Living beforesafety razors

Egypt: shaved priests, and a razor in a basket

Herodotus, a Greek visitor of the 5th century BCE, wrote about Egypt as an outsider: “Everywhere else, priests of the gods wear their hair long; in Egypt, they are shaven. For all other men, the rule in mourning for the dead is that those most nearly concerned have their heads shaven; Egyptians are shaven at other times, but after a death they let their hair and beard grow.” The first sentence is about priests, the second about everyone. Of the priests he adds: “Their priests shave the whole body every other day, so that no lice or anything else foul may infest them as they attend upon the gods.” (Histories 2.36 and 2.37, tr. A. D. Godley, 1920.)

In Genesis, Joseph is fetched to Pharaoh: “And he shaved himself, and changed his raiment” (Genesis 41:14, Jewish Publication Society translation of 1917). The Hebrew verb is וַיְגַלַּח.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s excavations of 1935 to 1936 found the razor above in the tomb of Ramose and Hatnefer, the parents of Senenmut; Hatnefer was his mother (after W. C. Hayes, The Scepter of Egypt II, 1959, and the Met’s record). The record places it inside a basket. A second razor from Thebes, Ruiu’s, is of the same decades.

Rome: barbers from Sicily, then the beard returns

Varro, in De re rustica, has just finished with the shearing of sheep:

The 453rd year of the city is about 300 BCE. Varro is reporting what is said. Pliny the Elder gives the next year: “According to Varro, they were introduced into Italy from Sicily, in the year of Rome 454”. He goes on: “The younger Africanus was the first who adopted the custom of shaving every day. The late Emperor Augustus always made use of razors.” (Natural History 7.59, tr. John Bostock and H. T. Riley, 1855.) The “first” is Pliny’s.

A Roman on trial was expected to let his beard grow. Aulus Gellius writes that Scipio, “although he was under accusation, neither ceased to shave his beard and to wear white raiment nor appeared in the usual garb of those under accusation.” Gellius was puzzled by it: “But since it is certain that at that time Scipio was less than forty years old, I was surprised at the statement about shaving his beard. I have learned, however, that in those same times the other nobles shaved their beards at that time of life” (Attic Nights 3.4, tr. J. C. Rolfe, 1927).

Martial has a joke about a barber called Eutrapelus, here in an anonymous English verse of 1695: “Eutrapelus, the barber, works so slow, / That while he shaves, the beard anew does grow.” (Epigrams 7.83, as printed in Bohn’s Classical Library.) And Suetonius has a first shave made into a ceremony. At a gymnastic contest Nero “shaved his first beard to the accompaniment of a splendid sacrifice of bullocks, put it in a golden box adorned with pearls of great price, and dedicated it in the Capitol.” (Nero 12.4, tr. J. C. Rolfe, 1914.)

Then the beard came back. The Cleveland Museum of Art’s record for the head below says: “Beards were uncommon in Rome until the emperor Hadrian (r. 117–38 CE) popularized them”. The Historia Augusta, a late and weak source, claims a reason:

India: razors in the monks’ rules

The Cullavagga, a book of the Buddhist monks’ rules, has the monks asked whether they can remove one another’s hair. They answer “They are, Lord”, and the Buddha allows “the use of razors, of a hone to sharpen the razors on, of powder prepared with Sipatika-gum to prevent them rusting, of a sheath to hold them in, and of all the apparatus of a barber.” The same pages list what is not allowed. Beards are not to be cut by barbers, grown long, worn “like a goat’s beard” or with “four corners”, and monks are not “to cut the hair on your bellies into figures”. Of long nostril hair, people said: “Like the devil-worshippers!” (Cullavagga V.27, tr. T. W. Rhys Davids and Hermann Oldenberg, 1885.)

In another chapter the Sakya youths ask that “Upali the barber” be ordained before them, “and thus shall the Sakya pride be humbled in us Sakyans”. So “the Blessed One received first Upali the barber” (Cullavagga VII.1.4, same translation).

The Kama Sutra’s citizen has his head and face shaved every four days and the rest of his body every five or ten (after Part I, ch. IV, in the Kama Shastra Society’s English of 1883).

