History of shaving

For thousands of years man has been fighting a battle with his facial hair - over 25,000 hairs as hard as copper wire of the same thickness.

The hairs grow between 125mm and 150mm per year and man will spend an average of more than 3,000 hours of his life shaving them.

Egyptians shaved their beards and heads which was a custom adopted by the Greeks and Romans about 330BC during the reign of Alexander the Great.

This was encouraged for soldiers as a defensive measure to stop enemies from grabbing their hair in hand-to-hand combat.

As shaving spread through the world, men of unshaven societies became known as "barbarians" meaning the "unbarbered". The practice of women shaving legs and underarms developed much later.

Men scraped their hair away in early times man with crude items such as stone, flint, clam shells and other sharpened materials. He later experimented with bronze, copper and iron razors.

In more recent centuries he used the steel straight razor (aptly called the "cut-throat" for obvious reasons).

For hundreds of years razors maintained a knife-like design and needed to be sharpened by the owner or a barber with the aid of a honing stone or leather strop.

These "weapons" required considerable skill by the user to avoid cutting himself badly.