Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Shaving

Episode Date: January 10, 2022

Alex Schmidt is joined by comedian/podcaster John Cullen ('Blocked Party' podcast, album 'Long Stories For No Reason') and comedy writer/podcaster Sarah Pappalardo (Reductress, 'The Reductress Minute' podcast) for a look at why shaving is secretly incredibly fascinating. Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources, handy links, and this week's bonus episode.

Shaving. Known for being close. Famous for being slicey. Nobody thinks much about it, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why shaving is secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode. A podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt, and I'm not alone. I'm joined today by John Cullen and by Sarah Pappalardo, two amazing guests. John Cullen is a wonderful comic and podcaster, and he co-hosts the podcast Blocked Party, which is amazing. Every week, it's John Cullen and Stefan Heck bringing on a new guest to talk about the most significant story where they got blocked on Twitter or Instagram or any other social media platform or situation. It goes tons of directions from there. Amazing show. You also may remember

John from the episode of this podcast about Ampersands. And then Sarah Pappalardo is a new guest, an incredible comedy writer and podcaster. They are the co-founder and editor of Reductress.com. I hope you know Reductress, or I hope you'll check it out. It's an amazing satirical comedy website. It's also home to a couple very funny podcasts, including the Reductress Minute, co-hosted by Sarah Pappalardo. Also, I've gathered all of our postal codes and used internet resources like native-land.ca to acknowledge that Sarah and I each recorded this on the traditional land of the Canarsie and Lenape peoples.

Acknowledge John recorded this on the traditional land of the Coast Salish, Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. And acknowledge that in all of our locations, native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode. And today's episode is about shaving. Shaving is the top patron chosen topic for the month of January. Thank you to Dustin Hetrick for that awesome idea. Also, there's a total of three patron chosen topics every month, so go to sifpod.fun if you want a say in what those are. It is fun to suggest them and vote

on them. Really is. Anyway, I think shaving is a perfect topic for this show. It launched us into some amazing things about history and gender and more, so please sit back or do the thing in that one animated Monty Python gag where a guy lathers his chin, but then he lathers his whole head and then he cuts his entire head off with a straight razor. Really stuck with me as a kid. Just hyper violent, but also clever. Either way, here's this episode of Secretly Incredibly Fascinating with John Cullen and Sarah Pappalardo. I'll be back after we wrap up. Talk to you then.

Sarah, John, thank you both so much for being here. And of course, I always start by asking guests their relationship to the topic or opinion of it. Either of you can start. But how do you feel about shaving? You know, I've definitely explored all kinds of the societal requirements and going against them. And I've personally pulled what I like from shaving after just genuinely experiencing it. I'm personally an armpit shaver only.

That's it. It's just what I decided I like personally an armpit shaver only. That's it. It's just what I decided I like. So yeah, everything else, I let it run free. That's great. Well, I run in direct contrast to Sarah. My armpits are the only thing that I have never shaved. So no, I'm kidding. I never shaved my legs either but I should

I just might shave your life yeah hey well I did I did go through this very um there was this like period I mean I guess maybe we're still living in this period where the sort of societal norm for men has been now that you that you shouldn't have like a lot of armpit hair like you got to kind of rein it in a little bit and i have pretty hairy armpits so i have gone through trimming it which is very weird and stupid so i don't do that anymore uh but uh well not weird i guess i mean whatever do whatever you want but for me it felt weird and stupid um and then yeah i hate i've been shaving my face uh for a long time uh, not my face face, but my neck. And I have a very sensitive neck and face.

So I don't like shaving. I shave like I shave my neck hair like once a week. I've had a you know, I've had this like beard ish thing for the last probably 10 years. And yeah, I think my funniest experience with shaving would be working for the grocery chain Safeway when I was a teenager. And they actually had a policy at that time, which would have been 2000 to 2003 that I worked there, where you had to be fully clean shaven if you were a man. And they would send you home if you weren't shaved. And I actually had that happen one time. They made me go home on my break and shave my face and then come back.

Wow, that's harsh. I mean, because they have those little beard caps in sanitary environments. I feel like that should work. But that's just rude, honestly. Yeah, I think so now I think you are allowed to grow a beard but if you do yeah you have to wear the like the hair net for your face or whatever but anyway yes shaving there it is i never had to shave again i'd be thrilled d i mean i don't know how explicit they were about it but was the vibe like you need to shave for sanitary reasons or was it like you need

to shave because our founder is some sort of puritan about this they just they just want everybody to look trim the second one i think i honestly think it was the second one yeah i don't think it was a food safety thing because i didn't work with any like i was in produce so i guess technically that is like exposed consumable food but i don't believe it was like even if you worked in grocery or whatever where you were just handling cans and stuff like that you had to be clean shaven so i think it was a yeah it was a puritanical type thing rather than for the six dollars an hour that you were making like yeah that's right that's rough yeah it was pretty rough i think when you're like 15 you just don't think about that i also think like we were still like it was it was 2000

when i started working there so you're still in that kind of era where you're like yeah they can just tell me what to do sure you know and then yeah now i feel like now we're a little bit out of that era yeah for sure and and also thank you both for like like on every episode i just ask people like hey how do you feel about this? But this topic is, like, relatively personal. And I, like, when I think about it, I think about how I can't really form a beard with my facial hair. It just doesn't come in enough for that. And so I'm mainly shaving to eliminate the embarrassing fuzziness of my face that that will like stop at a point that

is not appealing so if you could grow a beard would you grow a beard i thought about it and i think i probably would try it and then be irritated by the itchiness and then get rid of it because i i have also done the armpit trimming but i don't like shave it shave it i just do lazy electric trimming to make it less itchy and less annoying. You know, I think it would go like that. Yeah, that's exactly, exactly it. I think your beard does get itchy when you first start growing it. But then once you get used to it, it kind of goes away a little bit.

