(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . WYFP: Ensh*ittification Hits Me Right in the Face [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2024-08-31 Not. The. Same. I am a man. A man of Eastern European / Slavic heritage, as such, I am blessed/cursed with a prodigious amount of hair follicles. I am hairy. I am hirsute. I have hair growing everywhere; hair growing out of my hair, even. Except, where I really want it, on the top of my head (lol) … I’ve been called many names: Beast, Bear, Grizzly, Sasquatch, and now as I age, Yeti. Puberty came late but when it did arrive it came in spades. I have had a beard since I was 16. A FULL beard. Lush, thick, coarse … sprouting up literally overnight. Since that time, I have been shaving. There were times, as a young man, where I would allow the beard to grow out. Just for novelty’s sake, to see what it looked like. After a few weeks or a month, it would be back to a clean-shaven face. I just don’t like the feel of a heavy beard on my face. The tools and techniques have been rather constant. Electric shavers (I tried many) were a cruel joke: they’d yank, tug, or pull hair out of my face rather than cut it. So I use blades. Razors. Along with shaving cream. Or rather, shaving gel. Specifically, EdgeTM shave gel. Again, as a young man, much experimentation was undertaken (and not just with shaving products, nudge-nudge, wink-wink), and I’m always willing to try something new (once), but I settled on the combo of Edge/Schick and have used them dutifully for nearly 50 years. We all know that over the years that companies looking to increase (or merely keep) their bottom-line profits have done so in methods not obviously apparent to the consumers and end-users. Shrinkflation — where the package size gets reduced but the price remains the same, and Enshittification — where the product is made from less-costly materials. Not the same. New (left) and old version. I went to pick up some EdgeTM on my last shopping trip and noticed a change. The can had gone from a straight cylinder to a cone-top model. An examination of the net weight showed they were not subjecting me to shrinkflation. I thought perhaps this was cost-savings from a more-economical packaging container ... no big deal. Until I went use it — and what came out of the can was Not The Same. I shaved and went to work, and since I work in a small-ish town away from the metro area, I went out at lunch to a store and found older cans still on the shelf there. Picked one up for some head-to-head testing. The new (but not improved) version is less gel-like. I’m old enough to remember when EdgeTM first came out. It hadn’t been on the shelves for even a decade when I started shaving, and it was popular, for a reason — shaving was a much more comfortable experience with it. It was so popular that the big foam makers, Gillette & Barbasol, came out with their own versions of it. Gillette’s was called Foamy Gel, and it was an apt description. It looked like the new EdgeTM. I don’t know if it’s just me or part of the gene pool I sprung from, but shaving is a regimen that is quite intolerant of disruption. Despite all the advances in shaving technology over the years, my father, a Greatest Generation veteran, shaved with a single-blade safety razor until he passed away at age 85. He was a Wilkinson Sword & Barbasol man. One of my earliest memories is watching him shave while I was in the bathtub. He would shake the can of Barbasol and hit the bottom of it with the heel of his palm. Why did he do that? I’ll never know. I should have asked him. But he always did it, and you could tell when he was shaving from the dull thud-thud-thud coming from the bathroom. He faced down his own enshittification, though. I was home to visit, sometime in the early ‘90s, and peeked in the medicine cabinet. There lied a pack of Schick double-edge blades. I asked why no Wilkinson Sword ones, and he responded grouchily, “They’re just crap now.” The more things change the more the stay the same? I know this is a completely first-world problem. But when it hits you right in the face, it’s hard to shrug off. Time for some experimentation like in my youth. Suggestions welcomed. So, WYFP? [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/8/31/2266821/-WYFP-Ensh-ittification-Hits-Me-Right-in-the-Face?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=latest_community&pm_medium=web Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/