There have been some reports coming out of late in the forums and Reddit site saying that people are starting to notice price increases on a lot of shaving products due to tariffs.
Let’s face it, just like in other parts of our lives, a lot of shaving supplies (hardware and software) is made abroad and shipped in. And some of the retailers seem to have stocked up to beat the tariffs, and some seem to be running out of older stock at older prices and are starting to have to jack up prices.
I noticed reports of a couple of things that I wanted to order soon going up by as much as 50%, so I placed a couple of orders. In a couple of cases, the potential savings could be significant. In many cases, it won’t be that big a deal, but a buck’s a buck, right?
Above, you see the biggest single cost of this buying spree: the Henson AL-13 Medium (it’s the one in black). I really am thinking this is likely to be the last razor I buy, though I can’t promise anything like that. But as I’ve talked about recently, there really isn’t any other hole I need to fill in the razor stable.
To recap briefly, though, I love how my existing Henson mild razor (the blue one) shaves and feels. I love everything about it except its weight, but I’m willing to overlook that because it just works so well and so comfortably almost all the time. The medium should be no exception, but it will overcome another small issue I have with the mild, and that is that it’s almost too mild. I was looking for something that would give a closer shave with less effort, and this should do it.
Now yes, I hear some of you asking about the colors, I did purchase the medium in black because I wanted to be able to instantly differentiate the two from each other, but also because it was my second favorite color that the series comes in. But there is another way to tell the two apart: the mild has one plus (+) sign and the medium has two plus (++) signs on their plates, as shown below.
Henson Shaving is based in Canada and manufactures their product line there. And I’ve been seeing prices starting to creep up to as much as $85, while it’s normal price is $70 (USD). So I pulled the trigger on this at the $70 price point before it goes up.
Most razor blades are made abroad as well. Egypt, India, Russia, Germany, and Japan among others are all big sources for blades, and while a tuck (box) of blades is not expensive, I knew I’d be stocking up on some favorites sometime before the end of the year, so I added 110 blades to the order. With the 5 RK blades that came with the Henson, I added 115 to the collection, taking my inventory total to 235 blades. Considering I use one blade for 3 shaves and replace a blade once a week, I can now shave 705 times over 235 weeks, or about 4 1/2 years before I’ll run out of blades. So…I have no compelling reason to order more for quite a while.
The final thing I ordered in this shipment from Razor Emporium was an Arko shaving soap stick because they’re cheap and people talk about them a lot. Arko is made in Turkey, and it reportedly has a strange or funky scent. What I’m getting off of it is kind of a minty/soapy/sweet/medicinal scent, but we’ll see what happens when I try it in a couple of weeks. People swear by its lather, so I’m excited to try it soon.
This is the second stick-type soap I have (the other being the Carden Farms soap that I bought at the State Fair, but you’ll read about that in the SOTD weekly post on Sunday), and it’s the third stick-based product in the stable. That third is the Razor Emporium unscented pre-shave stick.
That was the extent of the Razor Emporium order, which interestingly shipped in 3 days from Arizona…so go figure. I had an order of popcorn that took 10 days to come from central Indiana, and it ended up going to West Virginia and Pennsylvania first before coming here to Minnesota.
People had been starting to raise the alarm on a few retailers selling Proraso products at a 50% increase–the tub of white, red, or green soap selling for $15 instead of $10, for instance. Thanks to my use of the samples of the blue and green lines, I’d already decided I wanted to stock those product lines, and I also wanted to try out the Proraso White cream, as the blue and green creams have been working well. So I ordered those directly from Proraso-USA, as they seem to be the only ones who sell the entire product line kits for less than the cost of the combined individual products. So instead of paying $42+ for the green line in the tin, I paid $32, then $29 for the whole blue line, and the standard $10 for the white cream. Plus, thanks to a discount, I got the total cost down to $61, and those products should last me a while. Assuming a 50% increase to the cost that I avoided, that turns into a good $30+ savings. The Proraso shipment hasn’t arrived yet–it’s due around the end of the week, so I’ll post about that later.
Because I’ve tried to be honest about spend, this set of orders totaled about $140 with discounts, though I did have a pre-paid gift visa card that I burned on the Razor Emporium order, so real out of pocket was about $90.
But in case you’re curious, that puts the total collection at 6 razors (but 11 razor options counting the Rockwell’s 6 plates), still at 21 blade brands/lines in stock (we shall never talk of the Kai again), 5 pre-shave products (yes, I want to get one or two more here down the road, even though I added more of a couple of options), 26 lather options between soaps, gels, creams, foams, and sticks, 3 brushes (and I want to add a synthetic one soon), and 10 aftershave options. The bottom line is that I’m pretty well stocked with what I really need. There are very few things that I want to add, and I’m stocked enough now where I don’t think I’ll be restocking existing products terribly soon.
In the collection, I have 1 razor remaining to try (the Henson medium, that’ll be next week’s shaves), 2 blades to try (one of those will make their debut next month), 2 lathers to try (Arko and the Proraso white cream, and those will both be coming in a matter of a couple of weeks), and 1 aftershave to try (the Proraso green–I’ve been using the blue sample with the green cream and pre-shave samples). More reporting to come!
