Shaving Throughout History
10,000 B.C. -- Cave drawings from this period show
some clean-shaven men, some with short beards
Shaving Throughout History
10,000 B.C. -- Cave drawings from this period show
some clean-shaven men, some with short beards
| 10,000 B.C. -- Cave drawings from this period show some clean-shaven
men, some with short beards.
4000 B.C. -- Egyptian pharaohs of this era are clean-shaven; beards (and all body hair) were a sign of uncleanliness and negligence. 1567-1320 B.C. -- Shaving becomes easier as (sharper, tougher) bronze razors replace copper-alloy models. 12th century B.C. -- Moses, the Hebrew leader, is commonly depicted with a full beard (see Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments). 1000 B.C. -- Shaving, construction and warfare are vastly more efficient as iron replaces bronze for razors, tools and weapons. 323 B.C. -- Noting that beards could be grabbed by enemies, Alexander the Great commands his soldiers to shave. 296 B.C. -- Romans, who had sneered at shaving as an effeminate Greek practice, adopt the clean-shaven look and import Greek barbers. 78 B.C. to A.D. 117 -- Julius Caesar shaves, setting the style for Roman leaders until emperor Hadrian, who wears a beard to conceal scars and a wart. Circa A.D. 1 to 4 -- During his brief ministry, Jesus of Nazareth is believed to have worn a beard, the custom of his day. 330-63 -- Roman emperor Julian grows a beard to contrast his pagan beliefs with those of clean-shaven Christian leaders. 1163 -- A papal decree forbids monks to practice bloodletting, a medical treatment; barbers get the job. 1508-12 -- Michaelangelo paints a bearded God and a clean-shaven Adam on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. 1541 -- After reinstating the beard as a fashion statement, Henry VIII allows barbers and surgeons to form a joint guild; barbers can engage in bloodletting, but surgeons are forbidden to shave people. 1610 -- France's Louis XIII, going bald, popularizes powdered wigs and the clean-shaven countenance, which holds up for two centuries. 1680 -- The narrow-bladed folding straight razor, a boon for shavers, appears. 1750s -- The shaving brush is invented in France. 1776 -- Declaration of Independence signers are clean-shaven. 1847 -- William Henson of London puts a handle perpendicular to a razor blade, creating the first "hoe-type" razor. 1858 -- Uncle Sam gets chin whiskers (but the most popular rendition of him is in a World War I recruiting poster). 1860 -- Newly elected president Abraham Lincoln grows a beard. 1861 -- Union army Gen. Ambrose Burnside gives us "burnsides," later called "sideburns." 1863 -- Political cartoonist Thomas Nast in Harper's Weekly draws Santa Claus with a full white beard, establishing the standard. 1880 -- Brothers Otto and Frederick Kampfe get U.S. patent for the first safety razor. 1895 -- A fellow named King C. Gillette invents the disposable razor blade. 1917 -- The U.S. Army equips soldiers in World War I with Gillette safety razors to assure a good seal on a gas mask. 1920s -- Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini declares: "Whiskers are a sign of decadence." 1926 -- Burma-Shave shaving cream unveils its rhyming road signs. 1929 -- The electric razor appears. 1938 -- Old Spice, the country's best-selling after-shave lotion, is introduced. 1956-59 -- Fidel Castro grows a beard after running out of razor blades while a guerrilla in Cuba's Sierra Maestra Mountains. 1962 -- The stainless steel blade, developed by U.K.'s Wilkinson Sword, appears. 1965 -- The cartridge razor appears. 1971 -- Gillette introduces the TRAC II (Twin-blade Razor And Cartridge), the first twin-blade razor. 1980s -- Don Johnson influences young males with his "stubble" look on Miami Vice. 1990-98 -- Quik Shave developes their double-bladed, swiveling razor, which fits 2 TRAC II blades. Women report NOT cutting themselves in well over a year and their leg-shaving time drops to about 1 minute per leg. Also, Chicago Bulls coach Phil Jackson sometimes grows a beard, becoming the first coach to win an NBA title with one.