But yeah, it's yeah. It becomes a norm. It definitely takes a while to get used to. Yeah. Yeah. And every every person's hair, it becomes a norm. It definitely takes a while to get used to. Yeah. Yeah. And every every person's hair grows differently and is different. And it's a whole bucket. You know, I feel like there's two or three norms tops and then everybody's like dealing with that all of the time.

The rest is just the it's the Wild West of just hair. That's great. I love it. Not out there. I know Wild West is a go-to metaphor, but it seems like those guys could do whatever. Huge handlebar stuff. And it was very easy. But yeah, and then as far as the rest of the show goes, I think we can get into the history of this and a lot of the norms of it and everything else.

On every episode, our first fascinating thing about the topic is a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics. This week, that's in a segment called... When I find myself in need of numbers, Alex Schmidty comes to me with interesting statistics. One, two, three. One, two, three. One, two, three. And that name was submitted by Peter Counter. We have a new name every week. Please make it as silly and wacky and bad as possible.

Submit to Sip Pot on Twitter or to Sip Pot at gmail.com. We got some stats and numbers here about shaving. That was good. You paused there like you wanted me to compliment your singing. So here I am. Yeah, yeah. There's applause happening over here. Great work.

A little tear. You can't see it, but there's a tear. Do you sing it every time? I feel like I asked this last time. And I remember thinking like, damn, that's good. Like, that's cool. And I would not want to do that. If I had something like that on my podcast, I'd have to shut it down like I wouldn't be able to sing it every week it'd be bad

yeah I'm not and I'm not pained by the singing element but that's what people tend to pitch and thank you for uh I never release a video version of this because I do a lot of pleading in that pause like it's it's silent but I do a lot of like you know just visual begging to the guests so yeah please. Please encourage me. And just this in general. Please just encourage what's going on. All of it, yeah. But yeah, but we got some numbers here about shaving, especially in history.

The first number is 5,000 years. 5,000 years. That's approximately how long people have used razor blades to shave that's when we started having like enough metal working to do it more or less that must have been a rough razor blade though like oh like stone age razor not stone age literally but like that's got to be you know it was rough you know a lot of people made a lot of fatal mistakes early on oh man oh yeah oh yeah the infections oh terrible it had to be like uh it had to be a real um you know like i'm thinking of this like and this is heteronormative but i'm thinking of this in the like who were the first women to be like

i will not have a man unless he's shaved and then the men were like oh my god i'm in love with this girl but she insists that i shave but i hate shaving it's a nightmare and and like how many like real fights actually happened about that yeah like hezekiah died shaving for a woman yes exactly exactly here lies hezekiah he knew he was not skilled with a blade but he was he was skilled in love yeah that especially with blade use i feel like that was one of the first skills anybody learned like most of these people were not literate you know and like couldn't cook more than a couple of things and they only grew a couple of things. And then they were trying to figure out blades. Like that was it.

That was the whole process of being a person. And many other skills. But I guess I mean, in a way, though, that's true. Like it's it's like, oh, no, another skill. Like I think we think of like now i think we think of like oh i want to have as many skills as possible and i want to be multifaceted but back then they were probably like i was really set on only doing three things my whole life now you're telling me there's a fourth thing no the documentation was a lot more tedious back then.

It just really was too many stone tablets. The heaviest manuals, yeah. And that number, 5,000 years ago, it's coming from one source for this. It's a book called Hair, A Human History by Kurt Sten, who is a physician and medical historian. And there was probably a lot of parallel invention of razors. But a key documented one is that in ancient Egypt, around 3000 BC, men and women and everybody else in the royal courts of Egyptian pharaohs, they started using straight razor blades to shave off their hair. And the straight razors were made of copper or bronze. Those were the two metals people apparently there started using first to do razors okay i mean right copper is like antimicrobial

it probably was very pretty until it turned like green that's the one that turns green right i don't know i think so yeah i didn't know the antimicrobial thing either amazing it's just smart they like put it in there was a whole copper hospital, I think. Way too expensive. Not repeatable. But yeah. Copper hospital. Tuesdays on NBC.

