Posted 9/17/2005 01:13:00 PM by Douglas

What an exciting time to be alive in the world of razors.

Gillette Co. Wednesday unveiled its newest shaving system, a five-bladed razor called Fusion with a trimmer on the back of the cartridge aimed at the 50 percent of men who have mustaches and beards.

Fusion is Gillette's latest product geared at maintaining the company's leading share of the world's razor and blade market.

It has one more blade than the Quattro sold by rival Schick, a unit of Energizer Holdings Inc., plus a trimming blade on the back of the pivoting cartridge for shaping facial hair, trimming sideburns and shaving under the nose.

I know I'm not the first person to notice this, but the R&D boys over at Gillette obviously read the onion.

Would someone tell me how this happened? We were the fucking vanguard of shaving in this country. The Gillette Mach3 was the razor to own. Then the other guy came out with a three-blade razor. Were we scared? Hell, no. Because we hit back with a little thing called the Mach3Turbo. That's three blades and an aloe strip. For moisture. But you know what happened next? Shut up, I'm telling you what happened—the bastards went to four blades. Now we're standing around with our cocks in our hands, selling three blades and a strip. Moisture or no, suddenly we're the chumps. Well, fuck it. We're going to five blades.

I just can't help but think that the marketing meeting at Gillette sounded exactly like that.

When SNL made fun of the new double blade in their premier episode with their Triple-Trac because, you know, people will believe anything. There was also a commercial on SNL, and for the life of me, I can't google it, in response to the first 3-bladed razor. Theirs had an astounding 23 blades, and was pretty damn funny. Obviously, it's just a matter of time.