Gillette Silver Blue. Do Not Wipe Blade! Why Not?

I got a consignment of the wonderful Gillette Silver Blue blades recently and on the packaging of the each individual blade it warns me in capital letters "DO NOT WIPE BLADE". Why is that? What will wiping the blade remove?

I've been wiping the blade, by giving a few strokes over any clothes I'm wearing at the time, after every shave to remove any soap scum that might reduce the effectiveness of the blade. Could this actually be reducing the effectiveness of the blade?

Hi,

They put coatings on the blade edge on some offerings. Wiping removes the coating. So they warn you not to wipe it off.....

Stan

KQY61 said:

Hi,

They put coatings on the blade edge on some offerings. Wiping removes the coating. So they warn you not to wipe it off.....

Stan

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This

and for safety reason I assume.

abrowncrayon said:

I got a consignment of the wonderful Gillette Silver Blue blades recently and on the packaging of the each individual blade it warns me in capital letters "DO NOT WIPE BLADE". Why is that? What will wiping the blade remove?

I've been wiping the blade, by giving a few strokes over any clothes I'm wearing at the time, after every shave to remove any soap scum that might reduce the effectiveness of the blade. Could this actually be reducing the effectiveness of the blade?

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The 'wiping will remove a coating' theory may very well be right - but every shave wipes the blade over your hide and the stumps of your beard hairs so I'm a little skeptical that the warning relates to that. My theory is 'wiping may remove part of your finger and we want you to have an enjoyable experience with our product' - a more compelling argument. So I don't wipe. But there's no rule against buffing the razor head on a washcloth or towel is there? I'm a lazy sort of fellow so I don't bother to take the blade out before I buff the razor head. Haven't lost a towel or wash cloth yet and I get about 6 or 7 four-pass shaves from a GSB. I also ignore the numbers in corners on all brands.

They only put that on there so that you know licking the blade is totally out of the question.

The coatings are not going to come off from wiping the blades on a towel or soft cloth...They scrape against your face!

Its there so that if you cut yourself, while wiping the blade, you can't go after the company.

nymtber said:

The coatings are not going to come off from wiping the blades on a towel or soft cloth...They scrape against your face!

Its there so that if you cut yourself, while wiping the blade, you can't go after the company.

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exactly

The "Do not wipe" instruction appears to have started sometime before 1963: http://www.unz.org/Pub/SaturdayRev-1963nov30-00006 is the earliest mention I can find. See http://badgerandblade.com/vb/showth...with-the-quot-Do-Not-Wipe-Blade-quot-printing for a long discussion with no particular conclusions.

I wonder if this warning had something to do with the coatings used on early stainless blades? Around that time Gillette was making some early stainless steel blades, but they were coated with something called "organosiloxane gel" rather than PTFE. US2937976 mentions that the organosiloxane gel coating would last several shaves, "although it does not last indefinitely". Wiping might have been found to shorten its lifespan even further, reducing the perceived benefit of the new blades over the older carbon steel variety.

Personally I find that jeans-stropping actually benefits modern blades, as long as the blade was a good one to begin with. So if stropping counts as wiping, then I break this rule almost every day. Mantic has a video on this at http://sharpologist.com/2011/07/video-how-to-extend-the-life-of-razor-blades.html too.

I buff the blade with some down strokes against my boxers. Does anyone know for sure if Gillette add some kind of coating to their blades?

Do you think that removing the mixture of dead skin cells, soapy scum, grease, organic detritus, human waste etc by a quick buff on my Marks and Spencers underwear is worth it even if this coating does exist?

I'd like to believe what Oldbluelight says; that the warning is just there to cover the backside of someone whose job it is to make sure that Gillette aren't sued.

abrowncrayon said:

Do you think that removing the mixture of dead skin cells, soapy scum, grease, organic detritus, human waste etc by a quick buff on my Marks and Spencers underwear is worth it even if this coating does exist?

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Here is one way to look at it. Imagine the cutting edge has a miniature debris field. You could make a landing in the debris field, but it is probably going to damage the landing gear. With blades, the debris is on the landing gear proper, so when you make the landing there is some chance it will be damaged. The Teflon coating will hold up pretty well; cleaning the edge of debris should help. Ok, not the best analogy, but it was quick and easy. All I do is rinse my razor off, but I am pretty sure this is better than putting it up with visible gunk on the edges.

abrowncrayon said:

I got a consignment of the wonderful Gillette Silver Blue blades recently and on the packaging of the each individual blade it warns me in capital letters "DO NOT WIPE BLADE".

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This is a very common typing error, it must say "DO NOT WHIP BLADE".

Haegar said:

This is a very common typing error, it must say "DO NOT WHIP BLADE".

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Thanks. From now on I'll carry on wiping the blade but desist from whipping the blade.

