Review: Philips Norelco i9000 Prestige Ultra Shaver

You never really expect your shaver to have an opinion about you. And yet here I was, receiving a failing grade from Philips Norelco’s new i9000 Prestige Ultra shaver, released this spring.

According to a phone app paired to the device, I had apparently been using my shaver wrong. I'd pressed too daintily, whispering along my skin too lightly for an optimal shave. My stats were, in fact, downright abysmal. I had applied optimal pressure just 30 percent of the time. By extension, I had probably been using any number of shavers wrong for years, without knowing.

“Let’s try again!” the app admonished me, with hope in its robot heart.

Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

The i9000 Prestige Ultra is, on the face of it, something I would not have expected. It is an AI-trained shaver, offering real-time feedback to guide each user to their ideal shave—both through an app and via a light-ring collar that glows orange, green, or purple depending on how well you’re doing. Just as a great book teaches you how to read it, this shaver apparently teaches you how to shave with it.

My editor was skeptical. ”No shaver even needs an app, let alone one with metrics and judgment,” she wrote when I described it.

Except, the funny thing is, I apparently needed the help. Within a few days, I hadn’t just received a hearty congratulations from my shaver for my “perfect” motion and pressure. I also had achieved some of the closest shaves I’ve ever gotten from an electric device.

I’m not even sure whether I want to be in a relationship with a human barber, let alone an AI shaver. But to paraphrase the immortal Rasheed Wallace, skin don’t lie. And mine was unbothered and smooth to the touch.

The Head Philips

Courtesy of Philips

The i9000 Prestige Ultra, as its lengthy name implies, is Philips Norelco’s current premium shaver. It offers the grip, heft, and balance of any well-made tool, and combines every bit of technology Philips can throw at it. It’s priced accordingly, north of $300.

The model I tested, the 9405, comes with a little precision shaver attachment for sideburns and maybe staches. Other sets come with nose trimmers and such. The i9000 can be dunked in a bathtub, provided you don't immerse the charging socket, or get rained on in the shower for minutes at a time. I tested this, too. It theoretically adjusts its performance to your skin's sensitivity or the density of your hairs. The i9000 is the honey badger of shavers: adaptable, unbotherable.

Its shaver heads are covered in tens of thousands of hydrophilic beads, so it can still glide across your skin on the off chance you like to shave when wet. If you decide to enter your name in the phone app, the i9000’s screen will even greet you by name in the morning. It will know that it’s morning and wish you a good one.

Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

But the basic shaving technology behind the i9000 is not overly new. It is a tripartite rotary shaver of the sort that’s been on the market for years, a ring of rotating blades beneath circular coils. The foils draw hairs into the whirring blades, where they’re snipped. Like a few previous Philips models, these promise to lift hair even from below the level of your skin.

But while rotary shavers have long been known for their ability to conform to unforgiving face geometry and buzz through coarse or unruly hairs like my own, the danger with rotary blades has always been discomfort. This was why I initially pressed lightly when I used it: I didn’t want that telltale pinch of skin pulled into the shaver’s foil.

But that’s a dumb way to do things, I learned after talking to Philips’ engineers about their thought process in developing the i9000. Pressing too hard with a blade is an obvious way to end up with hot and bothered skin. But so is pressing too lightly. Turns out, a chief cause of skin irritation when shaving is making too many passes with your blade. Shaving too lightly is a recipe for this.

This leads in to the technology I find most interesting: that AI-trained feedback system.

A Virtuous Feedback Loop

Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

I initially wondered whether the feedback system was a bit of a gimmick. Basically, the device’s collar is outfitted with a tricolor LED. Press too hard, it cautions you in orange. Too light is purple. Perfect is, of course, green.

But what’s the correct shaving pressure? Up to now, I didn’t know there was one nor that it was different for each face. The goal is to get your skin to “dome” up just enough so the razor can grab your hair but not so much that it catches even a whisper of skin. Despite decades of data gathered by Philips from its customers, it’s quite difficult to map this ideal pressure statistically.

People with sensitive skin are sensitive to just about everything, including whether or not it’s raining. If you’re older, your skin might be thicker and less flexible and thus less prone to doming. You’ll have to press harder to get a good shave. Using shaving foam also changes the math. It’s difficult for mere mortals to sort out the confounding variables.

That’s where AI’s pattern-recognition capabilities came in—the same abilities that allow AI to detect anomalies in munitions or fishing vessels and to map heat-vulnerable buildings. Philips correlated skin redness to the pressure applied for different skin and hair types and used AI to construct ideal ranges of pressure that lead to the best shave on fewer passes, with the least irritation.

Courtesy of Philips

The shaver AI learning model doesn't operate on a learning model using data from your face, specifically. Instead, AI was used to analyze Philips’ vast troves of existing data to create profiles for the ideal wet shaves, coarse-haired shaves, standard shaves, and sensitive shaves.

I tested this out over months, both with my coarse face stubble and the fine remaining wisps atop my dome, alternating wet shaves and with dry ones—intentionally messing up my shave and then trying to do it right. Near as I can tell, the model works quite well. Theoretically, the shaver also modifies its power output to match my facial hair's unique density, though it’s not easy to test whether it’s doing so.

Just note that the i9000 is more of a full-face or full-head shaver. (Go here instead for our favorite beard trimmers.) While the i9000’s broad and flexible head is quite good at melding to difficult geometries, it’s not overly good at precision shaving. Its precision shave attachment, while perfectly good for sideburns, won’t be your answer to a pencil mustache or a tight Fu Manchu.

App Drain

Courtesy of Philips

There is, however, a bit of a confounding factor. The i9000 is already a bit of a power-hungry device, what with all the smartness and the whizbangery and Bluetooth capabilities. This means about 60 minutes of shave life, and the same amount of time to charge fully.

But here’s the thing: To get full benefit from the i9000’s pressure and motion feedback, you actually will want to download Philips’ GroomTribe app, which will allow you to see and track in real time how you’re using the device—and get better at achieving a close shave without irritation. The shaver’s various settings are also much easier to navigate on the app than on the device controls.

But here’s the kicker. Leaving the device connected to the app constantly drains the device. By my reckoning, this might amount to about 5 percent daily. Ironically, one of the main reasons the device keeps draining battery to communicate with your phone seems to be to … communicate the battery status.

Courtesy of Philips

You can turn off this function by putting your device in travel mode or by disabling Bluetooth—though the latter may require you to then reconnect the device over and over. You can also just remember to shut your app off completely each time you use it, to keep it from running in the background and draining your shaver. If you’re the sort who plans to keep your shaver mounted on its handy included charging dock, always proudly ready for action, this added power drain won’t matter. If you’re the sort (guilty!) who leaves your shaver lying around wherever you last used it, you may find yourself picking up a dead or dying shaver.

But in the end, you’ll probably use the app for only the first month or so you own the shaver. Once you figure out your ideal settings, you might as well just turn off the app. Your shaver will still glow green to let you know you’re pressing down the right way. And the i9000 will remain one of the only electric shavers I’ve used that shaves so closely I literally cannot feel the whiskers when I’m done using it. It's also one of precious few with a seven-year warranty (registration required.)

And so you may do what I did: You’ll turn off the Bluetooth permanently. You’ll live with the fact that your newly app-less shaver will no longer know that it’s evening, in order to wish you good evening. And it will also no longer know your name, or greet you by it. It will no longer congratulate you, no matter how perfectly you use it. If this loss makes you sad, I don’t know what to say.