Yeah. We've combined Chicago hospital and Chicago PD into one unbelievable show. Nobody gets sick. Yeah, exactly. But financially, they're failing. I also like that copper as slang feels very British to me. Like it's set in Chicago, but everybody has these

thick British accents. Really great. Yeah, that's very confusing for the people who turn on NBCbc for the chicago-based show oh no he got oh he's bleeding their cockney accents too they're just like the most grave english accents possible and it's got to be a musical so everything's a musical and watch yeah that's that's going straight to peacock singing about michigan avenue and lower wacker and stuff just really really anyway uh and uh well the other source here for this this ancient egypt stuff is a book from the object

lessons series they do a lot of different objects. And the one about hair is by Scott Lowe, who was a professor at University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire. He says that the Egyptian shaving kind of got more and more extensive for the upper classes. And by the 600s BC, rich Egyptians of all genders would shave off all of their hair on their entire body. vendors would shave off all of their hair on their entire body. Like that was the goal. And Egyptians pioneered also some of the first waxing of hair and also sugaring of hair. And the richest people had like personal shavers as staff. There were entire hired people to just shave their bodies for them. That's a beautiful relationship. gotta say what an intimate beautiful thing to have like i want that's the movie i want to see actually is just a oh wow really yeah um i don't

know i mean of all the kind of like subservient roles to have that is quite exceptional i do remember uh this is you know not to get too blue on this show but i do remember there was uh when i was growing up there was like this cosmo article about because i again i'm 36 and i feel like we're sort and i think you guys are close to me in age i i think it's like uh uh we were sort of the generation that started, that started the whole, like, you know, you got to shave your pubic hair. You just simply have to do it. And that, and everybody's doing it and you have to do it too. And I remember reading like an article about how it was like someone asking the question, like my partner just won't shave their pubes. Like, what do I do? And then then it was like you should draw a romantic bath and like

do it for them or whatever you know it's like it's kind of i feel like the same tip they give to women it's like if the guy won't wear a condom like put it on yourself like learn like practice on a banana and learn how to put on a condom and then it can be part of the foreplay it can be sexy like you know and you're like okay i mean really like i was just trying to imagine that like i'm already just thrilled that i'm potentially about to have sex with someone and now i'm supposed to talk them into drawing a bath and shaving them i mean like come on yeah i wonder where all our issues with consent came from it's so weird so So crazy. I know,

right? Isn't that insane? Maniculate your partner into changing their body. Ooh, sexy. Exactly. If you put rose petals in the bath, that's the,

that's the rules. Unfortunately. Look, babe, I bought these roses. What, what do you, Cosmo told me.

Please shave your butt, baby. Time to shave your butt. I love how Cosmo, it's all those numbers on the articles, too. Like the 79 hottest schemes to make your partner like basically tolerable. Yeah, exactly. Does your partner stink? Do they they not shave do they not brush their teeth it's like who do you think my partner is what's going on oh god just render them unconscious and put them in the bathtub honestly if you if you could if you could draw a bath in 2001 you could do anything

that was the really yeah that was really the whole thing yeah real skeleton key there yeah well and also one other thing with the egyptians is that apparently egyptian priests went the furthest with this which is that not only would they shave their whole bodies, they would also apparently do hand plucking for their eyebrow hairs and also their eyelashes if they were fully committed to going all the way with this social practice. That's where you should have had a video episode as Sarah and I both recoiled in exactly the same

fashion and talked about plucking eyelashes yeah this is just like fully like rhinoceros you know it's just like oh we start out and it's like oh not having hair is cool okay try having no hair to the point where you're suffering and have no immune system left like right why do we do this but it's at least it's good to know that it started at the beginning of civilization like it's not just like the internet that made us ridiculous like truly people have been nuts since antiquity yeah the depth of the commitment like it's varied across cultures and eras but but the egyptians they really really went for it and also it's an outside source because it's the Greek historian Herodotus. But he said that Egyptian priests, they did all this hair removal.

And then they would also let it all grow back specifically to mourn a death. And then once the mourning period was over, then they cut it all back off. So there was a big, big religious component to this. In a way, we don't do so much, I don't think. That's what I should have told my girlfriend in 2004. Oh, my bush? I'm actually in mourning right now. So how dare you tell me?

How dare you draw this bath? How dare you go against God's wishes? I'm a devout ancient Egyptian religion follower. Babe, you know this. You know this about me. Okay? Don't pretend like I just made this up now. Okay?

The next number is three million years. So even more years now. Three million years. three million years. So even more years now, three million years. That is about how long humans have dealt with their own specific species of pubic lice. And I know that's gross, but pubic lice. This is Professor Scott Lowe again. He's citing a study that was done at the Florida Museum of Natural History. Their goal was to track human evolution by studying the genetics of lice over time, because you can kind of like that changes as different hominids evolve. And they decided that approximately three million years ago, human pubic lice became genetically distinct from gorilla pubic lice. And so we've been dealing with that for basically as long as people have been a species.

And, you know know especially in more ancient times that was a big part of shaving some areas was hygienic reasons okay but like real talk if you're a non-human or a gorilla wouldn't that just be regular lice like where do your pubes end and where does the rest of your hair begin yeah this is for this is for the audience think about it Yeah. This is for the audience. Think about it. You're like, look, I'll be your surrogate.

