TOO CLOSE FOR COMFORTMaybe Gillette’s M3Power has just too much pulsing action

BY HARRY GOLDSTEIN

A CLOSE SHAVE? IEEE Spectrum Senior

Associate Editor Harry Goldstein tests out

Gillette’s M3Power electrified razor.

Movie studios are in themidst of digitizing theirarchived films so that theycan be repackaged fordigital distribution. Part ofthe process involvesfinding and removing thedefects that inevitably

come with age, particularly thosedistracting long, vertical scratchlines. So far, automatic detectionof these lines has proved elusive,requiring either lots of manualtuning or many false alarms. Butworkers at the Istituto per leApplicazioni del Calcolo, inRome, now have an improvedscheme for automaticallydetecting these lines, which areusually a mere 3 to 10 pixels wide.

The key insight is thatscratches should be modeled in amore complex manner than ifthey were purely noise added tothe image. In addition to beingfast enough to run in real time,the new method keeps thenumber of false positives low, sothere is little fear that it willaccidentally remove, for example,the hanging rope in your favoritecowboy movie. �

A Generalized Model for

Scratch Detection, by V. Bruniand D. Vitulano, IEEETransactions on ImageProcessing, January 2004,pp. 44–50.

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When I was a boy on the verge ofmanhood, my father advised me toput off shaving for as long aspossible: he warned me that itwould change from a fun, optionalkind of thing to a necessary onerather quickly.

Impetuousness beat out commonsense, and one morning a few daysshy of my 13th birthday, I found

myself leaning over the bathroom sinksporting a full foam beard. I scrapedcarefully, and my dad’s double-edgeWilkinson Sword safety razor annihilatedthe downy growth on my cheeks andupper lip in about five strokes.

After a couple of years, I was groominga hirsute beast that sleepily regarded mein the mirror every morning, hacking atan increasingly bristly growth fromcheekbones to chest. My father wasright. Shaving had become for me whatit is for many men and quite a fewwomen: a boring daily chore only rockstars can ignore.

Over the years I’ve toyed with straightrazors and disposable ones, electricrazors with floating heads and electricrazors with screens, and razors with oneblade, two, and three. I finally settled onGillette’s Mach3 Turbo triple-bladedrazor, whose long-lasting cartridges giveme a consistently smooth, fast shave.Lots of other men agree—it’s the best-selling razor in the world.

I was never tempted to switch—untillast April, when Gillette offered me a trialof a prototype battery-powered, motor-ized version of my beloved Mach3. Thiswas the M3Power, formally launchedin May in a bid to steal a march on itsarchrival, Schick-WilkinsonSword.Just like Pepsi and Coke, these twobehemoths have taken to trying to carveout new niches by introducing a streamof variations on a basic product.

You could call the US $15 M3Power thediet Vanilla Coke of razors. Hefting it in myhand, I found it to be only slightly heavierthan my regular $5 Mach3, owing mostly

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to the AAA battery in the handleand the small motor-driven os-cillating mechanism that makesthe blades vibrate. As with theMach3, the disposable bladecartridge snaps onto the end ofthe handle. Gillette claims thevibration stimulates facial hairto stand up and away from theskin, allowing for a closer shave.

I must admit to a certainthrill when I pressed the powerbutton on the electric-greenhandle and the razor vibratedenthusiastically in my hand.My follicles would be stimu-lated, hairs standing stiff,eager for the harvest.

Clad in a terry cloth robefor the occasion, I turned tothe Gillette publicist whodelivered the prototype toIEEE Spectrum’s offices,where I was to try out theM3Power in our men’s room.She never left my side—andcouldn’t leave without theM3Power, lest I hawk it oneBay before its release or,worse, sell it to Schick-WilkinsonSword for some re-verse-engineering to getaround the 62 patents Gilletteclaims to have on the inven-tion.

I took the M3Power to my

gel-lathered face, attackingsome four-day stubble on myleft cheek. It fared well, butno better than the regularMach3 I used on my rightcheek. So far, it was a tie. Butnot for long. Things gotdownright nasty when I wentto work under my chin, usingthe M3Power exclusively.Hello, nicks, cuts, razorburn, blood, and generalunpleasantness. I hadn’texperienced a burn like thissince…well, I can’t rememberwhen, honestly.

Maybe my follicles wereoverstimulated, I theorizedaloud, my hairs too excited,the blades pulling up justenough skin to nick. Or maybethere was a little too muchhard-core vibrating action.

The publicist corrected mefor saying “vibrating.”“Pulsing action is whatGillette calls it,” she said.

Tomayto, tomahto. If I wantmy hairs to stand on end whenI’m shaving, I’ll just have mywife throw the toaster in the

THE AFTERMATH:

Nicks and razor

burn sent this

Spectrum editor

back to his old

Gillette Mach3 Turbo.

HANDY HANDLE: The Gillette

M3Power uses an AAA battery in its

handle to power its “pulsing action.”

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