The Braun Series 7 Pulsonic Razor: Destroyer of Facial Hair

My lovely girlfriend Tricia got me for Christmas what any bearded man dreams about but doesn't believe exists -- an electric razor that is 99% as close as a barber shop straight-razor cut. Indeed it does exist! The Braun Series 7 Pulsonic Razor.

Prior to this miraculous electric foil razor, I have used good old fashion Gilette disposable razors (Mach 2 & 3), a Norelco electric 3-headed rotary razor, and every now and then, a visit to L.A's award-winning straight-razor master Felix over at the Mark Matthew's Fine Gentleman's Grooming Club. But none of these solutions is perfect, whether prone to cuts and bleeding, ineffective, or time consuming and expensive. It was time for a change, and after much research, Tricia came upon this heralded device.

The box itself is intimidatingly chic and futuristic, looking like it will contain some sort of handheld ray gun banned by a future Galactic Federation yet somehow here in the present, ready for your use. Just to open it, you have to find the tiny instructions that tell you to press on 5 little black pegs that release the inner clear packaging. Finally, the Series 7 razor and its accompanying cleaning and charging dock reveal themselves, lacking only the appropriate sound effects.

Once you install the liquid canister into the bottom of the dock and plug it in, you slide the razor itself into it at a slight angle. The base lights up satisfyingly and charges.

Within a second of sliding the charged razor across my cheek, I felt an intense tingling (10,000 micro-vibrations to be exact) and realized that hundreds of hairs were quietly screaming out in terror. For when I then touched my face, the area affected was completely smooth, free of unwanted facial hair! Amazing! Contrast this to my rotary razor, where minutes would go by and hairs would shrink but never quite disappear, laughing at me and my useless weaponry. Even worse, my skin would start to get dry and sore after dozens of unsuccessful laps around my face. Not so with the Series 7 Hair Destroyer. Once it had eradicated all but my goatee, I placed it back into the dock to be cleaned and it did so without any annoying dead hair lying around.

Granted this device is not cheap. However, it's about the price of four visits to Mark Matthew's and far faster. (Although it won't serve you a beer, offer you a hot towel and chat with you as Felix will.) But isn't it worth not having to despair over unwanted facial hair?

Too much Intermittence, Not Enough Genius

Ugh. I have not been writing often enough on here lately. I can blame my two day Internet outage at home (which I remedied last night by noticing that somehow, my Internet Connection settings were set to "disable". Huh!), my being busy at work, or the Holiday Season blitzkrieg.

It's 2007! Good grief. Ten years ago I was in San Francisco, and was beginning the ride of a Dot.com called I/Pro. AOL was still a closed online garden, trying to get subscribers by snail-mailing people CD's. We all used dial-up modems. The era of perpetual text-based online worlds was on its way out, leaving iChat (not the Apple version) and soon ICQ (the first Instant Messenger) to take over as the prime Internet addiction, for the relatively few of us online. You could still meet people who did not know what the Internet was. To say you met someone on Match.com was still a taboo, an admission of complete social desperation. C|NET was a television show, not just a website. Must-see TV really was must-see, with back-to-back Seinfeld, Newsradio, Friends and ER. The late Mike Oznowitz (Frank Oz's father) still hosted Holiday Puppetry Guild parties at his Oakland home. My PC was a Pentium 150 Mhz running Win95, though for most activities it felt zippy. Nobody had cel phones, only pagers.