I know we are all thinking this right now. Let me be the person to bring it. It's like we really just gave them less. We gave the lice less surface area to play on, which changed everything. Probably just fundamentally changed the DNA of the lice. Yeah, we gentrified the area, and the lice could no longer get in. Because also this source told me a thing I did not really know, which is apparently human head lice and human pubic lice are separate species. It's not actually the same thing.

And it might partly be because our hair covering varies across the human body. Well, and the next number here, even larger number, 5 million. We're up to 5 million now. That is the approximate number of hair follicles in an adult human body. And just kind of across everybody. According to Dr. Nicole E. Williams, those 5 million follicles come in two varieties. There's something called vellus hairs, which are the very, very fine, very thin hairs that are all over our bodies and are kind of hard to perceive. They're so thin and tiny.

And then there are terminal hairs. That means it's a darker hair, thicker, more noticeable. That's everything from the scalp to pubic hair to kind of everything else we would bother shaving. So we're really only shaving one of the scalp to pubic hair to kind of everything else we would bother shaving so we're really only shaving one of the two types of human hair that's what you think uh i don't shave my invisible hairs although i do like that the first kind those are the kind that like will grow six inches on your chin and you won't notice until it's there and you're just like how did this get this long and i'm like that's great sneaky hairs um those are the hairs that are going to really survive the apocalypse of hair

when it comes down to it i have one like one of my ear lobes has one completely white hair that will just get huge and it's very upsetting to me and very strange but and i think it does count as a terminal hair even though it's white because it's just like like those vellus hairs are basically like that fine downy temperature control hair that you never on purpose shave because it's so like not microscopic, but tiny. Like you don't notice it. But the weird ones, any weird one, I think, is terminal. Yeah. Which sounded like death when I said that it's not death very serious that did sound really sorry I was like what happened yeah are you do you have in

your hair Alex as well because my I didn't even know that I I didn't even know that I had it and then um very awkwardly was doing a tv taping for comedy and the makeup artist started plucking my ear hair and I was like what's happening and then she was like oh did you not know that you and my fiance was there and she was like she's like wait did you not know that you had ear hair and I was like no I don't look in my ears I'm not a freak you know I'm not like in the mirror like oh I wonder what's going on in here and so that was a weird way to find out that i am growing ear hair like i'm 65 years like it's crazy i had to buy i had to buy one of the

little trimmer things like it grows that much but it was like i but i somehow didn't notice and then all of a sudden i was like oh my god it's a friggin forest in there it's crazy nothing like being made massively insecure right before a tv spot too that's yeah it was totally fine she's like oh yeah no well yeah because you start thinking about that you're like was it so long that it would have appeared on television that they were like we have to get rid of this people won't even be able to watch they'll be so distracted they'll be like look at this idiot with the massive ear hair problem i was like oh my god i also due to due to my limited knowledge of both canadian television and canadian health care i

assume it was part of the health care system for public cbc i assume this was all like a medical and entertainment process. All it was. The TV taping was on CBC. Yes, it was for the Winnipeg Comedy Festival. So that's about as Canadian as it gets right there. But and then the last number here. Here's let's think about some really strange guys.

Last number here is much more modern it is two and two is the number of u.s presidential elections won by ulysses s grant but it's leading to some other guys grants he won two terms as president in 1868 and in 1872 i i just find this parallel fun both of his opponents had humongous neck beards. Each time. And I sent each. Oh, yeah. Those were the neck beards.

I mean, I wonder if that's where the term neck beard originates. Like, we just don't like it as a culture. We disapprove of the neck beard. Yeah. I mean, I wouldn't vote for anyone with a neck beard. I'll tell you that right now. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I mean, I wouldn't vote for anyone with a neck beard. I'll tell you that right now.

Yeah, like in in modern times and Internet times, there's like a trope of a neck beard guy. And I think it really just means a guy who hasn't done a real close shave on his neck. But I'll have pictures for people. In 1868, Grant defeated Horatio Seymour in 1872, he defeated Horace Greeley. And both of these guys have like very cleanly shaven cheeks, chins, upper lip, everything. And then incredibly robust beards of just the hairs on their necks. Like it's really, really, really impressive, full thick beards exclusively from their necks. Well, the style didn't pull well, so they should have really checked that out before the election second one like shame on the second one especially

should have known better and i like that they both had this had first names with the same root of hora horatio and horus apparently they didn't care for that either. So, you know, people learned. They're like, we don't be named that. Don't have a neckbeard. Yeah. Also, like, be the general that helped win the Civil War. I think that also helps too. That helps for sure.

I mean, we are definitely, we must consider that as well. Maybe it just was that, like, the opposing party knew they were going to lose. So they just ran their idiots. Like, they're just like, ah, this is a throwaway. We don't stand a chance. Throw the neckbeards into the wolves. yeah exactly put old captain neckbeard in there oh should we should we run should we run jack thompson against him no jack's too handsome and beautiful he's going to lose anyway horatio get over here horatio emerges from like a dusty corner.

He's drunk. You guys want something? You guys calling me? You're running against Ulysses S. Grant. Shave your face. Only grow your neck beard. Yeah, it's almost the producers. Like it's almost, let's just throw these elections.

