How Gillette Used Gender to Make Face Shaving Needlessly Worse for Men

A lesson in how marketing uses culture to corporate advantage

Let’s start by setting the right benchmark for a perfect facial shave. The undeniably smoothest, cleanest, and best facial shaves I have ever received came from a cheery Tamil man inside a dusty, un-airconditioned shed, amidst the honking, screeching, and clattering noisescape that is any Indian intercity highway before it reaches the rural areas.

As lorry horns blared intermittently with the amplitude of a cruise ship horn, I would try to sit motionless in front of an old, dirty mirror as Selvam deftly maneuvered a 10-inch long, diamond sharp straight-edge razor as if in martial arts combat with every errant follicle.

He moved that blade fast. Not once did I ever get nicked.

The speed at which Selvam’s hand moved terrified me into silence the first time. And the second and third times. But I eventually trusted him. After all, this was his family’s caste-appointed occupation for centuries. Free, expert training was built in. In South India, barbers occupy a prime networking position because they shave the faces of virtually anyone, but more importantly, have access to the wealthy and upper castes in their local neighborhoods. They are a classic, intermediary caste group like the old merchant castes (e.g., Patel, Jain, Reddy, Modi, Chettiar, etc.)

A traditional barber shop shave in India today costs approximately 35 cents (and was even cheaper when I visited). That’s about 31 rupees, or about the price of a cup of coffee at a contemporary coffee stall. You won’t find a currency-adjusted $5 shave at any American barber shop…if you can even find a barber. It’s a bit of a hunt. In urban India, though, there are man-cave barber shops everywhere. If you have to walk more than 200 yards, I’d be surprised. Even small villages tend to have one, often staffed by someone who bikes in from somewhere else and simply wants to ‘capture’ that audience.

This is all to say that it has taken Gillette over thirty years to make only a small dent in the Indian male shaving market.¹ Gillette’s mass market razor in India is the Vector, a scary 2-blade solution that can only offer an inferior experience compared to your local barber shop and any modern cartridge system.

Let’s assume these darlings are single-use cartridges, because they are too cheaply manufactured to last more than once on 2-3 days of stubble. If so, then the Vector is only 32 rupees per shave,² roughly equivalent to the market price at local Indian barber shops. Every man I know has tried a two-blade cartridge shave at some point, often because they ran out of blades and had to run into a 7-11 to get whatever disposable blades were available. Actually, Gillette has just such a thing still for sale in the U.S. -

All I can say about the 7 O’clock product (or India’s Vector) is: have a separate towel ready for the blood. These twin-blade razors should be in a horror film, not for sale to the public as a legitimate solution to facial hair.

How Gillette Played Us For Fools

Gillette may still have the highest market share, but it once had a 70-80% share. Not anymore. A flurry of DTC brands like Dollar Shave Club and Harry’s swooped in during the 2010s to solve problems Gillette had either created OR left unsolved. Creating upwards of a billion in annual revenue across these newer brands only proves to me that male face shaving is the wrinkle cream of men’s personal care. Either the problems of male shaving are unsolvable, OR companies like Gillette have little incentive to solve them permanently.

Currently, only about a third of American men shave daily.³ The frequency of daily face shaving (and grooming) has been declining for years, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic. In parallel, America has witnessed a trend toward increasingly informal dress and appearance at work, accelerated during the pandemic by mandatory work-from-home scenarios that lasted for months (or forever). This permanent business casual attire has been adopted by both genders, but is perhaps more pronounced for men. I remember 2010-ish was when consultants no longer had to wear suits to client meetings nationwide (if you were in a West Coast ad agency, it started in the 1990s).

As men shave less often in America, the odds of a man deciding to shave after a few days of growth have grown. This sets up a very different usage scenario and design standard than the shaving routines of professional men in the 1970s (which I grew up observing). In fact, my own father used a trendy electric, dry razor for years because it’s so much easier to be a daily shaver with the electric approach. Quicker. Very low likelihood of any nicks or blood. He even introduced me to shaving with a Christmas electric shaver purchase as if to say, “Don’t bother with blades.” The minority who shave dry are entirely focused on impression management in public, not on experiencing a smooth shave (the ancient standard). This radically simplifies things, but never satisfies, once you have experienced a real shave.

The trade-off with dry, electric shaving is quality. No nicks or cuts, but NOT a smooth shave. It’s a crap shave that avoids blood on your collar. I know this intimately because I used an electric shaver until I went to India in 1997. The conversion to sharp blades was instantaneous and permanent because I had never had a real shave. And I have always been an every-few-days-shaver since my mid-20s. Clearly ahead of my time.

My conversion to blade shaving in India, however, sent me down the rabbit hole of most American men when I returned to cartridge-land. We forelorn wet shavers have never found any blade system that eliminates nicks, cuts, and blood while providing a clean shave. The only solution is to triple your shave time and approach it like surgery. I still doubt this will work because the blade quality doesn’t match an actual barber shop straight-edge razor. Alternatively, you could replace your cartridge every single shave (at great expense). Until recently, I blamed myself and my technical finesse, not the cartridge designs. That’s what Gillette wants you to do: blame yourself.