The record of the Kalighat painting describes “A chinless barber with cleaning pins tucked in his turban”. The barber’s work in it is ears, not beards.

The Islamic world: which hair

Sahih al-Bukhari gives this saying of the Prophet Muhammad on the fitra, the natural way:

The next entry is about the beard:

The head is another matter. The Qur’an, in Marmaduke Pickthall’s translation of 1930: “Ye shall indeed enter the Inviolable Place of Worship, if Allah will, secure, (having your hair) shaven and cut, not fearing.” (48:27; the brackets are Pickthall’s.) Shaven and cut are the pilgrim’s two choices at the end of ihram, the pilgrim’s state, and the chapter of al-Bukhari on that moment ranks them:

Those who shorten are added only on the third time, or the fourth in the other version the entry records.

Japan: wooden pincers, then tweezers

Miura Jōshin’s Keichō kenmonshū counts the years from his birth to “this year”, 1614. One chapter of book 4 is headed with its subject: why men today have no beards. It opens with the hair of the head:

Ketsushiki is our reading of けつしき; the kana do not settle how the word was said. Miura gives the style and no reason for it. The beard, in those same years, was wanted:

One insult is recorded, and two deaths. By the time Miura wrote, both fashions had turned over:

The line about a dull face is a saying of the day that Miura reports, not his own view.

A century and a half later Suzuki Harunobu drew a shave indoors. By the Cleveland Museum of Art’s record, “a courtesan demonstrates benevolence by shaving her attendant’s neck.”

An undated photograph of Japanese barbers in the Wellcome Collection carries an outsider’s note in English, pasted on its back: “Most Japanese are shaved daily, and in addition to the head, the face and even the nose is shaved, the ears are bored out, and the eyelids often turned back and scraped”. The claim is the note-writer’s.

China: an order withdrawn in 1644, and ten days in 1645

The Veritable Records of the Shunzhi reign enter an order to shave at Tongzhou and its withdrawal in the same month of 1644:

The text we read prints 朿, which we take as 束, to bind. In 1645, on the report of victory in Jiangnan, the order came back, first to the army:

The edict names military law and no penalty beyond it. Ten days later a second edict went to the Board of Rites:

In this edict the text we read prints 矱 where the word is 薙, to shave. Its harshest words, “kill without pardon”, are aimed at anyone who petitions to keep the Ming style.

What followed in one county is told in the Haijiao yibian, an anonymous Qing chapter-narrative of Changshu. It is a narrative with a verse at its head, not a plain record, and the year 1645 is by its context:

A later emperor, Qianlong, recalled the conquest in an edict punishing officials who had shaved during the hundred days of mourning for an empress. “Over a hundred years” is his own count:

That none escaped is the emperor’s claim.

About 1890 Zhou Pei Qun painted a street barber, and the inscription on the sheet says what the picture shows:

The Americas: two outsiders

Hernán Cortés, in his Second Letter of 1520, describes Tenochtitlan as a conqueror: “There are places like our barber’s shops, where they wash and shave their heads”. At Tlaxcala he saw “houses like barbers’ shops, where they wash their heads and shave themselves” (tr. Francis Augustus MacNutt, 1908). He names no blade.

George Catlin, writing in 1841 of the forty-eight tribes he had visited, describes plucking. A man who had missed the moment “subjects his chin to the repeated pains of its extractions, which he is performing with a pair of clamshells or other tweezers, nearly every day of his life” (Letters and Notes, vol. 2, p. 227). Both men are outsiders. We found no open image of people shaving or plucking in the Americas, so this section has no picture.

