On that fateful day, as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin boarded the Saturn V that was departing for man’s lunar mission, they did so with shaving kits containing Gillette’s razors. The company now celebrates 50 years since that glorious achievement, and its long-standing association with NASA, to launch the Apollo handle under its popular Razor Maker program that lets you choose custom 3D printed grips for your trusty Gillette blade.
For space and science aficionados, you can now attach a lunar-themed Apollo handle to the base of your Gillette Mach 3 or Fusion5 ProGlide blade. The razor features an exclusive moonscape handle design adorned with a historically inspired “one small step” boot imprint on the front and NASA’s logo on the back. Each handle is SLA 3D printed in Gillette’s Boston headquarters, and comes made to order in a beautiful metallic gray finish that beautifully brings out the colors and the textures of the moon’s crater-filled surface!
It's the easy joke to make: how exactly can Gillette innovate in shaving, beside adding even more blades? Well, add heating. The first product from GilletteLabs, its new innovation team, is the Heated Razor. It has a metal, gold-colored bar that heat...
You could say that Gillette’s practically perfected the shaving experience, with its state-of-the-art blades, housings, mechanisms, and lubrications, a Gillette razor is a sheer feat of engineering, designed to provide a near-perfect grooming experience. Gillette now wants to conquer the next frontier… personalizing this grooming experience.
Partnering with Formlabs, Gillette introduces the Razor Maker, a tool to personalize your razor with a bespoke handle that’s chosen by you, and specially SLA 3D-Printed for you. You can choose from as many as 48 different form-based designs, even decorating them with images for a razor that’s unique to you. The handle designs come compatible with Gillette’s MACH3 or Fusion5 ProGlide razors, and the final product, once designed by you, ships to your doorstep! I call dibbs on the water-swirl one, although I know it probably isn’t going to be particularly ergonomic to grip.
Shaving at home isn’t always as comfortable as getting shaved at the barbers. You’re either crouched over your sink, or in your shower, running a blade amateurishly across your skin, cutting yourself and cursing your stars as your skin smarts under the influence of aftershave. Go to the barber and it’s a different experience. The barber wipes your chin with a warm cloth, before running the razor expertly across your jaw, periodically dipping it in warm water too, so that the blade is nice and toasty as it glides across your skin. The aftershave doesn’t sting as much either, because of the expert hand… however, there’s a trade secret to this experience. Heat.
As the heated towel rests against your skin, and the warm razor shaves your beard, the heat enhances the quality of your shave. It soothes and relaxes your skin, and even helps the blade glide through the stubble effortlessly. In keeping with Gillette’s tagline of offering man with quite literally the best, the Heated Razor mimics the barber experience. The razor comes with a state-of-the-art heating system built into it, and a strip right under the blades heats up to a comfortable temperature, warming your skin up before the blades glide above it. Pair this with Gillette’s world-class blades and you’ve got a shaving experience that doesn’t give you a remarkably close shave, but gives you a sensational, soothing shaving experience.
Gillette’s Heated Razor comes with a remarkable build. The handle has a great, ergonomic grip, and comes made from aluminum zinc, with a control button that lets you toggle the heating-strip as well as decide between two temperature settings that are indicated using a light-strip on the razor’s hand;e. Built with a lithium-ion battery inside, the razor comes with its own slick-looking dock that doubles as a Qi-enabled wireless charger that should keep your razor permanently juiced anytime you’re ready for a shave. The Heated Razor is built to be waterproof, so you can use it in your shower too for a shave that feels superiorly comfortable, and leaves you running your fingers across your smooth, warm jawline.
Gillette is synonymous with two things. A. Shaving, and B. Slick Masculinity. It’s difficult to find brands that have the kind of reach Gillette does, in the shaving industry. It quite literally has no serious competition, which one can only ask for as a brand, but its the latter reference that one could say is a narrow-sighted problem. Gillette has and does cater to women too, with its gentle Venus series that runs smoothly against the skin, removing unwanted body hair, but a major part of Gillette’s portfolio caters to the young man who believes beards are for hipsters, and wants to have an immaculately shaved jawline with no cuts or bruises, in record time. In maintaining that vision, Gillette forgot a significant part of their market. People who want to, but are unable to shave.
A masterpiece of inclusive design, the Treo enables assisted shaving, allowing helpers and caretakers shave the beards of men who are unable to. Using a straight-razor was out of the question, since these helpers/caretakers weren’t professionals, and using regular razors is challenging enough on your own face, so shaving someone else can be nothing short of an ergonomic nightmare.
Gillette began its work on the Treo as early as 2017, analyzing pain points, areas of failure, and coming up with solutions to the wide range of problems. Studying assisted shaving scenarios revealed that men were shaved sitting down, or in a bed, which meant that the angle on the blade and handle had to reflect that arrangement, rather than one where one shaves oneself. Since the subjects weren’t being shaved/groomed in the bathroom, there was also the challenge of shaving cream becoming a messy ordeal, given that you didn’t have a constant flow of water to periodically wash the razor. All this research culminated in the Treo, the world’s first assisted-shaving razor.
Designed with a reoriented blade angle, the Treo can be held like a brush or a pencil, making it easier to maneuver across a jawline than conventional razors. A special razor guard allows the blade to work all sorts of facial hair, thick or thin, resulting in a clean shave with lesser water. The handle of the Treo also doubles up as a tube of shaving gel, allowing the Treo to be practically a shaving kit in itself, and armed with enough gel to last for exactly one shave (so that the blade is disposed of when the gel is used up, ensuring a single blade isn’t used twice). The Treo uses a proprietary water-based gel too, which doesn’t create a mess like foam does, and doesn’t need washing off too. The water-based gel hydrates the skin too, working as an after-shave as well!
It’s great to see the company build a product keeping inclusivity in mind. The Treo not only helps caretakers groom and shave the people they take care of, it also allows the men being shaved to feel clean, comfortable, and even young again!
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It's the easy joke to make: how exactly can Gillette innovate in shaving, beside adding even more blades? Well, add heating. The first product from GilletteLabs, its new innovation team, is the Heated Razor. It has a metal, gold-colored bar that heat...
