, shavers with coarse, tightly curled hair—especially those of African descent—will find that a multiblade razor may not be the best choice).

All that was left was to name it. Candidates included the groovy Dimension II and the pragmatic Face Saver. In the end, an acronym was chosen: The Twin Razor and Cartridge—or Trac II—was backed by a huge advertising campaign, was a hit. The age of traditional shaving was over.

I remember my first twin blade razor. It was Gillette’s Atra, the successor to the Trac II. The company had resuscitated the name from a failed 1960s project that had been launched thousands of miles away. The name—another acronym—stood for “Australian Test Razor.” The Atra was a Trac II with a pivoting head, and they were delivered, by the thousands, to incoming college students across America, in sealed cardboard tubes with colorful logos on them. Compared to my Dad’s old double edge, the Atra was a revelation: beard removal became fast and easy, and cuts were rare. But Atra blades were expensive, so after the samples wore out, I switched to another new Gillette product—the blue-handled Good News razors, a disposable and cheap version of the Trac II.

Gillette had invented the Good News razor as a way to provide a budget product that was also exclusive. It was so successful that it almost destroyed the company. By the late 1980s, when I began covering the shaving giant, such cheap razors had come to account for more than half of the US market. But there was little profit in disposables, and Gillette found itself undercut by BiC—a French company that sold pens and lighters and that brought single-blade shaving back into vogue, at least for cheapskates, with its Creamsicle-themed white and orange razor.

That’s where shaving was when I began covering the market—and Gillette was determined to change things. As important as the new razor was, in retrospect, the more symbolic move was the new slogan, “The Best a Man Can Get,” introduced as way to make shaving seem like a luxurious, pleasurable ritual, rather than a commodity-driven chore.

Is the now-familiar catchphrase true? The Sensor was a twin-blade razor, and it worked well. Millions of men switched from disposables to cartridge systems, beginning the escalation that leads to the sticker shock many consumers report they experience when buying refill blades for modern shavers. Underlying this is a fundamental supposition that “the best,” as Gillette says, is a moving target, that improved razors are eternally on the horizon, and that the decades-long succession of new products from Gillette and its competitors represent true progress. Primary among these assumptions is the notion that more blades—no matter how many more—are better.

But adding blades has felt a bit like a scam from the very beginning. In October 1975, a few months after the Trac II appeared, the very first episode of Saturday Night Live questioned the concept with a fake advertisement for the “Triple Track” razor, whose tagline was: “Because you’ll believe anything.” Three decades later, when Gillette’s top-of-the-line razor was the Mach3, The Onion correctly predicted Gillette’s future direction with an article headlined “Fuck Everything—We’re Doing Five Blades.” Within two years, the shaving giant did just that.

And it turns out that the comedians and satirists are right. When all factors are considered, more blades—especially more than three—really aren’t better.