After five three-pass shaves with no special treatment, an Astra edge can look like this:



With jeans-stropping: three strokes on each side, without removing the blade from the razor.



The dull-looking blobs in the first image are some sort of shaving residue, maybe soap scum. The dark band in both images is probably a coating of sintered PTFE. Shaving appears to push it back from the ultimate edge of the blade, but it may still influence shave quality for several shaves. The gunk on the unstropped edge also seems to influence shave quality. With a many blades I get less irritation and better blade life if I strop the blade.

It would be interesting to know if there was some sort of encouragement TO wipe the blade in days of yore, but newer technology made that inadvisable. I sort of assume that since the blades were for few uses and disposable, this was in opposition to "must wipe" straight razor blades.

NCJack said:

It would be interesting to know if there was some sort of encouragement TO wipe the blade in days of yore

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Carbon steel blades (which were common back in the day) should not be stored with moist on them, otherwise they rust very quickly. When stainless steel became common this was no longer an issue. The gel coating explained by Mblakele, in addition to the possible safety issue, is probably the reason for "do not wipe" instructions.

Or just wipe your blade until you find a reason to not do so.

mblakele said:

After five three-pass shaves with no special treatment, an Astra edge can look like this:



With jeans-stropping: three strokes on each side, without removing the blade from the razor.



The dull-looking blobs in the first image are some sort of shaving residue, maybe soap scum. The dark band in both images is probably a coating of sintered PTFE. Shaving appears to push it back from the ultimate edge of the blade, but it may still influence shave quality for several shaves. The gunk on the unstropped edge also seems to influence shave quality. With a many blades I get less irritation and better blade life if I strop the blade.

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Just this morning I was sitting here wondering if stropping a DE blade actually makes a difference. Looking at these pics I'd say it certainly does.

In the instructions provided with razors, it states to not wipe the blade because doing so might damage the edge.

No lawsuit would ever be started because someone cut themselves wiping a razor blade, and weren't warned to not do it. Was there ever, or is there currently, such a warning with a straight razor?

Interesting. Wondered this myself.

mmack66 said:

Was there ever, or is there currently, such a warning with a straight razor?

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Most probably not, because straights (except shavette blades) are not disposable items.

Actually I've got a an old straight razor where the instructions on the box clearly tell to wipe the blade:

"After use,
clean and dry the razor and wipe the blade so as to keep it
polished."

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mmack66 said:

In the instructions provided with razors, it states to not wipe the blade because doing so might damage the edge.

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Interesting. Which razors?

In the accompanying paperwork of a Muhle razor I can read:

Combine this safety razor with special brushes whose design and proportion are in perfect harmony.

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Should I really believe what Muhle has written here?

Getting back to the do-not-wipe statement written on blade envelopes I'd say that a manufacturer would be a fool if he told people how to extend the lifespan of his disposable items.

While looking into the history of the Schick Krona brand, I thought I had found a slightly earlier "do not wipe" reference than I have seen before. This was in Consumer Bulletin Annual, published by Consumers Research, p119. Google dates this to 1960-61 (but see below) and only has snippet view. Here is the link: http://books.google.com/books?ei=Kj...AjAQAAMAAJ&q=often+damages+keen#search_anchor

"Stainless" blades are best not wiped dry; wiping often damages keen edges.

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But this raised a problem. To the best of my knowledge there were no coated stainless DE blades until 1962, when McKibben says that Wilkinson introduced them: http://books.google.com/books?id=YCldvmXq25EC&lpg=PA56&pg=PA56#v=onepage&q&f=false (p56).

Then I noticed that the Consumer Bulletin article specifically recommended the Schick Krona Plus DE blade - but the "Krona Plus" trademark says the first use was 1963. This finally made me suspicious of the google books date: sometimes they are not reliable. Digging deeper into the content I found that this "1960-61" book contained articles as late as 1968. As best I can tell, the razor blade story and the quote about "best not wiped dry" actually appear in a 1965 or 1966 article. That fits much better with what we know about the introduction of coated stainless blades.

So this gives us a 1963 reference and a 1965-66 reference, and both seem to treat "do not wipe" as something new and different. The Consumer Bulletin treats it as specific to stainless blades. According to a Schick patent filed in 1962, the earliest PTFE coatings were somewhat fragile and irregular, and that may have had something to do with it. Several patents for PTFE coatings also mention that the baking or sintering process used to coat the blades has the undesirable effect of softening the metal, which might tie in with the idea that "wiping often damages keen edges". If the hardened, sharpened edge had been softened again, that would be a problem.

Modern blades often have a second coating of a harder material like chrome, which https://www.google.com/patents/US3829969 specifically calls out as a fix for the problems caused by PTFE sintering. Assuming that works and your blade has that hardness coating, "do not wipe" is probably a dead letter.