Samuel Tilden can wait for when we really have a shot. Who also did not win, but you get it. For people who don't know, Ulysses S. Grant was like deeply a slam dunk candidate, especially the first time. And he ran against real weird looking guys, extreme 1800s neckbeard situation. And guys were just doing this in the late 1800s in the US. It was just going on. And guys were just doing this in the late 1800s in the U.S. It was just going on. Greeley was a New York City newspaper publisher. He was surrounded by the finest urban life in America.

And he had what is to me a really full and wispy neckbeard all at the same time. It's incredibly strange to me. But if you have that, good for you, folks. It making me think i maybe i should try it for a bit just go full neck beard well because i my my whole thought i was talking about this but i never did it but um movember right the whole original point of movember was that mustaches weren't cool so you'd like sacrifice your face and you'd have this like looking thing on your face for a month and that was the sort of people were pledging for that and then uh you know and then hipster culture took over and now mustaches are like cool it's like not even a

sacrifice to have a mustache anymore so i told my fiance i was gonna do neck beard vember where i would shave my whole face but just leave my because that's actually doing something for real right um and uh that was soundly that was soundly shut down she was like no just maybe just you just straight up make a donation to a cancer charity and don't do that at all so i I was like, okay, fine. Yeah. Yeah, also, I mean, this is audio. They don't know. Wow, John, your incredible neck beard.

So robust and tremendous. So brave. A hero. Now we all know about testicular cancer. I know. No one knew about it before. No one knew about it before. No one knew about it before. And then John Cullen grew a neck beard.

Now here we are. Also, don't ask for pictures. There aren't any. Just don't worry about it. Don't worry about it. Yeah, it's all lost. Everything was lost. It's tough.

All right. Off of that, we're going to a short break, followed by the big takeaways. See you in a sec. I'm Jesse Thorne. I just don't want to leave a mess. This week on Bullseye, Dan Aykroyd talks to me about the Blues Brothers, Ghostbusters, and his very detailed plans about how he'll spend his afterlife. I think I'm going to roam in a few places, yes. I'm going to manifest and roam. All that and more on the next Bullseye from MaximumFun.org and NPR. Hello, teachers and faculty. This is Janet Varney.

I'm here to remind you that listening to my podcast, The JV Club with Janet Varney, is part of the curriculum for the school year. Learning about the teenage years of such guests as Alison Brie, Vicki Peterson, John Hodgman, and so many more is a valuable and enriching experience, one you have no choice but to embrace, because, yes, listening is mandatory. The JV Club with Janet Varney is available every Thursday

on Maximum Fun or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. And remember, no running in the halls. Thank you. And remember, no running in the halls. Well, Sarah, John, there's two big takeaways for the main episode here, so we can get into them. First one is takeaway number one. The creation of the modern style of shaving is one result of the great chicago fire and this is going to get into where disposable safety razors came from which was a pretty big change in in creating modern shaving but the

spark was initially like the results of the chicago fire how that came about uh tell me more yeah did the straight razors cause the fire oh no nope no like a flint i could see it it would make sense nope oh sorry i missed my big i missed my big opportunity sorry alex can you just say the chicago fire thing one more time uh the creation of the modern style of shaving is one result of the great chicago fire speaking of the great chicago fire tune in on nbc NBC Tuesday nights at 8 p.m. Chicago fire. Chicago fire. Oh, look at the blaze. The blaze is huge.

What's happening? Oh, my God. Everything's on fire. Someone shave me face. The bass. That was not even a good accent. Really couldn't find it. Sarah nailed it.

There we go. Sarah, do you have a thing where you have to do the oi first to get you into the... Yeah. You know when you can't do an accent, so you just rely heavily on the catchphrase? Yeah, that's me. Yes, I totally like that, too. I like that. I was like, I noticed. You're saying too i'm like that i was like i noticed

you're saying oi every time i was like yeah also my my ramp into a french accent is hon hon which is incredibly embarrassing it's not great i apologize up front but it makes the message clear well We know who you're talking about. But back to the British city of Chicago. The key sources here are the Smithsonian and the National Museum of American History. Also the Lemelson Center at MIT and National Geographic. The shaving is a knock-on effect of the fire. The fire was October 8th, 1871. And then it lasted for about a day and a half. But in that day and a half, it burned $200 million worth of property, over 17,000 buildings.