IF you find yourself in a cluster of important people at a ritzy cocktail party and you need something to break the ice, try this: "I was surprised to learn recently that human beings have three times more body hair than chimpanzees." Wait for the admiring murmurs to subside, then boggle minds with this follow-up: "On the other hand, we humans have less body hair than gibbons and gorillas." You've just become someone whom everybody wants to know. Or maybe you're meeting the parents of your beloved for the first time and want to display the range of your intellectual engagement, so you subtly steer the conversation to the late Hellenic period and wow them with this: "Alexander the Great was a brilliant military strategist, of course, but what fascinates me was his eye for the crucial detail. As you probably know, for example, he demanded that his soldiers be clean-shaven because he didn't want the enemy to be able to grab their beards with one hand while stabbing them with the other. That's very impressive to me." And after you lay that gem on them, your potential in-laws are going to be even more impressed with you. About now you're asking: Where does a person discover such helpful information? The answer is in an odd little book about, of all things, male facial hair. Its title is A Closer Shave: Man's Daily Search for Perfection (Artisan, $16.95) by the mustachioed Wallace Pinfold; his book is unassuming in length (155 pages), compact in size (6 1/4 inches square) and laden with a jumble of disparate facts that are more arresting than essential. Certainly a person could lead a full and rewarding life without discovering that: · Men's whiskers grow 5 to 6 inches a year. · The average guy devotes 2,965 hours over his lifetime to standing in front of a mirror and shaving -- the equivalent of four months. · In the matter of total facial-hair follicles, "people from Europe and the Middle East are hairiest, Asians the least hairy and Africans fall somewhere in between." · The "really good (shaving) brushes are made from a badger's stomach hair," and the "better brushes ... use hair from the badger's back." While none of this stuff is redemptive or inspiring, viewing the human comedy from such a cheeky perspective can be amusing, sometimes startling and occasionally humbling. At the very least, A Closer Shave should make American men grateful for the freedom they have when they face, so to speak, the question that looms before them each day: To beard or not to beard?
Men generally employ the proven monkey-see, monkey-do approach to facial grooming, which is to say we do what the large majority of other guys do, who do what the style-setters do, who are men other men admire or fear, and who tended to wear crowns long ago. As A Close Shave observes: "The fashion for beards has waxed and waned throughout history. When kings still counted and beards were in fashion, kings set the style for beards." Take England. If you were a guy during the reign of Henry III (1216-72), odds are that you wore a long, full beard like his. Things got a bit trickier in the next century with Edward II (1307-27), who sported a three-ringlet job. The forked beard of Edward III (1327-77) was only slightly easier to imitate. Richard II (1377-99) didn't help matters much with his twin tufts at either side of the chin, which meant you had to shave and maintain a growth. And if monarchs decided they didn't like beards at all, they could be
seriously
Take Russia, where beards were de rigueur for centuries and where Ivan the Terrible, who became czar in 1547, was so oppressively pro-whiskers that he once declared: "To shave the beard is a sin that the blood of all the martyrs cannot cleanse." Heavy. Yet 150 years later, here came Peter the Great (his height was 6 feet, 7 inches), who ordered his male subjects to bare their faces (he wanted to emulate the prosperous and then-whiskerless Western Europe). If they didn't, they got slapped with a beard tax.
Today in this country, the clean-shaven look is the fashion and has been for a century. Although you will rarely see beards on politicians, CEOs and TV anchormen, there's no stigma, much less any tax levies, for letting one's whiskers go. There's also little excuse for not slicing them off each day.
In This Golden Age Of Safety Razors, Which Is The Best? We now take for granted that you can shave yourself with no danger. Maybe it's a chore, maybe you don't want to do it, but you do it. However, you don't worry about getting infected, and when you look at advertisements from the first 30 years of this century, the companies making razors and shaving creams were pushing hygiene, promising you wouldn't get a septic infection from their product. Oh how tough life was then and how easy our lives are now. Here is something half the human race, or at least half of the American human race, does every morning of their lives, or at least six mornings out of seven. And they never think twice about it. If you ask men what they do while they're shaving, you find they all zone out. And another thing they have in common is they like to grouse about shaving. They'll say, "I hate to shave". Maybe guys simply presume that to be the properly macho response. If you told them you could wave a magic wand and they'd never have to shave again, I think most men would say, "Ohhh, I dunno." They're attached to it in a kind of contrarian way.
