Gillette Super Blue blades

King-D · Post by **King-D** » Tue Aug 16, 2011 11:31 am

Mullard recently posted on how he gets carbon blades to perform best: use it for the final pass. However, just this morning I used the sharpest/smoothest blade in my life, with the resulting "perfrect shave". And it came in the form of a pack of Gillette Super Blue blades that I picked up at an estate sale. I first inspected the edge of the blade with a loupe to ensure there was no rust, then I dropped it into my Futur and went to town. My usual routine with a 1-day growth beard is ATG, then WTG. It was fabulous.

I have to say that my other experience with carbon blades, the Treet "Black Beauties", was similar. That was 3 years ago. So, there ya go, a classic case of YMMV.

[/img]

Squire · Post by **Squire** » Tue Aug 16, 2011 12:22 pm

The Gillette Super Blues are sharp and get the job done. Gillette replaced them with stainless ones that were equally good and longer lasting. Also more profitable for the company.

brothers · Post by **brothers** » Tue Aug 16, 2011 3:16 pm

I'm wondering how many of those excellent shaves the Super Blues will provide before the edge degrades into mediocrity.

Squire · Post by **Squire** » Tue Aug 16, 2011 4:43 pm

Gary they go South quicker than a Feather. We used to toss them after one shave although I can get two out of the Treet Dura Sharp which is close to a modern equivalent.

harper · Post by **harper** » Tue Aug 16, 2011 7:58 pm

I remember the first Super Blue blade I used and it was wonderful, the best shave at the time ever. I could get one great shave, a second shave that was close to being as good as the first and a third that was very scratchy. I remember that Gillette introduced the Super Blue by glueing it into newspapers and there was no fuss at the time about anybody cutting themselves, the exact opposite of what happened when Tract 11 was introduced by sending it to mail addresses ... in a carton that no youngster could have opened ... still the complaints grew. I am not sure that Gillette made more money on stainless blades but introduced them because they were forced to by the competition which took a larger share of the market in Canada than it did in the the US.

IAmTheJody · Post by **IAmTheJody** » Wed Aug 17, 2011 5:20 am

You can thank Wilkinson Sword for the death of carbon blades. When they introduced the first stainless steel blades, the Wilkinson Sword Super Sword, people snatched them up so much that it was hard to even find them in stock. Before long, Gillette's blade market share dropped from around 72% to 57% so they had to come out with their own stainless steel blades.

The funny thing is that WS didn't even market their blades in the usual places... pharmacies, cutlery shops, etc. They were more interested in selling their new line of garden tools and included packs of the blades as a freebie and incentive to buy one of the tools. So the most likely place you could find the blades were in hardware stores. WS really didn't care about razor blades. WS was actually shocked by the response to their blades and couldn't keep up with production, nor did they care to - as far as adding more manufacturing equipment for the demand, etc.

This information I gleaned from articles in old TIME magazines:

Nov. 23, 1962 TIME Magazine article: Competition: Beastly Blades

May 1, 1964 TIME Magazine article: Britain: The Reluctant Millionaires

Jan. 29, 1965 TIME Magazine article: World Business: The Blade Battle

Interestingly enough, a pack of the WS Super Sword blades sold on eBay yesterday for $33.60 shipped making them $6.72 a blade. Someone must really like them 49+ year old blades. I'm curious if they are as good as WS's other well known and liked vintage blade, the WS Light Brigade blades.

nteeman · Post by **nteeman** » Wed Aug 17, 2011 5:40 am

I remember as a boy my dad and his buddies going to the local Barbershop, their usual Saturday afternoon hangout, anxiously waiting for his delivery of Wilkinson SS blades from England. These were the rage and their barber had made some kind of arrangement to get these for his selected customers (the men who also placed their hourse race bets with his less than legal operation in the back room).

GregPQ · Post by **GregPQ** » Wed Aug 17, 2011 7:05 am

I'll chime in with my oft-told recollection of my grandfather using Gillette blue blades in the late 1950's, early 1960's. He had a small peach basket that he tossed them in, after one shave. This was in north Florida, and those were delicious peaches from south Georgia. Anyway, whenever I got to play with his gear, I always used one of the discarded blades. I still don't know how he disposed of those little baskets of razor blades...

When he moved on to Gillette Stainless Steel blades, he continued to throw them after one shave. I got to point out the error of his ways.

Greg

Squire · Post by **Squire** » Wed Aug 17, 2011 7:27 am

From my first hand recollection the men picked up pretty quickly that the SS blades would last more than one shave but the women were much slower to come around.

Rufust445 · Post by **Rufust445** » Wed Aug 17, 2011 11:06 am

IAmTheJody wrote:You can thank Wilkinson Sword for the death of carbon blades. When they introduced the first stainless steel blades, the Wilkinson Sword Super Sword, people snatched them up so much that it was hard to even find them in stock. ...