There were 300 deaths, and then 100,000 people were left homeless, which was a third of the population at the time. And one family that was displaced by the fire had the last name Gillette. The family had a hardware business that burned up. They had to move to New York just to find a new place to live. But they also needed to send their older children to work and take them out of school. And so their 17-year-old son became a full-time traveling salesman. He had to leave school. But his name was King Camp Gillette. And he would do traveling salesman work, but then his real dream was to be an inventor. So since he was kicked straight into working life, he started tinkering and inventing with

his spare time. And by 1890, he had four different patents for various minor stuff. He also worked as a freelancer for a guy named William Painter who invented the disposable bottle cap. And that guy suggested to him, you should come up with something disposable. There's like huge money in disposable stuff. People have to keep buying it. And so then in 1895,

Gillette developed the idea for a disposable razor that slots into a holder. And that led to the disposable razors we have today. So don't go to college, that's uh that's the takeaway yeah and and you know far the original was far more green than what we use now which is kind of a bummer now we just have plastic but the original the original was just like a single metal thing and you know there's very minimal waste that's that's what bums me out about it i like yeah i like the idea that this guy's whole they're just like chatting at a party and then he's like hey you know where the money is throwing

stuff out if you can make something that people will just throw out over and over and over again you're gonna get rich dude and he's like you're that's right actually that's it yeah it's true yeah he's right he's right i mean yeah god would have been sweet to be alive in 1890 where just like any idea would be like a you know they're always like oh you invented a better mouse trap it's like in 1890 there wasn't even arap. It's like you could just do, oh, disposable bottle caps is just such a funny thing. You know, it's like what is it's in Mean Girls, right? Where the one girl got rich because her dad invented toaster strudels. Is that in Mean Girls?

It feels very much like you wouldn't want to tell that like, oh, yeah, my grandpa invented the bottle cap, actually. So that's why that's why i drive a corvette to school it's always something really boring and that's that's the thing you gotta find the most boring thing to reinvent and you're a bajillionaire yeah maybe you should do it right now the three of us well i also i like that his bottle cap friend was not even creative with the tip. He was just like, what if you did what I did? That'd be cool. But with a different thing.

Totally. Solid tip. He's like, I'm too busy. You take it. Great tip. Great tip. And it took off from there and filled landfills from there. But in 1895, Gillette has the idea. He partners with an MIT engineer who could just build good enough machines to make the blades well. Then in 1901, he starts the American Safety Razor Company.

1903, he names it after himself. 1904, gets a patent for the first disposable safety razor. And his company became the market leader in the whole thing. And then others tried to copy it, which reinforced the idea. And from there, we had what I think of as modern shaving, where it's like a mass market product with an easy to get blade that is like has some kind of safety mechanism built in. You're not just doing a straight razor, which if people don't know is basically a big knife. You're just very

carefully using a knife to trim your hairs and it's a true horror i mean if you guys if you guys gone to like a real barber i mean it's it's horrifying i very rarely do it but i got a straight razor cut before my wedding and it was just oh cool i was haunted but playing it cool because it felt like important and he did do a fantastic job like i never would have really appreciated like a fade but um wow yeah it's like a dying art that's very very cool and deadly that's cool yeah i've never had it done on my hair like on my head hair but i i have had the straight razor shave like for my beard um at a barber shop and it does rock it's like a very very good way of getting like it doesn't hurt there's like no irritation at all uh the guy who does it will be like 75 which is sick uh you know it's always like some old italian guy and that's i think what makes it

scarier because it's like you know his hands will be kind of shaking and he's got this giant like knife in his hands but then as soon as the knife goes to your neck it's like his hands magically stop shaking and he just has that muscle memory and you're like oh this is the best experience of my life I've never had it done but I'm curious with both of you like did you plan on that going in or did they just sort of break it out as an option as you were getting a cut? Nope. Total surprise. That's the funny thing is like depending, you know, it's like if you go to a hip Brooklyn, whatever, whatever.

And it really is like a 50 50 chance that you get someone who's very intense with like full sleeves on both arms and just he just takes the art form very seriously. That's the weird part. Yeah. I feel like I don't know about you guys, but like there's no warning going in for me. So, yeah, like I said, I've never had it done during a haircut. So I think if I had, then that would be a surprise to me. Like if I was getting if I was getting a haircut and they pulled out the straight razor, I would definitely be confused because I think I only associate it with face shaving. Like I'd never even heard of it as part of a haircut, which is cool. And it makes sense

that you would do it, but I just had never even thought of that. So it would certainly be surprising to me if they did that. But as far as my face, yeah, I specifically went to get that done, but it was, I can try to remember the first time I want to say it was just like a buddy of mine did it and he was like oh it's the best shave like you got to do it um it just feels good and and so i did and i agreed it's great and off of barber stuff i think we can get into the other main takeaway for the show takeaway number two the u.s beauty industry invented the pressure on women to shave their legs in the 1920s. It's a 1920s invention. Yeah.

Yeah. Invented a lot of the opposite of innovative things back then, I think. A lot of rules we don't need. Yeah, it was the same guy being like, like okay so i've made a lot of money selling disposable razors to men yes i just can't help but notice that half of the population is women and they're not shaving anything what are we gonna do you know and then it was like and then we got to the 90s and then it was like like, ah, now we got them. We got both genders are buying razors, but they're not buying enough.

And then that's when Big Pube took over. And then they were like, Big Pube. Big Pube and the Brazilian Industrial Complex. Exactly. And they're like, we got us. Everyone has to start shaving their pubes. And because your pubes are generally more coarse as well. So you got to go through the razors faster.

Yeah. It's like we're just we're constantly evolving, you know. Yeah, that's all pretty much what happened. There's also, you know, cultures and eras vary. They're probably places like we were describing ancient Egypt. That whole body shaving included the legs like they had a separate pressure for that in a separate way. But there's a couple sources here, Vox.com article by Phil Edwards, and also Smithsonian stuff, and then the book Hera Human History by Kurt Sten from the numbers.

