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Well, I'm back to shaving with my beloved 1940s Injector again, so I guess I can tell the story of how I came to start shaving with the "mystery razor" I've kept company with lo these past few weeks.

It all started when I was in Japan on a shoot last month. I'd taken along my roll-up wetbag packed with my travel shaving rig -- bakelite Injector, shortened Feather Pro Super disposable straight razor blades, Vulfix travel brush, a tube of Taylor's Rose shaving cream, and a bottle of Trumper's Lime Skin Food -- and I was looking forward to some ungodly close shaves for the on-camera work I was doing (the better my shave, the less TV makeup I have to wear, which is always a good thing since I'm not Ace Frehley though I may wind up looking like him one of these days).

But for some reason, my shaves sucked while I was in Tokyo. I got nicks galore, even with a fresh blade, and the underside of my chin -- the dreaded "billy goat's gruff" which is the bane of my shaving existence -- became more raw with each day's shave. By the time I got back, I knew I needed to take a break from the Featherjector. Though I'm addicted to the ungodly close "skin peeling" shaves I get with this rig, the 14 hour flights and the drier weather forced me to take a step or two back and revisit a kinder, gentler shave.

I knew I wanted to go back to a DE, because I find these safety razors less aggressive and easier on the puss than the Featherjector, or even an Injector with the standard Schick or Personna blades. But which DE?

All my Merkur and Gillette adjustables were out. I can never stop dicking with the settings, and I always wind up nudging them to a higher settinng than's good for me, which is exactly what I was trying to take a break from in the first place. And even my non-adjustable Merkurs, like my favorite Merkur of them all, the mighty "Hefty Classic" (aka the HD), are more aggressive than the kind of easy breezy shave I was looking for so my skin could settle back down again.

Which left the non-adjustable Gillettes. I've never really taken a shine to the fixed-head Gillettes, because none of them seemed to shave very closely, at least compared to the adjustables. They're also, I don't mind saying, a little dinky looking -- when you finally wise up and graduate to a safety razor, you want a big, meaty steel job, not a slim-handled number that looks like a toy.

I wound up with a lot of these vintage non-adjustable Gillettes while winning large lots of razors on eBay. If a group of razors had three or four desirable models like the shorty Gillette adjustables and the bakelite Injectors, it usually also had a slew of these non-adjustable Gillettes as well, both the very early all-brass razors as well as the later "TTO" (twist to open) silo-head razors with the red (aggressive), black (fair to middlin'), and blue (what they gave to guys on suicide watch so they couldn't cut themselves) twister knobs on the bottom to tell you what kind of shave you were going to get. I'd clean them up -- I don't think boiling the germs off and then obsessively scrubbing an old razor you never plan to use with Bartender's Friend and a Radius toothbrush makes anyone a shavegeek, does it? -- and toss 'em in the drawer, with vague plans to unload them back on eBay someday.

But now that I was looking for a gentler razor after the Featherjector beat me up, I found myself rummaging through my razor drawer till I found the perfect little number for a fun, no-strings fling while I was on the rebound. I knew I wasn't going to get as close of a shave as I'd grown accustomed to with the Injector, but that was the point. I needed to slow down and take it easy for awhile. I wanted to get away from the high-maintenance cutting-edge and just shave like a regular guy again.

I settled on a slim-handled Gillette non-adjustable silo razor from the 1940s that's about as basic and undermasculinated as a safety razor can be. All you can do is twist the knob to open the silo head, drop a DE blade in, and twist the knob back the other way to close the doors and tighten the blade into place. You can't ogle this thing, you can't admire its heft in your hand, you can't leave it outside your medicine cabinet without visitors to your home wondering if an elderly relative is visiting. This old Gillette DE is about as cool as a brown cardigan. I know, because I own one, and oddly enough I get far less tail than Sinatra when I wear it around town.

The first time I shaved with the Gillette I popped in a fresh "no-name" Israeli Personna blade and my expectations couldn't have been lower, but damned if I didn't get a truly excellent shave. It was not only closer than I'd expected given the razor's almost sheepish blade exposure, but it was just about the most comfortable, irritation-free DE shave I've ever had. Normally I hit my limit with three passes from DEs, but this non-adjustable Gillette felt like it could go all night and never so much as raise a shave bump.

I started off lathering up with my usual English creams, but as the days passed and the shaves kept amazing me, I tried moving to a hard soap to see if its closer cut would work well with the milder DE. I found Classic Shaving's soap to be an ideal match with the Gillette -- a combo for the shavegeek ages. I did find myself going over areas of my face more times with this razor than I usually have to with a more aggressive DE or the Injector, but it didn't faze my skin a bit. This Gillette's so easy going it didn't matter how many times I swiped it over my whiskers.

Many's the time I've read comments by Gordon, the eminence grise of the shavegeek forums, where he's explained that it's the lower, less aggressive settings on an adjustable razor which ultimately give the best shaves. Of course, this advice is routinely ignored, as the geeks chase after the most hellishly aggressive razors trying to scrape their way to a baby's butt shave, and I've been right there with 'em. It just didn't seem logical to me that a mild-shaving razor could shave closer than one showing more blade.

But it can and it does. Much, much more comfortably than you're probably used to. You just have your technique down. Which this kind of razor will really help you learn if you don't already have it.

Okay, enough mystery. It's the Super Speed. And the days when you could pick up one of these razors for a song on eBay are officially over. Happy shaving.