I’m done with that. Let me explain how I burst out of the marketing Matrix, how we men have been played by Gillette (and others), strung along with ever more expensive, but still clunky, multi-blade cartridge systems that refuse to resolve fundamental trade-offs. If we still complain about the nicks, cuts, and blood, Gillette’s marketers implicitly refer us to the electric razor, blame our technique and shrug. For anyone who has ever had a professional barber shop shave, this is gaslighting at its finest.

To unpack how we got here and then reveal what Gillette has been hiding from American men, like good little consultants, we need to lay out the shaving design variables colliding on the faces of American men, using India as a critical interpretive foil. When we do this, we uncover a bizarre truth:

American men want an ultra-quick, home shave every few days. This means they have 1-3 days of stubble to conquer. The blade system needs to be very sharp or maintain its sharpness across multiple uses to be affordable. This is honestly the same standard as an Indian barber shop. Few Indian men go every day, even though they are located everywhere.

The variables at play are:

1. speedy shave (2-3 minutes please)

2. on-demand shave (must be at home or portable, not tied to a barber shop we can’t find when we suddenly decide we have too much stubble)

3. clean, smooth face

4. no nicks or cuts when applying pressure (we mean zero!)

5. no skin irritation

6. reasonable cartridge prices (hah!)

So, yes, American men have been asking for all six of these outcomes from one product line. America’s face-shaving brands only excel at the first three design variables.

If the male in question uses enough foam and the right foam (which Gillette makes in gel form), number five resolves easily.

Dollar Shave Club scaled hyperbolically by solving the sixth issue, only to under-deliver on a clean, smooth face and, in my experience, increase the risk of nicks and cuts if you tried to use a blade more than once. Dollar Shave Club basically offers lower quality engineering and a whole lot of brand humor to distract us. I quit after a year.

The nicks, cuts, and scrapes (and skin irritation) are notoriously ongoing in American bathrooms, despite all these fancy new five-blade cartridge systems that keep launching every five years or so.

Here’s a telling passage from a bio-mechanical research publication on men’s shaving to establish that I’m not some weird outlier who gets nicked all the time with traditional men’s shaving systems.

…many men struggle to achieve hair removal through shaving without resulting irritation. Shaving-related irritation is one of the most frequently mentioned male cosmetic complaints in Europe and the United States. Previous studies have shown that only 12% of men are reported to never experience irritation after shaving, with two-thirds of men expectant of some level of irritation. This difficulty is exacerbated on the neck, where a number of physiological factors combine to make this a particularly challenging facial area, including multiple hair growth directions, hairs with lower elevation angles, rougher skin topography and looser skin attachment. These are coupled with more difficult access and reduced visibility, and hence, the neck is recognized as an area which is more prone to problems such as erythema, irritation and shaving nicks.⁴

I find it ‘fascinating’ that it took bio-mechanical engineers to point out to us the absurdity of trying to shave a skin surface that only another person (not the subject) can adequately see (i.e., the professional barber).

In the 1980s, like millions of young boys, I absorbed Gillette’s famous, retired slogan on TV: “Gillette…the best a man can get…” I assumed the brand knew best. I mean, listen to this triumphant, arrogant brand advertising -

Please excuse the ridiculous aspirational career imagery (stock trader, astronaut, etc.) and the exaggerated adoration of females.

Is Gillette the best a man can get? Really? Is it though? Then, why does Gillette keep inventing better cartridge lines? At ever more inflated prices? Why can they never solve the nick/cut problem even with six blades, springs, lubricant strips, and whatnot?

If the goal is to achieve all six of the desired outcomes (speed, portability, clean shave, no nicks or cuts, no skin irritation, all at a reasonable price) with an innovative design, Gillette seems to struggle.

Source: Gillette website.

Why would a brand this large with this many decades of R&D experience find it so difficult to address all six design requirements I listed? Is it actually this hard to reproduce the outcome I received every single time in a 10-minute, artisan, roadside shave in South India? Is it? Maybe Gillette has no financial incentive to really solve the nic/cut and skin irritation problems? If we are not going to open 20,000 barber shops priced like Great Cuts, how do American men break free of their blind trust in Gillette, Harry’s, and others, and solve all their DIY shaving problems?

Three weeks ago, my lovely wife of 19 years set me free. Despite hundreds of observations until then, she chose three weeks ago to sigh and hand me her Venus Extra Smooth shaving blade system, which is designed for, yup, female pubic hair. Even more bizarre is that it is designed specifically for young women (I think you can figure this out on your own, since my lawyer advised me not to go there).

Here it is.

If you’re still reading this, let me tell you that the result was borderline miraculous. And all it took was 19 years of marriage for one woman to get a man to try a far superior facial hair shaving system marketed to women.

The base design of all seven Venus lines is essentially suitable for everyone and every location on any body. A rubber guard surrounds the entire five-blade system and secures it, so you need to angle it just right on the skin and apply pressure for it to work. There’s no way to nick yourself accidentally by approaching at the wrong angle! And it has two lubricating strips covering both directions, OR any direction of pull.