· The good, the bad and the beard. Beards, or their absence, cannot reveal what's in a man's heart. Abraham, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad are usually portrayed with beards. On the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel: God has a beard, and Adam doesn't. Lenin wore a beard. So did Lincoln. Washington and Jefferson were clean-shaven. Benito Mussolini, the Italian dictator, was rabid for razors. Noting that Julius Caesar was clean-shaven, he inveighed: "I am anti-whiskers. Fascism is anti-whiskers. Whiskers are a sign of decadence." Tell that to Ivan the Terrible. · Beard bias. The late 1960s and '70s were bad enough for barbers, what with male youths and their rebellious long tresses. But consider an article that appeared in the New York Times in 1879 under the headline "Barbers Terrorize Public," which begins: "The records of our insane asylums show the fearful effects wrought by the conversation of barbers. No less than 78 percent of the insane patients in public institutions in this state were in the habit of being shaved by barbers before they became insane. If this does not mean that to be shaved by a barber is to incur the risk of being talked into madness, statistics have no meaning." (We trust this was written with tongue in shaven cheek.) · Rebels with razors. In the 1890s, Aubrey Beardsley, William Butler Yeats and Oscar Wilde were among the artists and writers who went for the clean-shaven look so they could feel superior to the money-grubbing men of the mercantile class who wore beards. · For the want of a blade. In a 1977 interview, Fidel Castro told Barbara Walters that he would have been a clean-shaven revolutionary if his supply of Gillette razor blades hadn't been cut off during his guerrilla days in the mountains of Cuba. · Highway culture. From 1926 to 1963, Burma Shave, the brushless shave cream, reduced the tedium of long car trips with its quintets of rhyming road signs. Here's one: "Henry the Eighth Sure had trouble Short-term wives Long-term stubble Burma Shave." · Beard bias, Part 2. Proving that smart guys can be idiots, Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), the German philosopher whose theories on the primacy of the will influenced Freud and Nietzsche, wanted beards outlawed because he believed they shielded the inherently sinister features of a criminal's face. · Non-Burma Shave poetry. Upon Shaving Off One's Beard by John Updike: "The scissors cut the long-grown hair; The razor scrapes the remnant fuzz. Small-jawed, weak-chinned, big-eyed, I stare At the forgotten boy I was." · More beard bias. Massachusetts farmer Joseph Palmer grew a beard in 1830, when beards were out. Boys threw rocks at him, a preacher preached that his whiskers were "a satanic device," and finally some men jumped him and tried to remove his beard. He fought them off but was fined for assaulting his attackers. He refused to pay and was jailed, but a grass-roots movement was formed on his behalf, and he was released. · Facial hair in the White House. Our presidents were clean-shaven for the first half of the 19th century. Lincoln famously grew a beard just before taking office in 1860, and except for his successor, Andrew Johnson, who was clean-shaven, and Grover Cleveland, who had only a mustache, beards held sway for the rest of the century. For the record, Rutherford Hayes (1877-81) had the longest beard, and the last bearded president was Benjamin Harrison (1899-1903). (The public health experts at the turn of the century believed that beards carried germs into the home.) · Stubble. Author Pinfold credits, or blames, Don Johnson in Miami Vice as a chief popularizer of this regrettable look, which peaked during the 1980s. · Sideburns. In 1861, Gen. Ambrose E. Burnside, a Civil War hero for the Union, "affects whiskers in front of the ears and along the cheeks," Pinfold writes. "They are known as `burnsides' until folk etymology decides that since they are worn on the sides, they should be called `sideburns.' " · Another Burma Shave moment: "He had the ring He had the flat But she felt his chin And that was that Burma Shave." · King of Shaving. In 1895, a brilliant entrepreneur named King
Camp Gillette has a brilliant idea: a disposable razor blade. In 1903,
he and his partner, William Nickerson, introduce his brainchild, selling
only 51 razors and 168 blades the first year. The next year, though, they're
on their way, moving 90,000 razors and 2.4 million blades. The breakthrough,
however, is World War I. Pinfold: "American troops were issued Gillette
shaving kits rather than straight razors. Thus, millions of men who usually
went to barbers learned to shave themselves and became a vast market after
the war." The practical reason: Being
· One for the road: "Within this vale Of toil and sin Your head grows bald But not your chin Burma Shave." And by the way, we really do have more body hair than chimps. Theirs is just darker and coarser, and thus more visible. |