Paris, 1769: learning to shave yourself

Jean-Jacques Perret was a master cutler in Paris. In 1769 he published La Pogonotomie, ou l’art d’apprendre à se raser soi-même, the art of learning to shave yourself. He sold razors, and his preface makes the case against the barber’s:

The claims about disease are Perret’s. For the beginner’s cuts he offers a razor of his own:

His new barbers are beginners shaving themselves. The name comes from the tool it looks like:

The Wellcome Collection’s copy has no plates, so figure 13 cannot be shown here. A footnote to the preface settles a score:

That is Perret’s side only: we read neither journal. The print has “mou” for “mon”. Then comes the lesson, for any kind of razor:

15 November 1904: a blade to throw away

US patent 775,134, “Razor”, was issued on 15 November 1904 for an invention of King C. Gillette of Brookline, Massachusetts, filed on 3 December 1901; its printed heading names him as assignor to the Federal Trust Company of Boston. It starts from razors “of the safety type”, whose blades “require to be stropped and honed frequently, which cannot be done satisfactorily by the average individual user himself”. Its answer is blades of “very thin sheet-steel”, so cheap “that the user may buy them in quantities and throw them away when dull”, with two edges “so that the life of a blade may thus be doubled”.

Gillette’s own claim is careful: “so far as I am aware, I am the first to produce a razor-blade which may be thrown away when dull without loss of economy and to combine such a blade with a holder adapted to support the blade and also to give its cutting edge the rigidity necessary [...]”. He patented the throwaway blade and the holder that stiffens it.

By a modern company history, production began in 1903; that October the firm was renamed the Gillette Safety Razor Company, and it began advertising the same year. On 8 June 1907 the Star of Christchurch, New Zealand, carried a small advertisement offering a block meerschaum pipe, “bargain or would exchange for new gillette safety razor”. We read the advertisement as the scan’s machine-read text, so it is quoted in lower case as that text gives it.

The stories that don’t hold up

“Gillette invented the safety razor.”

His patent of 1904 speaks of “razors of the safety type, the use of which as heretofore constructed”, so they were there before it. On 15 June 1880 Frederic and Otto F. Kampfe of New York had patented “Improvements in Safety-Razors”. Their specification says “Our invention relates to an improvement in safety-razors”, and its toothed guard “will yield sufficiently to allow the razor to sever the hair without danger of cutting the skin”. Their blade was still “then honed and strapped”. Perret’s plane razor is older again. One modern company history credits Gillette with “a patent on the safety razor”, which is the loose version.

“Perret invented the safety razor in 1770.”

He says he invented his plane razor in 1762, and a rival claimed it the same year. The Wellcome Collection’s copy of the book is dated 1769 on its title page, with an approbation of 28 September 1768 and a privilege of 24 May 1769.

“Egyptians shaved to keep off lice.”

Herodotus gives lice as the reason for the priests alone, who shaved the whole body every other day. Of other Egyptians he says that they “are shaven at other times”, and gives no reason.

“Alexander had his army shaved so that enemies could not grab their beards.”

The source is Plutarch, about four centuries after Alexander, and Plutarch hedges: “as they say, he ordered his generals to have the beards of their Macedonians shaved, since these afforded the readiest hold in battle” (Theseus 5.4, tr. Bernadotte Perrin, 1914).

“Romans were always clean-shaven.”

Varro has barbers reaching Italy only about 300 BCE and points at the bearded statues of earlier men. By the Cleveland Museum of Art’s record, beards came back into fashion under Hadrian.

“The 1645 edict said: keep your hair, lose your head.”

The saying is not in the edicts. They threaten military law and severe punishment, and their harshest line orders death without pardon for anyone who petitions to keep the Ming style. The saying stands beside them. The Haijiao yibian opens its chapter with “Keep your body and lose your hair; keep your hair and lose your body”. Lu Xun’s story “Fengbo”, printed in Xin qingnian in 1920, has “留髮不留頭，留頭不留髮”, “Keep your hair and you don’t keep your head; keep your head and you don’t keep your hair.” (our translation). The speaker in the story pins it on the Taiping years, not on 1645.

“Native Americans had no beards.”

Catlin wrote that “eighteen out of twenty, by nature are entirely without the appearance of a beard; and of the very few who have them by nature, nineteen out of twenty eradicate it by plucking”. “By nature” is his claim. What his own page describes is plucking: at puberty for most, and nearly every day for a man who missed the moment.

“Muslims don’t shave.”

It depends which hair. The collection that tells men to let the beard grow full also counts shaving the pubic hair as part of the fitra, and asks God’s mercy first on pilgrims who shave the head.