The design ensures the right angle, pressure, and ease of pull for a clean, easy shave with zero nicks or cuts. This is precisely what a professional barber is trained to execute unconsciously with their straight-edge razors.

Three weeks later, and I’ve experienced no blood, nicks, tugs, or anything Gillette has claimed to address for men too insecure to buy a system designed for women and marketed as such. I’ve changed nothing about my face-shaving technique or speed.

When it comes to shaving, I’m now non-binary.

The verdict I’m pronouncing here is that Gillette, DSC, and Harry’s have little incentive to solve the male facial shaving challenges permanently. They are making too much money, distracting us with cartoon inserts, ‘luxury’ marketing language, attention, and price-per-shave value messaging (what’s the point if the shave quality is worse than what Gillette offers?).

And Venus systems are not only superior. They’re exceptional for no absolute price premium at all, IF you can get over your gender identity.⁵

Gillette’s Incentive is Most Likely Profit…Shocking.

The morning I discovered Venus, I confess to descending into consumer rage for a few hours at how I had been played by a highly successful marketing machine that has insisted for decades that a man needs a razor marketed to men. Framing like this works because humans love to simplify choices wherever they can, even when it works against their own interests.

The rage deepened as I also realized that Gillette knows all about Venus’ technical superiority internally. The Venus blade division is not sealed off in an underground bunker at an undisclosed location. R&D and marketing professionals for male and female lines eat in the same corporate cafeteria. R&D certainly knows both systems very well. Venus is not the product of a corporate skunkworks.

Are you suggesting, Mr. Gillette, that no one at your company tested a Venus razor system on a man’s three-day facial stubble? Not once? In the name of science? As a prank, even?

They’ll never answer these questions publicly, but I’m sure some Gillette employees know the truth.

As a consultant for consumer packaged goods manufacturers, I can tell you that it’s generally more profitable to have a smaller line of products that satisfies an enormous audience than to design and manage many lines for many different segments. At the very least, there are many more staff required to operate a sprawling company. And, economies of scale that raise profitability only benefit from concentrating volume into one core set of products. The primary exception here is when the superior product (e.g., Venus) is more expensive to make.

I strongly suspect the Venus shaving blade system is not as profitable as the male cartridge systems (which sell globally, I might add, with more global volume to bring down costs). If true, this would be the primary reason Gillette is not transferring the fundamental design principles of Venus to its male cartridges. If you just look at the extra rubber and plastic used in the surround blade guard AND the dual lubricant strips, it seems clear that it is more complicated to manufacture. Complexity almost always means more costly to manufacture.

Chopping the market into segments may be culturally necessary in some categories (like soda or furniture), but not in skin shaving. Both genders really do want the same six things.

Profit is the most likely reason for Gillette’s decision to distribute lower-quality cartridges to men. This has happened again and again in consumer products.

Fight the marketers by thinking for yourself.

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If you’re a new subscriber, have a look at my Nautilus Award-winning, anthropological exploration of how post-WWII American life and its many tradeoffs and mixed outcomes - Our Worst Strength: American Individualism and Its Hidden Discontents.

1. Even though the target customers were professional men with higher disposable incomes than the average Indian, the traditional, double-edged razor, could not be dislodged. Indian men do not consider shaving a significant enough activity to justify such a premium. Gillette’s Mach3 value proposition was based on extensive consumer research, which highlighted key concerns men had about shaving: it was time-consuming, caused skin irritation, and was generally unpleasant. Mach3 promised “the closest shave ever in fewer strokes - with less irritation.” Source: https://www.businesstoday.in/magazine/lbs-case-study/story/gillette-innovated-improved-its-market-share-in-india-47708-2014-04-04

2. Based on Flipkart online pricing sourced on 10/5/2025.

3. Short answer: the most defensible “current” estimate is roughly ~30–35% of U.S. men shave daily. Why that range?

• A large survey cited by a peer-reviewed article (Statista, 2019 fieldwork; published 2020) found 35% of men shaved once or more per day—a solid pre-2020 benchmark. PMC

• A 2025 industry summary (not primary research, but recent) reports ~32% shave every day; treat as directional but it aligns with the Statista benchmark. Market.us News

• Older Mintel data (2015) among men who use shaving products found 41% don’t shave daily → implying ~59% of shavers did daily back then; norms have shifted toward beards/stubble since, so today’s all-men figure will be lower. Mintel

So, given the best publicly visible proprietary indicators and the post-2015 rise of facial hair, a reasonable 2025 take is about one-third of American men are daily shavers (higher among older cohorts, lower among younger). This analysis was compiled by ChatGPT5 and verified by me.

4. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ics.12330#:~:text=Each%20person%20exhibits%20a%20unique,erythema%2C%20irritation%20and%20shaving%20nicks.

5. Wait! Is there a Venus price trade-off? Are women being exploited yet again, but on a per-cartridge price? Using Walmart as a pricing data source, I found that

• Venus Extra Smooth goes for roughly = $3 per cartridge

• Gillette Fusion ProGlide (the most widely available modern line) goes for roughly = $3 per cartridge.