Well the biggest problem with this that I see is that you're generalizing from one example. If I shave with an electric (which I normally do) I can feel stubble if I touch my face within an hour, if not right after I shave. If I shave with a wet razor, I feel quite smooth for up to 12 hours. So your numbers vary tremendously. The degree having stubble bothers people also varies tremendously from person to person. As does, I'm sure, how attracted any particular woman is to stubble.
I do tend to agree about cleaning, and I think that's far more generalizable. I always used to argue with my mother that there was little point to me making my bed because I would just mess it up again that night. But now that I don't live at home anymore, I always make sure to make it when I leave, since it won't be being messed up any time soon.
Well the biggest problem with this that I see is that you're generalizing from one example.
I think I can confidently state this is a question to be addressed by experiment directed by considerable quantity of anecdotes.
If I shave with an electric (which I normally do) I can feel stubble if I touch my face within an hour, if not right after I shave.
I can even after a wet shave.
I always used to argue with my mother that there was little point to me making my bed because I would just mess it up again that night.
There's a comic circulating on Facebook of a kid asking his mother that, and the mother answering “why wipe your ass if you're going to shit again?”.
Well, diminishing returns don't set in until the third or fourth or nth wipe - the first wipe removes some quite dangerous and smelly material.
And on the other hand, making one's bed has zero health or smell benefits that I can see, and won't even impress 99% of the people one runs into - since they won't be in your bedroom noting how unusual it is your bed is made and how very Conscientious you must be.
I roll around a lot when I sleep, and I find making my bed daily virtually eliminates my tendency to pull the sheets off completely any given night. Whenever I do pull the sheets off they end up in a tangle that takes a lot of time and effort to get back into any useful state.
Then in that case, you don't need anyone lecturing you - you will do it just to get a better night's sleep. And in my own case, I find 'made' beds much harder to sleep in.
You're definitely not the only one. If I have to sleep in a made bed, I will carefully unmake it first. Bedding preferences are idiosyncratic enough that declaring one style to be Right is obvious hubris.
there might be health benefits to an unmade bed. I heard of one study that found that a made bed was more conducive to bacterial growth than leaving your sheets open to the air.
Previous discussion of face shaving.
I only found this because I remembered it-- it don't show up in a google search, whether from the site or a general google search. It doesn't show up in yahoo, bing, or duckduckgo, either, though less wrong posts with less about shaving do show up.
There may be another person's comfort to consider - stubble can be painful if rubbed against sensitive regions. A wet shave is probably preferable before an intimate encounter.
That was my first answer as well. I bought a wet/dry razor after such an encounter.
But thinking further, I believe wet hair is both longer and softer, making for an easier and closer shave.
But I agree with the OP's general principle for a lot of other things. I apply the 80/20 rule for a lot of maintenance cleaning tasks.
I have very scraggly facial hair - it grows very patchily above my jawline (i.e. it's mostly neckbeard) and it looks terrible, so I shave daily. I have an electric shaver with a self-cleaning dock station which was a gift from my parents. My facial hair grows in various directions which makes shaving it a pain. I have to run the shaver over it in different directions, and run my fingers ahead of the shaver to pull the stubble up so the shaver will catch and trim it.
Shaving takes me about two or three minutes each morning, right before I shower. After 24 hours I will have very noticeable rough stubble which I find unpleasant, hence shaving daily. Curiously, I've found that it seems to take pretty much at least 22 hours for it to be the right length for the shaver to be maximally effective. If I shave late one day (say 1pm) and then early the next day (say 8am) I find that it doesn't shave effectively, and I will have rough stubble again much sooner than if I'd shaved at 8am the previous day too.
I've used a safety razor a few times in the past which I found did give me a smoother shave (skin felt very smooth, instead of slightly rough like it does normally), but it took ages of faffing about with the shaving cream and washing the razor and everything and is just not nearly worth the benefit, unless I am doing something very fancy. I haven't experimented with this method much at all.
I almost never shave. I hate the feeling, somehow manage to draw blood even with electric razors, and it wastes time I could put into something else. Instead I enhance and channel my natural trichotillomania urges into continuously plucking my facial hair one by one with tweezers. I usually don't even pay attention anymore, so that I can still do something else like reading at the same time, and there's never more than handful of hairs that need removing from day to day unless I stop for a few days. It doesn't really hurt either, not after the first few times anyway. Plucked hairs will not become apparent again for days.
Someday I'll probably just give more definitive hair removal methods a try. This might actually be even more cost effective than having to set apart some of my time each day for decades to shave.
(Assume 10 minutes a day, time valued at least at $10 / h (assuming San Francisco and assuming it won't change for a long while)(and I'm not even counting the initial price of an electric shaver, neither of all the electricity needed to operate it). That's $608 per year. Average laser hair removal cost would be around $1649 if I am to believe this, and time put into it would be negligible (like around 10 hours at most?). Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that like investing $1749 now and expecting continuous fixed dividends of $608 (~ 37%) every year for several decades? (Assuming hair removal to be definitive of course. Even if not, settling for a few years may already be enough to amortize the investment. Let's say in that case, with a discount rate of 8% on 5 years I think the present value of all the money saved would be around $2 427, $678 in excess of what's been invested. ))
Electric razors hurt. They pull hairs out of my face, even when they are sharp. I used them from 15 years old to 26 and I am never going back.
For the hair on my upper neck, I never found an electric razor that much cut them at all, since they're at a funny angle. I would rub an electric all over them for a while and never get as close as I could on my face. Combine with the fact that electrics hurt and my change was obvious.
I can not get a close shave. With anything I have tried. The only thing left to try is a straight razor. I have the unfortunate combination of sensitive skin and a very coarse beard. Even feather DE razors which many claim are the sharpest in the world don't get me completely clean shaven.