This information I gleaned from articles in old TIME magazines:

Nov. 23, 1962 TIME Magazine article: Competition: Beastly Blades

May 1, 1964 TIME Magazine article: Britain: The Reluctant Millionaires

Jan. 29, 1965 TIME Magazine article: World Business: The Blade Battle

Interestingly enough, a pack of the WS Super Sword blades sold on eBay yesterday for $33.60 shipped making them $6.72 a blade. Someone must really like them 49+ year old blades. I'm curious if they are as good as WS's other well known and liked vintage blade, the WS Light Brigade blades.

Your post and the Time articles have given me more perspective on the stash of 20 or so Super Sword Edge that I have left. They preceded the Light Brigade, of which I have two 5-packs stashed away.

The Super Sword Edge made up most of a lot of 30 or so, along with a pack of Thins (1963) and some Super Blues. Per blade cost from the eBay auction was in the 30-40 cent range.

I haven't tried the Light Brigades yet, but the Super Sword Edge shaves have been the smoothest and best of the 15 or so blades I've tried.

The Gillette Thins have been good for one DFS. The Super Blues have been good for one tolerable, not-so-smooth shave.

As always with blades, YMMV

harper · Post by **harper** » Wed Aug 17, 2011 1:21 pm

I loved the Super Blues and used them until Wilkinson introduced SS blades which were not as sharp as Super Blues on the first shave but about as good as I recall from the second shave on for a good many more. Interestingly, according to the President of Gillette which was a client, Gillette held the patent on SS blades but thought that men would prefer a sharper blade to one that was not quite as sharp but lasted longer so they did not introduce one until competition forced them to. This was another major market mistake by people who should know better. The Swiss believed that people would not buy quartz watches because they thought that watch buyers would not want to have the batteries changed once a year (at that time). This decision almost destroyed the viability of the Swiss watch industry as quartz movments took over the world's watch business and they still dominate in terms of sales. The Swiss came back with expensive traditional watches and in terms of value are doing quite well but in terms of numbers of watches made and sold are a small blip on the world watch market that they once dominated. As for the Edsel, this was the wrong car at the wrong time even though it was a good car for the time. It was a case of something not being needed, again a marketing mistake.

Squire · Post by **Squire** » Wed Aug 17, 2011 2:13 pm

Yeah, and BetaMax was convinced they would dominate the video market because they had a better system.

haiti222 · Post by **haiti222** » Thu Aug 18, 2011 6:08 am

Note that the Super Blue in your picture is the late model one (late 70s to late 80s).
It is PTFE coated and has better longevity than the early Silicone ones and the earlier PTFE ones. Gillette had a patent on how to better bond the PTFE to carbon steel that helped longevity and quality. If this blade works for you, you could get 3-5 quality shaves. I get 5.

Gillette continued to make this blade in the US until production was moved to France around 1989. In some parts of the US, this was actually the dominant (or even only IIRC) Gillette DE in some stores at the very end of US production (when stores were often only stocking one Gillette DE blade).......

harper · Post by **harper** » Fri Aug 19, 2011 7:08 pm

Squire: the world is full of dead "better" products that did not make it for one reason or another. Products die or do not succeed for a variety of reasons but frequently because the "better" product is not an improvement that the buyer can detect; laboratory tests that show one product is better than another may often be so marginal that anyone who buys the product will not be able to see the difference; if the cost is more than the existing product, it is doomed to failure. Another reason is the need for a new product ... no matter how good it is. Still another reason is that the cost of making a better product may be so prohibitive that the manufacturer does not make enough profit on it to justify the manufacturing icost. And then there are a variety of reasons that none of us really know or care much about. The German PAL and French Secom TV signals provide much better picture reproduction than the Americn RCA system (HD now gives us a picture quality about what the Germans and French, Japanese and others have been seeing for years). For political reasons the US did not use either of those systems (and for political reasons at the time the Soviets used the French system). It had nothing to do with which product was better.

Often very good products do not last in the marketplace because the manufacturer never intended them to last. All the research shows that more new products are introduced when economic times are bad than when they are good. In a down market a brewer may introduce a new beer knowing that it will never gain over a 1/2% market share but that half may be so cheap to produce that it is marketed for a time in order to gain market share at a very low cost. And some very good products die by the wayside because the supplier may no longer be able to get the ingredients needed to manufacture it. I spent a long time in the new product field and suspect that there are more reasons for good products to fail that there are for good products to succeed, luck being a major one in both cases.

The secret to success is knowing what might, when it might, and how a product may succeed and the problem is that the answer keeps changing. If it didn't there would be no failed products.

Squire · Post by **Squire** » Fri Aug 19, 2011 7:30 pm

Shades of Billy beer.

harper · Post by **harper** » Sat Aug 20, 2011 12:44 pm

Squire: other than for Billy himself, I wonder if the product made any money for the brewer ... or even if the brewer cared.

Squire · Post by **Squire** » Sat Aug 20, 2011 2:13 pm

I tried it, once.

brothers · Post by **brothers** » Sat Aug 20, 2011 3:10 pm

I had some of it once, can't remember if I drank any of if.