An unexpected meeting. Dinner with a visiting colleague.  An impromptu date.  A suitcase-packing oversight.  One occasionally gets caught with a couple of days worth of five o'clock shadow that needs removing, without time to go home and take care of it.

Rather than buying a new handle and pack of cartridges or blades, disposable razors are the solution.  Ordinarily wasteful--cartridges are already bad enough, and these have a handle that goes with them--the price is right, especially when the disposable is a (nowadays) old-fashioned twin blade model like the Bic Comfort Twin reviewed here.  (About seventy-five cents per razor through Epinions's linked merchants at the time of writing.)

The Comfort Twin's design is similar to that of the Trac II Plus: two blades held at an angle to the face, plus a polyethylene glycol (PEG) lubricating strip, which Bic advertises on the package as having something to do with aloe.  (Maybe there's a dash of aloe extract in it.  But it's a PEG strip just like Gilette's.  Stupid sells, I guess.)  It inherits the Trac II's principal flaw: a closed back that makes rinsing stubble from between the blades difficult.

Unlike many disposable razors on the market (including most store brands) this isn't just an Atra or Trac II style cartridge on top of a plastic handle.  That's a good thing.  Many of those are cheaper than the Comfort Twin but seem to be made with the worst Atra-style cartriges that could be found.  Disposables I recently picked up from Target had an Atra cartridge (that could be popped off and put on a regular handle) that tended to pull hair as much as it cut hair.  Not so with the Comfort Twin, which is reliably as sharp as Personna or Walgreens brand Atra cartriges.

I'd rather have bought a twin-blade razor that improved on the now forty-one-year-old Trac II design.  I'd rather have one with a pivoting head, too.  And I'd rather not find myself buying disposables at all.  But when in need of a backup, the Bic Comfort Twin is a reasonable choice.

Recommended: Yes