Ultra Shave's eight years research and development for the ultimate shaving cream aimed at eliminating the problems suffered whilst shaving. The result is a shaving cream that gives the most comfortable shave ever with glabrous skin all day long.

The motivation came from years of "bad shave days", razor rash, razor burn and, having sensitive skin, cutting myself more often than I'd care to remember. Shaving for me was never what you might call an enjoyable experience. No matter what blade I used I would inevitably either cut myself or at the very least suffer with razor burn and all the discomfort that goes with it. Looking back at how long I suffered from the plague of shaving I don't know why it took me until I was almost 50 before deciding to do something about it.

Well that covers the Reasons, now for the Research...

In September 1995, via extremely peculiar circumstances (for an engineer), I established a trading relationship with Calvin Klein, Perfumes & Cosmetics, Canada, a division of Unilever. Working from Nova Scotia, Canada, I began to export perfumes and cosmetics and, within a couple of years turnover was as much as $22,000,000 per year.

With no previous knowledge of cosmetics I felt I should know as much as possible about the products that I was working with. I went about making myself familiar with product ingredients to find why one product might be better than another.

This was to some extent curiosity on my part, but I also felt an obligation to my clients to have as much product knowledge as possible to be able to respond to any enquiries they might have, yet in seven years no one ever asked me anything other than the price - oh well!

During 1996 the formulas used for ladies skin creams became a curiosity to me, I found it most odd that many of the "top of the line" products (from many of the multi-nationals) were based on petroleum by-products.

As an engineer I had always been taught to avoid contact with petroleum products or risk developing dermatitis. Worse still - to me - were the cosmetics based on "animal extracts" as these have at least a theoretical risk of inducing a prion disease (BSE and the like) to the end users.

Problems with shaving

I still had the problems with shaving that I'd always had, even though I had tried just about every method of shaving there is, from cut throat razors, single blade and multi blade disposable razors and electric shavers, some methods were slightly better than others but none of them gave me what I would call a comfortable shave.

The last straw came one day when, with an important meeting to attend, and wishing to appear my best, I had one of the worst shaves ever. My neck was red raw due to razor burn (a new razor with probably too fine an edge) and to add to my woes I'd cut myself a couple of times. On the flight to Toronto I pondered why we all suffer these bad shave days and what I could do to eliminate the problem.

As I'd already tried just about every blade on the market and still had problems no matter which I used, as an Engineer I thought "blade technology" had already (with three blades) gone as far as it could credibly go yet now we see four blades, what next? Five, six or seven blades?

I didn't presume I could out-think blade designers, they have taken blades as far as I think they can go, but few seem to have looked at what we do immediately prior to shaving. As a Tribologist (lubrication engineer), I was well aware that even with the most advanced cutting tools they will fail if the cutting edge is not lubricated.

It was at this time that I began to think about how we shave, "why do we shave the way we shave", the basic method (soap and a sharp metal blade) had been around longer than Sweeney Todd, and how we shave would be well recognised by either Archimedes or King Tut!

It was time for a radical rethink on shaving techiques. So... I first looked at why we use shaving soap, foams and gels. Basically we use soap because we never give it a thought and simply follow the accepted convention. The reason soap was used in the first place was to wet the beard making it easier to cut and somewhat lubricate the skin.

This came into my field of expertise, in my work as a Member of the ASLE (American Society of Lubrication Engineers) I have had years of experience in Tribology (the study of friction & lubrication), and have successfully developed radically different lubricants that revolutionised the machining of stainless steel.