The straight razor, that timeless icon of quality men’s grooming, is officially a relic.

The latest generations of drugstore razors, born from millions of dollars in research and development, put grandpa’s old single blade to ignominious shame.

“I can’t compete with this,” says straight razor guru Rick Ricci as he holds up the new Schick HYDRO, a scruff chopper developed over a seven-year period by engineers in Germany and the United States.

Ricci owns Toronto’s Truefitt and Hill, a lavish men’s barbershop in Scotia Plaza, where Bay Streeters recline in old school barber chairs for the retro charm of an old school shave.

“We’re world renowned barbers and, I’m telling you, the single blade can’t do as well as this.”

Ah, these are heady days for shaving technology.

Simultaneous with the Schick launch, Gillette unveiled its latest high-priced offering – the ProGlide.

Billed as a “dramatically better” version of the popular Fusion razor (which is advertised on television every 15 seconds), the ProGlide is the product of 30,000 customer trials involving “precise measurement instrumentation used in the aerospace, semiconductor and medical imaging categories,” says a release.

The thrust: Thinner, finer blades reduce tug-and-pull and unlock the secret to irritation-free closeness.

Keep in mind, they said the same thing when they released the Fusion a few years ago.

Shaving technology standards are a swiftly moving target these days.

After hundreds of years of being largely ignored, the daily male horror of ripping wirelike facial hair from skin seems to have suddenly seized the singular attention of the world’s biggest grooming tool makers.

This is linked, no doubt, to impressive growth in the overall male grooming market over the last decade.

The modern man is motivated unlike ever before in modern history to step up his grooming game. That appears to include dropping big bucks on extortionately priced blades and other exotic skin care sundries.

The most obvious reasons for this are, of course, primal.

A recent Schick-funded poll, echoing the findings of less biased studies, found most Canadian women are more likely to get jiggy with clean-shaven men than those who aren’t.

The findings “show a clear link between material, emotional and romantic satisfaction and the frequency of men’s shaves,” says a release.

An anecdotal survey of a half dozen Toronto women backs this up.

Darcie Vany, author of Toronto dating blog fitdarcie.com, recently mused on the grooming habits of men by concluding, “Just because men are genetically able to grow hair on their face doesn’t mean that they should . . . You need to shave every day. We can tell when you don’t, and you look like a bum.”

Ouch.

Probed further, the 31-year-old says there is widespread agreement in female ranks that male facial scruff triggers silent dismissal.

“It’s a deal breaker,” he says. “We’ve all been with someone who doesn’t properly groom, non-shaving is usually symptomatic of worse bad habits.”

Enough said.

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Break out the $20 blades lads.

Whatever it takes.

Robert Cribb welcomes your male-oriented thoughts and queries at rcribb@thestar.ca.