The Bic Chrome Platinum blades shown above came to me as part of a sensitive skin blade sampler from Razor Emporium back in September 2024. (I see that since then, they have removed these blades from that sample pack and have moved them to a mild sampler pack). They’re rated as a 3.0 on the 5 point Razor Emporium aggressiveness scale, meaning they’re comparatively mild.
I’ve seen posts featuring or talking about these blades in the Wicked Edge subreddit, and most of them talked about the blades positively and affirmed the classification as a fairly mild blade, but they were still pretty popular.
So about a month ago, I put it in the queue to try. What’s that? I haven’t mentioned the queue yet? I put together an Excel file that tracks my ratings and use of individual products, and features a queue of planned shave combos along with a tracking of the combos I’ve tried. I created this file back in February, though prior to that was a far less complicated tracker in Google Sheets, so that’s where I keep track of my shaves and plan ahead by about a month.
I went into this shave not expecting anything Earth-shattering. The razor was on a medium setting. The blade was mild. After a week of aggressive-feeling shaves, I was looking forward to a shave that was just going to be comfortable. It didn’t need to be close or even amazing as long as it didn’t feel so…scrapey.
But today’s shave was just one of those cases where everything went right from the start. The Proraso soap lathered absolutely beautifully–it was perfectly moist (something that I usually need to chase a bit, adding a little water to the brush once or twice), it was perfectly thick and foamy, and it went on my face and neck perfectly, noticeably standing up the hairs (at least on my cheek, where I could see them sticking up out of the foam).
From the first stroke of my Rockwell 6C razor with plate 3, the shave was amazingly comfortable, smooth, and close. So close, in fact, that on my neck, I didn’t need the third pass, except to clean up a couple of spots that were missed or weren’t as close as the rest of my neck was.
The post shave went well. There wasn’t a lot of sting from the alum block, even with a couple of noticeable nicks on my neck that bled a little bit. And after rinsing that off, the balm went to work and did what it does so well: smoothed out my skin and made it feel soft and pampered.
The Rating
Shave #132. Even if I’d expected a great shave out of this combo, I think the results still would have exceeded those expectations. This easily is one of the best shaves I’ve had in 9 months, surprisingly right up there with combos including much more aggressive blades (Nacet, Feather, Perma-Sharp) and even better than combos with equally mild blades (the Gillette 7 O’clock Yellow). I’ll be trying the blade with other plates of the Rockwell this week (probably the milder plates), so we’ll see how that goes.
Comfort: 4.75 out of 5
Quality/Closeness: 5 out of 5
Overall: 4.88 out of 5
