A 33C Trial

This morning I returned to an old friend, my Merkur 33C Classic razor. I used it for the first pass of my usual two-pass daily shave. The three-piece 33C is a pretty mild shaver, though not as much as my finishing razor, the one-piece Weishi 9306-F.

This is the Merkur 33C Classic razor, the cousin to the more popular, more-aggressive-shaving Merkur 34C HD razor.

Even with the seventh-use Super-Max-Titanium (SMT) blade in the 33, the first pass was adequate to stop after a standard one-pass shave. However, adequate isn't adequate for me. So I used the 33 to take a few clean-up strokes under my jaw line prior to transferring the blade for my final pass.

Using my finishing razor for the final (second) full pass left a fairly close shave, but with a few weepers on my lower neck that took a touch of styptic. This may be due to the 33C not being quite aggressive enough in shave character. This mildness of the 33 may prevent sufficient beard reduction to comfortably shave against grain in a second pass.

Tomorrow being tested beyond my customary seven shaves.

The good news is that the SMT blade seems good to go beyond the seven shaves that has been my previous recycle point. So tomorrow's shave number eight will be an interesting kick off to pushing the performance envelope of the SMT blade to see what it can do.

Happy shaving!