I hate shaving. Facial hair is a nuisance. If there was some way to just remove all the hair from my face, forever, I would take it. I have considered depilatory cream, but apparently this stuff has marginal effect even for dainty little feminine hairs, and is completely useless on thick, burly, testosterone-infused whiskers. I have considered electrolysis. This looks promising and (since I am not actually considering becoming a woman) has an appealing "crazy person" edge.
My distaste for my own beard, combined with other chaotic-neutral-tending* personality traits that I may trouble you with in a different post, requires me to spend as little time as possible on daily hair-related maintenance. Consequently I bought an electric shaver. This one. It's pretty great, and I would recommend it. It's cheap, and you can wash it. Whenever I drag it over my face, it removes about 10% of the hair. So, with consecutive passes, I creep ever closer to having a completely hairless chin -- that mythical, Platonic asymptote.** I don't mind. This is also what happens when I shave using a blade, except that when using a blade I also tend cut my face up.
But eventually the foil started to break a bit, and it didn't seem to be doing the usual stellar job of removing a small amount of hair, so I started looking around for replacements. Shavers are based on a traditional vibrating-motor-attached-to-knives technology which has been with us for centuries, and can now be produced quite economically. There isn't that much in them to justify, say, a $400 price tag, confidence-inspiring reviews to the contrary ("This is not for the tutti fruit, lolli pop beard. Boys get out of the way, you might get hurt.") I ended up buying a Wahl 4000 "Custom shave system". It had some good reviews (though, notably, not on Amazon), it seemed reasonably-priced. But it is terrible.
Firstly, it sounds like a train. It's not washable, and the plastic is flimsy. But the strangest and most troubling part is the number of accessories it comes with. It has a plug-in charger (fine), and a charging dock which fell apart when I plugged it in (not so good). It has a flimsy plastic cover for the foil part. It has three interchangeable foils, which look different but are functionally identical. It has a vinyl case, and a little brush. Most oddly, it comes with a separate battery-powered "personal trimmer" which you are apparently supposed to stick up your nose. It's as if I didn't buy a shaver but instead bought a complete shaving lifestyle. Despite my blithe comments to the effect that this should be unlikely, it seemed to do a significantly worse job at beard-removal than my previous shaver.
In the end I threw it out. If you are considering a shaver, think twice about Wahl.
So, now I have a public opinion on shaving. Am I a man yet? Next up: how to wrestle bears.
* Hey, it beats "Look at me, I'm an INTP!"†
† The above-linked article was written by Joe Butt.‡
‡ "A major concern for INTPs is the haunting sense of impending failure."
** In sad news for fans of beard dualism, it turns out that, in fact, Plato had a beard.