Review: Leaf Thorn and Twig Razors

It’s dangerous to have epiphanies while shaving. But in this case it was unavoidable: My epiphany was about shaving.

For the past few weeks, my bathroom routine has been a little like George Clooney in O Brother, Where Art Thou?, minus the smelly Dapper Dan. I’ve been lathering shave soap with a brush and bowl and shaving with an old-fashioned single-blade, single-edge, unmedicated safety razor.

Specifically, I’m using the Leaf Thorn—a stylish and well-marketed and self-avowedly “aggressive” single-edge razor whose house blades are so wafer-thin the company imprints them with the words “I am not plastic.” The less aggressive Leaf Single Edge Razor is called the Twig, and it's meant to be more gentle than the Thorn. It’s all very cute.

But what I learned, after weeks of baby-smooth shaves with the Thorn, is that I’ve been doing shaving wrong.

Stay Sharp

The epiphany was something that seems obvious at first: The best and safest blade is always the sharp one. The best kitchen knife is the one you keep sharp. The same goes for scissors and for the blades you put on your own face. The Leaf’s low-tech, simple single-blade was cutting as closely and well as any fancy cartridge blade setup I’ve tried. The reason was mostly that it was still sharp.

Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

Because here’s the thing: It doesn’t matter if you’ve got a 15-layer stacked blade cartridge with whistles, lights, and responsive AI. Dull blades are awful, and all blades get dull with use. And when blades get dull, they start to yank on my hair instead of cutting it, irritate my skin into aggravation, and cause little nicks when the skin pinches up. Alas, the modern cartridge-based shaving blades that dominate the supermarket are expensive and often inconvenient to constantly replace: around $30 or $40 for a pack of 10.

The price adds up. Time magazine knew this game already in 1927: “As everyone knows, safety razor manufacturers derive the bulk of their profit, not from razors, but from the replaceable blades.” The old business-school yarn that King Camp Gillette devised a get-rich scheme to lose money on safety razor handles to make money on the blades is a bit of a myth, but the business logic of shaving remains inexorable: The money’s in the blades.

So I resist swapping out for too long. And then pay the price. Even as Gillette and other razor makers advertise that their blade cartridges are good for weeks’ worth of shaves, my own coarse, evil, steel-clad stubble tends to eat through a cartridge a whole lot sooner than I want to replace it. So either I keep paying blade installments or pay my tax in the form of a no-good, very-bad shave.

The Safety Dance

The Leaf offers an opposing theory of shaving: The money’s in the handle. The blades are instead cheap, small, and ubiquitous. The Thorn is at heart an old-fashioned safety razor. It’s compatible with pretty much any good old-fashioned safety blade, whether the classic Astra Platinum (you’ll have to snap the double edge in half) or Leaf’s own blades. Packs of a hundred are less than a $20 bill.

Photograph: Leaf

Each blade is a wafer-thin piece of recyclable stainless steel, which takes up no space in the medicine cabinet. There’s basically no opportunity cost to keep you from swapping out. And so, perhaps paradoxically, the low-tech blade is sharper and therefore better for the simple reason you'll likely change it more often.

The Leaf Thorn and Twig single-edged razors have the benefit of being elegant, with a short profile and a pleasing heft, available in colors from rose gold to chrome to “fig.” (Mine's just black.) Unlike older-school double-edged safety razors—and their awkward T-bone geometry that makes the under-chin a blind swipe—the single-edge Leaf will have a familiar asymmetric slant that aids in catching crannies wherever they may be.

The Leaf feels, in fact, like a razor you paid $60 for, which is a good thing, because that's what it costs. The savings come in over the life of the blade, as blade replacements remain vanishingly cheap: between a dime and a quarter apiece.

Note that the Dollar Shave Club operates on a similar business model, but with modern cartridge blades. They remove the inconvenience (and also the choice) surrounding blade replacements. If the blades just show up unbidden, you’re more likely to replace them often, and thus have sharp blades. Note, however, that the Dollar Shave Club is now more like $6 to $9 a month. Inflation comes for us all, even those of us named after dollar bills.

A Tale of Twigs and Thorns

Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

A sharp single blade is different, however. It requires a learning curve.

The Leaf safety razor comes in “Twig” and “Thorn” varieties. Of the two, the Thorn–which is designed to mow down coarse stubble like mine—is more “aggressive.” Aggressive means the blade gap is 0.2 millimeters larger, exposing more blade and thus offering the chance to potentially nick your Adam's apple if you're playing it loose. The first time I used it, I did indeed give my apple a little bird peck.

But this was a hiccup. By the next time I used the Thorn, I didn’t just jam it haphazardly against my neck the way I would a Gillette or an electric. I shaved in single, deliberate swipes. One swipe down, one swipe up, using gentle soap made from actual lathering with an actual brush, and my skin was as smooth as it had been since junior high, with less irritation than I’d get from most cartridge blades. It's also a much more mindful ritual, in the modern parlance of self-care—one that I came to value.

Still, if I were shaving legs or more concerned about avoiding the merest possibility of nicks, I’d probably just spring for the less aggressive Twig.

Photograph: Leaf

The Leaf’s most important design distinction from others in the long history of safety razors isn’t the blade gap, however. It’s the easy and pleasant swap-out mechanism. A double-edged safety blade tends to unscrew at the top. You take the whole top off, put a blade down, and then screw the thing back together. This is something that would cause me to be less likely to swap out the blade, and then eventually suffer a bad shave.

To swap out a blade on the Leaf Twig or Thorn, you just turn counterclockwise on the bottom of the handle. As you turn, the top of the Thorn corkscrews away from the blade, which slips right out. The process is almost fun, like clicking a Bic pen until it annoys your teacher.

The danger, unfortunately, is that doing so carelessly lets the blade slip a few degrees out of alignment with the safety edge—which hasn’t caused any effect I’ve noticed, but seems both solvable and less than ideal.

The plus side is that the ease and pleasantness of swapping blades encourages me to do so. And then I have a sharp blade. And (say it with me) the best blade is the sharp one.