Living in the United States and being a wet shaver presents some challenges. The US shaving market is, of course, all about multi-blade disposable cartridges and electrics.

If you want to load up that old Gillette Super Speed razor you got on Ebay with a good blade, what do you do?

Nearly all the mass merchandiser stores carry a peg of double edge blades you’ll find if you look hard enough. While they will often carry a house brand name, they will almost always be American-made Personna blades.

And they will suck.

They’ll pull whiskers, nick you, feel rough, and generally kill your wet shaving buzz.

Living in the Internet Age, US wet shavers have choices. We can search for double edge (DE) blades around the globe. And man, they’re out there. It seems every country east of the Greenwich Line offers DE blades; clearly shavers there are more enlightened than we Colonials.

So now what? You have blades from Russia, Israel, Greece, Turkey, Korea, Japan, Germany, UK, India… how do you decide what to buy? And in what quantity?

If you spend time on the wet shaving forums you’ll find varying opinions on what works best. Like the difference between soap and cream, there isn’t a definitive answer. You can take a chance on Ebay, as I did, and buy 100 blades at a time. Kind of a ‘spray-and-pray’ approach. I went with blades known as ‘IP’ or ‘Israeli Personnas’ which had a pretty good reputation and a decent price. Luckily the choice worked out for me. They matched well with my Super Speed and my beard.

There are so many brands out there though, you get the itch to try others. Small lots kill you with shipping charges and big lots are just too much of a gamble.

Market niche developing, no?

Enter the DE blade sampler pack.

A simple, brilliant idea that meets a need wet shavers have to check out different blades. They are available from various vendors, but to my knowledge were introduced by West Coast Shaving.

Check out their site, likely their link will be showing in the Google Ad window here *cough* *plug*, click through there and you can help them recoup their ad cost and contribute a penny or two to this humble blog as well.

West Coast offers different levels of samplers and even give you a list as to the order they recommend you use them. Find one you like, you can go wild, get a bunch.

I have enough blades now to keep shaving until, oh, the end of the Mayan calendar or so.

Bay Lime Shaving Cream