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A team of engineers at MIT led by C. Cem Tasan has discovered why steel razor blades go dull even when cutting hair that's 50 times softer than them. Using an electron microscopic, they found that under the right conditions a single hair can chip a blade edge.
[...] However, razor blades don't last and other steel blades, like knives and scalpels, also go dull even when used exclusively on softer materials. According to MIT, this is because there's more going on than a simple wearing down of metal, such as happens when a blade is rubbed against something harder, like a whetstone. Instead, what happens is that if a razor blade strikes a hair under the wrong conditions, it becomes stressed, cracks, and then chips due to a mechanism called stress intensification. This chipping leads to more cracks, leading to more chipping in a cascading cycle, ultimately resulting in a very dull razor and an unpleasant shave.
Journal Reference:
Gianluca Roscioli, Seyedeh Mohadeseh Taheri-Mousavi, Cemal Cem Tasan. How hair deforms steel [$], Science (DOI: 10.1126/science.aba9490)
Apparently it is not because the hairs have been affected by Brundlefly hybridization.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by fadrian on Saturday August 08 2020, @06:09AM (3 children)
I've lived in this world with beard and without. Here's the reality: Without a beard, shaving's a pain, and you'd rather not do it, because you, like everyone else, are a lazy bastard, but if you don't you end up growing a beard by default; with a beard, grooming's a pain, and you'd rather not do it because you, like everyone else, are a lazy bastard, but if you don't, you end up looking like a refugee from a ZZ Top tribute band. The moral of the story? You can't fucking win.
That is all.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 08 2020, @07:24AM (2 children)
How was this modded Troll? It is the honest truth.
(Score: 2) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Saturday August 08 2020, @09:29AM (1 child)
There's a middle ground: I wear a beard explicitely because I'm too fucking lazy to shave every day, but I don't keep it trimmed to perfection - just enough to look acceptable.
I give it a clean trim every monday morning and that's it. Come Friday afternoon, it starts looking really quite unkempt. But then it matches my TGIF outfit, and the weekend is coming up anyway.
(Score: 2) by shortscreen on Saturday August 08 2020, @11:29AM
Even if you go for two trims per week and just a comb on the other days it's still less hassle than shaving.
Now that we're expected to wear a face mask in public though, it doesn't matter what you do because nobody is going to see it anyway ;)