Currently I use a DE razor to remove the majority, then do a touch up with a disposable. I use jojoba oil afterwards. This seems to minimize skin irritation for me.
YMMV, of course. But I switched to wet shaving from electric when I discovered I could shave without shaking my skull with vibrations.
Many wet shave razors really, really suck. Disposables are really shitty and should be avoided. Try various models. A post on my blog about razors.
edit: I really, really hate having stubble. It annoys the hell out of me. So wet shaving grants me an extra half-day not annoyed, which is nice. I shave about every second day.
I shave in the shower. I haven't used soap or shaving cream on my face in years. My skin is happier too.
If there is some particular moment at which the least possible beard growth is desirable, for instance for a photo shoot, then I can see the advantage of the closest possible shave.
I was going to write “I've heard that in some cultures, failure to do that is considered such a faux pas that they have a name (‘five o' clock shadow’) for that”; then I looked up http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stubble and found out that's something marketers made up. (Well, after knowing about De Beers and diamonds, that doesn't surprise me at all.) FWIW, that's not the case where I am: stubble is quite widespread, and I only shave a couple times a week.
If wet shaving takes something like 10 minutes
It's not like I've ever timed myself while shaving, but I'm pretty confident it takes much less than that. Anyway, I wear a goatee and sideburns, and I find it very hard to give them a decent outline with an electric razor alone.
It varies with practice, so if Bart has tried wet shaving only once or twice, that's probably what it took him. In a recent trip I forgot my electric razor and had to do wet shaves for a few weeks, which I had never done before. The first time took 10 minutes, then it gradually decreased to less than 5.
I don't like shaving almost as much as I dislike having a beard. I have a fairly soft, slow growing beard. The result is that I only shave when I absolutely can't stand it any longer. This is not possible with an electric (at least it hurts too much to bother, so I would have to shave everyday). Thankfully I have no pressure from work or social life to be clean shaven, otherwise I would have to revisit electric. This could be quantified as 2 minutes with an electric everyday (60.8 hr/yr) or 8-10 minutes every 5-7 days (~45hr/yr).
Is a general analysis of the costs of shaving vs. beard possible, or is there so much individual variation that anyone who's interested in the question will just have to experiment?
I guess I can't put html in here. So please copy/paste this into your browser URL - http://www.drskincareproducts.com/products/latisse
I used an electric razor when I first started shaving, and switched to a wet shave maybe three years ago, purely for reasons of convenience. I hated fumbling around with a hazardous-seeming power cord or keeping a cordless razor charged - invariably, I would forget to plug it in, and it would run out of juice halfway through a shave.
A safety razor obviously doesn't have that issue. To me, the closeness of the shave and the cost savings are merely side benefits; convenience is the main factor.
I use a beard trimmer and take it back to about an eighth of an inch whenever someone gets annoyed by it.
The actual length will vary for you: you should experiment until you find a length that is just longer than "sandpaper feel". But certainly, your argument is solid: there's no point going for the closest possible shave when just a close shave will do; and for me, there's no point going for a close shave when just a trim will do.
I can shave my face with an electric razor more quickly than I can with a wet shave, but I can't shave my neckline with an electric razor without turning it into a rashy mess. So I don't really have a choice of electric vs. wet shave, but electric plus wet shave vs. wet shave. It takes me the same amount of time to wash and soak my face and neck to soften the hair as to do only the neck, and the actual shaving step takes less than two minutes, so I'm trading off an insignificant time gain against a less close shave, which is why I no longer bother with electric razors.
I think shaving processes are probably too idiosyncratic to generalize well.
I personally don't like the feeling of electric razors. When I shave manually it feels like I'm making progress in removing the hair. I don't get that feeling from an electric razor, so it feels slightly uncomfortable.
I maintain moderately outlandish facial hair (close-cropped mutton-chops, if you're curious), using an assortment of shaving and clipping techniques. In my experience, a wet shave produces a qualitatively different texture than what I achieve with an electric razor. This can still be distinguished well into the evening, which is probably the time when anyone important is going to be touching my face.
OK, OK, it's not the weightiest of topics, and it's not rocket science. But I searched the site for "shaving" and "razor" and didn't see where it had been previously addressed.
I had a beard for nearly 30 years, but have been shaving again the last 6. I have always (since a brief experimental period in high school) used an electric razor for shaving. So did my daddy and his daddy before him, back through history.. wait, that can't be right. But my daddy and his daddy did, anyway.
I can shave with my electric in about 45 seconds, or maybe twice that if I'm trying to do a great job. What on earth do men see with wet shaves? Assuming they don't find the process inherently rewarding, the only argument I've heard is that you can get a closer shave. Which brings me to rationality.
Why does one want a close shave? Beard grows continuously throughout the day and night. Let's take as a guess that after two hours, beard growth will transform a very close wet shave into hair length immediately after an electric shave. Assuming it is the ratio of hair length that determines the relative utility of two different beard configurations, the advantage of the closer shave falls throughout the day. The ratio would be 2.00 after four hours, 1.50 after six hours, etc. If wet shaving takes something like 10 minutes, if desired one could do a second electric shave in the men's room late in the afternoon and come out with less stubble for the vast majority of the day with less total time invested.
If there is some particular moment at which the least possible beard growth is desirable, for instance for a photo shoot, then I can see the advantage of the closest possible shave. A date is another possibility, though there is anecdotal evidence that some women prefer a hint of stubble to a smooth baby face.
But with those rare exceptions, the goal isn't to have zero stubble. It's to have stubble that's less long.
Similar arguments pertain to various sorts of housecleaning. Since whatever you're cleaning starts getting dirty again immediately, putting lots of effort into extraordinary levels of cleanliness seems to have little value unless you inherently value that moment of extraordinary cleanliness.