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Personally I think the twin-blade effect–technically known as “hysteresis”–is bull, but you can judge for yourself. Twin blades were first incorporated into Gillette’s Trac II “razor system” in 1971. (Ah, for the days when you could buy a razor blade or a bookshelf without having to get some cockamamy “system” along with it.) What you get is two parallel blades placed 0.06 inch apart. When you run the razor over your face, the first blade slides through each whisker and in the process pulls it slightly out of the follicle. Before the whisker can retract, the second blade comes along and slices it off even shorter. Eventually (so the theory goes), the whisker retracts below the skin surface, giving you an exceptionally close, long-lasting shave.
Gillette claims to have done slow-motion microphotography that shows hysteresis actually works. In an Esquire magazine article on this subject some years ago, a spokesman for Bic, one of Gillette’s chief competitors, admitted his firm couldn’t prove hysteresis _didn’t_ work. Nonetheless, years of testing by consumer magazines and by the razor blade companies themselves have never demonstrated any clear superiority for twin blades–at times, quite the contrary. In 1974, Consumers’ Research magazines tested four cartridge razors and found the best to be Wilkinson’s, the only one of the bunch that did not use twin blades. (The Wilkinson blade was good for 40 shaves, compared with 7-10 for Gillette, Schick, and Personna. Big problem for the twin blades: they got clogged up with gunk pretty fast.) A follow-up report in 1977 found the situation unchanged.
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