It is a couple companies, including Gillette, saying, hey, why don't we sell these razors to more people? And in 1915, Gillette premiered a razor with a name I've seen spelled a few ways. It's either called the Milady de Colette or the Milady de Coltet. The Frenchness varies of how it's printed on the labels. But it was marketed specifically to women. And I sent you both an ad for Gillette's product line in the early 1900s, where as far as I can tell,

it's pretty much exactly the same razor, but the milady one has like a floral box with a woman in a sleeveless dress on the front. That's pretty much it. Yeah. I'm looking at this now here. Decolate Parisienne. Ah oui.

Très bien. Yeah. Parisienne is in the name. Yeah name yeah but yeah you're right like it does look exactly pretty much like it looks like maybe the handle's slightly shorter at least in the ad from the from the old type gillette oh you're right but other than that yeah it looks exactly the same one thing that sticks out about the ad too is it's clear that they sort of make this look like a bit of a luxury item. Like, I don't know how expensive a dollar would have been back then, but like the way that these are coming in sort of these like almost jewelry boxes that you would like keep your razor in and stuff like that. Like, it's it's interesting that that we think of disposable razors as just this like, you know, thing you buy at the drugstore and throw in the garbage. But they've really made it seem here like this is a kind of luxury product. Yeah, this is a class thing.

And you notice there's no bulk discount for getting 10. Kind of weird. Yeah. But again, if you're rich, it doesn't matter. Same price for 10 as for 5. Totally. That's wild. I didn't even notice that.

But yeah. Look, we can sell them to you. They cost the same. Buy as many as you want. Yeah, folks. The sad, it's just a men's razor for $1, a women's razor for $1. So I guess no pink tax. That's nice.

But then Gilletteillette blades it's a pack of 10 for a dollar or five for 50 cents so yeah it's area you're right like there's no why are why are they not doing the bulk thing that everyone does really weird i don't think they really fully capitalized on capitalism yet they're still in its nascent form of exploitation right like we we just invented having another gender shape like we really we haven't come up with bulk yet we're yeah yeah we haven't gotten to like inventing things that people don't need quite as fully yet took another 10 or so years yeah and this this change for ladies razors it also is part of kind of the bigger, really big change that these safety razors did. Because once Gillette's invention came along, it was a pretty small change for men, because men would do that straight razor from a barber shave daily or very often. And then with these safety razors, there was less pressure to do that.

There was less of a practice of that. But also in the pre-safety razor era, body hair was like less of a thing you were supposed to deal with yourself or at least there were less standards for being super on top of it because that's like hard to do with a straight razor on your own. It's like, you know, it's like dangerous in some ways. And there was just less norms with it. And so as soon as safety razors came along, suddenly there were a lot more body hair norms and they were in particular put on women because just that, that was how they decided to be as a society. I can't imagine why. Yeah.

Yeah, it was just easy. But I mean, again, I still, it's been said before, but I would have appreciated a nice barbershop for body hair, you know, just like the full straight razor experience with a very skilled person on just the whole enchilada. I think that would have been really nice for women in general yeah i can only agree i can only agree as someone who has had his beard straight razored it would be i think fantastic on legs arm oh yeah whatever else you're taking care of yeah i would love that i i'd love it for me everything oh yeah i mean why not right i mean yeah stay away from the femoral artery and you're good you're good to go just get it going yeah yeah i like i like

that idea too that it's somehow funnier to me than getting your bush like waxed or whatever it's like oh yeah no i went to the bush barber and got this all i got this fade for our big date tonight it's an art form. It's beautiful. Faint Italian music in the background for some reason. I don't know. It just feels right. Absolutely.

Yeah. Yeah. And then also these body hair standards ended up either dovetailing with or causing fashion changes. fashion changes. Because part of nobody pressuring anybody so much about body hair was that it was all covered most of the time, unless you were nude privately. It was to the point where Phil Edwards cites a story in the Seattle Star newspaper in 1920, where it was fully a news story that a female college student cut her leg while shaving it. Like this was such a new practice, shaving your legs as a lady, that it was like, wow, write it up. But in the 1920s, there started being sleeveless dresses

and also shorter dresses where those parts of American ladies were exposed more than they had been before. And because there was this tool available, there was immediate pressure to adjust the hair that was visible there makes sense i mean if you cut to the 2000s like low-rise jeans could not have existed without the pube uh social norms of the time i mean it just wouldn't have worked or it would have been wild and honestly i would have loved to see that but um maybe it's better britney spears doing the vmas and you can just see her just a little beard just creeping out of the top of her jeans but yeah no you're

totally right like it although that almost seems like it went the opposite way where it was like shaving your pubes or whatever taking care of your pubes then that saw the advent of low-rise jeans like i feel like the shaving the pubes came first and the low-rise jeans came after i maybe i'm wrong i mean i don't know i don't even know i'm just guessing but that to me feels like maybe that's how it went as opposed to this where it was like oh it's it's getting more socially acceptable to show leg if you're a woman and maybe it would be more ladylike if we showed leg and we didn't have hair on her leg or whatever but but yeah you're totally right the the low-rise gene era would have been very confusing if we were not even confusing but i i mean i would i was very

