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I’ve been a user of King of Shaves shaving, um, products for a long time – I’ve enjoyed watching a small British company take some leaves torn out of the P&G manual and apply them verbatim… and actually succeed. I’ve just discovered Will King’s blog , which I might follow for a bit, though at the moment it’s a lot of promotional material for this newfangled razor…

I said “succeed”, but I have no idea of their financial performance… I guess the fact they’ve been around for a long time, constantly launching new products, and that they’ve just moved into essentially an adjacency is indicative of success…

Anyway. They’ve done a great job of basically taking the same shaving gel ingredients and rearranging them into products with different collections of complex acronyms (micro-magnetically-enhanced (MME) etc) which each get their own place on the shelf… until choosing to buy King of Shaves gel in Boots means trawling through 6 or more tubes, trying to decide whether the combination of activated menthol and sensitive skin or hyperbolic destressers and irradiated skin is better.

So having been a fan for a while, I was childishly excited to see a bus stop advert for their new razor, the painfully-named “Azor” (so called because its head sort-of forms an “A” shape, and clearly someone thought it was very clever). It assumed the knowing position of being “better, cheaper and different” as I remember… clearly taking a dig at the incumbent market leaders Gillette and Wilkinson Sword. Woo, I thought: I too can be different, like all the other people who get this (r)azor.

So I bought one. For a royal £5.00 or so, I got the handle plus three extra Endurium blades.

It was somewhat disappointingly made of a slighty tacky plastic… an off-white, like the inside of cheap Asian electrical products, with black bits (again, not quite as black as you’d expect) but still a pretty cool, innovative shape that fair made my follicles quake in fear. It had interesting and clever-looking plastic extensions to the top and bottom of the 4 blades, one of which looks like that moisturising stuff most razors have, and the other of which was just a bit of bendy plastic. No hygeinic blade cover like my Wilkinson Sword blades… which makes me want to wash it very thoroughly after chucking it in my wash bag.

To cut the story short, how good was it?

For 95% of my face and neck region (I’m sure those in the trade have a name for that… my neckvirons or my facebourhood, maybe) it was REALLY good. It felt a bit like dragging a freshly-sharpened scythe over my features… something about the shape and the way it makes you move your hand makes it really glide well. It was all going very well, and I was excited to show off my freshly-shawn gob to the general public, when I came across the Azor’s fatal flaw, at least on my mouth terrain.

All those fancy design decisions, particularly to include those wide flanges above and below the blades, added up to something which was essentually designed to leave you a 5mm moustache just below your nose. Try as I might, including half-stuffing the thing up a nostril, I couldn’t shave that bit. Maybe my hair grows too close to my nose? Maybe it’s all the rage to have a tiny, slightly crap pencil moustache to knit into your nasal hair… but more likely they noticed this flaw late in the design process, and had to live with it.

So now I use the Azor for most of my face (hell, I spent a whole fiver on it and I’ve got loads more blades to use up) and then a “proper” razor from one of the established brands for that elusive pencil moustache it’s chosen to leave me. Maybe I’ve missed something; I really wanted this to be an amazing razor; but it’s a bit stupid to have to take two razors in the washbag when I go away for the weekend…

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