Foil != BladeJan 17 '02 Write an essay on this topic.The Bottom Line Both work: my face gets smooth. Foil is accurate but noisy and messier. But rotary takes longer and refuses to cut where I want. In the end, I chose foil. First of all, most of the extant reviews in this category are confused: the Gillette Mach 3 is NOT a "foil razor". The Foil vs Rotary discussion is one entirely in the electric razor realm, referring to the two dominant methods of getting hair off your face. Rotary razors, typified by Norelco products, have some number of circular ~2cm diameter slotted receptacles. Inside the circular housing, a set of blades conceptually similar to a turbine with sharpened blades spins round and round, chopping anything that comes through the slots. Norelco is very proud of their "lift and cut" system: it has two blades, one to grab the hair and pull it deeper into the slot, the other to chop it off (hopefully) at or below the normal skin level (it sounds like it hurts but it doesn't). Norelco has plenty of TV commercials these days which all illustrate the concept nicely. Foil razors, typified by Braun products, have one or more pieces of thin metal foil with holes in it, folded over a set of blades that looks somewhat like a machine screw (tho they may not actually be connected screw-wise). The screw-like assembly is driven by a vibrating motor, causing it to jiggle back and forth against the foil. Anything that goes through one of the holes in the screen gets lopped off when the blade jiggles back from its current direction. AFAIK, no-one has come up with anything like the "lift and cut" system for foil razors, but Remington has new products based on "MicroScreen 3" technology which (I gather) uses a very thin foil screen, so the point is somewhat moot. I couldn't decide between the two, so I bought one Norelco QuadraAction 6828XL rotary "shaving system" and one Remington MS3 3000 foil shaver. These contain the best dry electric technology from the two manufacturers. (The name to beat in foil shavers is Braun but they don't carry a money-back guarantee, so they lost at least one customer!) Check my reviews of those items for my thoughts on those particular models. After a month with the Norelco shaving the left half of my face and the Remington on the right, I think I have a good idea of what the tradeoffs are between the two razing technologies. Both razors give a shave that's about as good as the one I got from a blade in the shower. Both are easy to clean by rinsing under water and occasionally cleaning with a brush. Both take about 10 minutes for a full shave. The rotary Norelco is quiet, and it does a pretty good job of holding the cut hairs in its reservoir (so long as you clean it regularly). The instructions say it takes 3 weeks for your face to aclimate to the cutting motion; I found it only took about a week. The Norelco shave is slightly closer where it is most close, but somewhat uneven: for example, my cheeks end up still smooth at the end of the day but other areas have a more-typical "5:00" growth. This is all good, but hides one huge problem: when there's a spot that needs cutting, you can't cut it specifically. This razor (and as far as I can tell, this would be the same with any other rotary razor, due to the placement of the blades) cuts very well "on average," but makes it very hard to target a specific hair or patch of long hairs. You'll get them eventually if you have patience, but as you're pulling up to the office building (or as the client walks towards your office) you may begin to sweat when that %$#! patch near your temple refuses to yield. The foil Remington is messier, and quite a bit louder, but gives a completely even shave. Its trimmer/long-hair-cutter works as advertized, allowing the razor to chop through 3-day beard growth in swaths instead of taking many passes to get through it. And most nice, if you missed a spot, you can just run the razor over it and it will disappear. So for my purposes, where last-minute shaves are the norm, a foil shaver works marginally better. If I had to shave in a suit tho, or noise was an issue, I might change my mind.  |
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