repressed i would have been very confused i would have been been like, oh, my God. It's Gen Z's turn to make sense of that nonsense. Yes, exactly. Can't wait to see what they do. Yeah. It's going to be exciting for sure. Rooting for you folks. Yeah. I just find it fascinating, like this almost sort of secret undercurrent of shaving technology

influencing fashion technology or going hand in hand with it. And there's also Phil Edwards in Vox, he cites an amazing story in the Journal of American Culture, sorry, a study in the Journal of American Culture by Christine Hope. She analyzed early 1900s advertisements in magazines like Harper's and McCall's and the other popular magazines of then. And she checked what hair removal ladies were encouraged to do in the ads. And she says that it took until 1915 for there to frequently be ads about removing armpit hair. Before that, it was facial hair, neck hair, and forearm hair was what they were encouraged to remove. Because that was visible at the time and also like, kind of fit with male visible at the time and also like kind of fit with male technology

at the time right and there was probably and again in the the weird gendered norms of the time like there was nothing worse than looking sort of like a man like that was just the worst thing that could possibly happen that's probably just like all of shaving norms is again just like gender performance in so many ways exhausting yeah it's definitely it's definitely very clearly a uh like a binary divide right it's like you like like men are gonna look like this and so women if you want to be separate from a man then you have to be you know you have to do this right it's very bizarre yeah huge norms against anything in between or different or anything yeah and yeah and then these ads apparently in the 1920s they

really got into shaving legs too by the 1940s almost all ads for ladies razors talked about that and this just sort of industry and advertising and culture created an entire norm out of nothing. Like this was not really a thing before the 1920s. And then in a 1964 survey of American women ages 15 to 44, 98% of them reported doing some form of hair removal regularly. Like just in a couple decades, they invented this entire thing. Doesn't take long to invent some arbitrary societal rules that make someone money, I guess. Yeah, there was cash in it. These days, it's in the flash of a TikTok. Yeah. It happened so fast.

And then the one other industry that was part of this, too, was the electric shaver industry. The key inventor of the electric shaver was an American named Jacob Schick. And Schick is another famous brand name of shavers and stuff. He patented the first one in 1930. They were an immediate hit. Also, he was so focused on making money that apparently this guy Jacob Schick tried to evade taxes on it. And so in 1935, he moved all his money to the Bahamas and also became a canadian citizen because he thought that combination of things would mean he didn't need to pay any u.s taxes on like inventing the electric shaver lesson for trying yeah yeah good for him good for jacob schick

yeah before him schick razors by the way let's get that out there right now tax evader jacob shick guess what you're probably dead now but whoever took over they're doing a bad job yeah probably because of the crime make that's what i think that's what i'm thinking it's all karma baby that's it tax evasion karma folks that is the main episode for this week my thanks to John Cullen and Sarah Pappalardo for both providing better British accents. Among many other things, I guess I grew up in Chicago, but I never learned the British accent, you know? Anyway, I said that's the main episode because there is more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now. If you support this show on Patreon.com, patrons get a bonus show every week

where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is the surprising shaving policies of the New York Yankees. As in the baseball team, the Yankees. Also, if you aren't a baseball fan, you're still going to love this. If you are a baseball fan, there is even more there than you ever knew. It's a really fun one. Visit SIFpod.fun for that bonus show, for a library of more than six dozen other bonus shows, and to back this entire podcast operation. And thank you for exploring shaving with us. Here's one more run through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, the creation of the modern style of shaving is one

result of the Great Chicago Fire. Takeaway number two, the U.S. beauty industry invented the pressure on women to shave their legs in the 1920s. Plus a slew of numbers about the origins of shaving and the origins of humans and some almost presidential neckbeards and more from there. Those are the takeaways. Also, please follow my guests. They're great. John Cullen co-hosts the hilarious podcast Blocked Party. Tim and Stefan Heck exploring their guest's most significant story of getting blocked online. Also, John's amazing stand-up album is called Long Stories for No Reason. And Sarah Pappalardo is the co-founder and editor of Reductress.com.

Punch in Reductress.com. Laugh a bunch. Have an amazing time. And they're also the co-host of the podcast The Reductress Minute. Find it by searching the name, you know, when you're searching Blocked Party 2. Blocked Party, Reductress Minute. Amazing shows.

Many research sources this week. Here are some key ones. An amazing article for Vox.com by Phil Edwards all about the practice of women shaving their legs. Also a book called Hair, written by Professor Scott Lowe as part of the Object Lessons series of books. Another book called Hair, A Human History by Kurt Sten. Find those and many more sources in this episode's

links at sifpod.fun. And beyond all that, our theme music is unbroken, unshaven by the Budos Band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Souza for audio mastering on this episode. Extra, extra special thanks go to our patrons. I hope you love this week's bonus show. And thank you to all our listeners. I'm thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that? Talk to you then.