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Shaving can be the absolute worst, especially for people with sensitive skin. Razors can leave behind razor burn, ingrown hairs and cuts, and when you've worn down a razor so that it's no longer usable, it joins the others in landfills to the tune of 2 billion razors per year in the US (PDF).
The makers of a new product called the Skarp Laser Razor want to give you an incredibly close, irritation-free shave using lasers. The prototype is an aluminum razor-shaped gizmo that they say uses a laser to cut (not burn) the hair at skin level for a close shave, and works for all hair colors.
Because the laser is supposed to last about 50,000 hours and be usable without water, it would be good for the environment as well.
http://www.cnet.com/news/forget-blades-the-skarp-laser-razor-wants-you-to-shave-with-lasers/
[Kickstarter Campaign]: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/skarp/the-skarp-laser-razor-21st-century-shaving
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Jiro on Wednesday September 30 2015, @05:57AM
Laser beams are made of light and one could reasonably think that blonde hair would be harder to cut with a laser than dark hair, so it could genuinely be about hair color.
(Score: 0, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 30 2015, @07:23AM
That is exactly what it is about. Laser hair removal is significantly less efficacious for blond hairs than for black hairs because black hairs absorb the energy much better. E-fueled is just so racist he thinks everything is about race.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Wednesday September 30 2015, @02:42PM
Speaking of color, I totally understand how a pasty white vampiric complexion guy with dark hair could preferentially burn the hair off. Hows that work if you're a black skinned dude with equally black hair, superficially it would tend to sear skin as the same rate as hair due to similar color, right?
Maybe its some kind of surface area to volume ratio thing where frying off a hair's thickness of skin wouldn't really do much to my skin but would pretty well annihilate a single hair.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 30 2015, @07:24AM
Then again, perhaps it would only kill the hair follicle - which means you wouldn't need to shave that particular hair till the follicle is regenerated.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 30 2015, @07:38AM
For laser hair removal it is the dark hair that works like an "optical fibre" - the dark hair absorbs the heat and channels it to the root which then burns out. If you are lucky the root is damaged so much that it won't grow any more hair, but most of the time, especially if your hair is blond, it just burns it enough to make the hair fall out but not enough to permanently injure the root.