How we make money

What an affiliate link actually is

A normal link to a retailer with a tag on the end identifying where the visitor came from. If you buy something within the retailer's tracking window, they pay us a percentage of what you spent. You pay the same price you would have paid anyway - the commission comes out of the retailer's margin, not off your card.

Every commercial link here is marked rel="sponsored nofollow", opens in a new tab, and carries a visible #ad mark with a link back to this page. The disclosure also appears above the first buy link on every page that has one, rather than only in the footer.

Why our links go through /go first

Every product link on this site is /go/<product> rather than a direct retailer URL. That does three things:

• It keeps the destination in one place. When a product moves, or a better retailer relationship exists, it is one data change rather than an edit to every page mentioning it.
• It lets us count clicks. Retailers cannot tell one site from another inside a shared tracking tag, so buy-clicks measured on our side are the only per-site performance signal that exists.
• It is excluded from search entirely. The /go path is disallowed in robots.txt, absent from the sitemap, marked noindex in its own headers, and every link into it is nofollowed.

It is a 302 rather than a permanent redirect, so a browser never caches it and the click always reaches us. There is an open-redirect guard on it: the destination has to belong to the merchant it claims to, or it goes to the merchant's homepage instead.

Who we earn from

Exactly one retailer, today:

• Amazon - the Amazon Associates program. Most products on this site link here.

That is not a philosophical position, it is the current state: this is a new publisher and no other affiliate network has approved it yet. When one does, the products that belong on it will move, and the destination is one field on one record - no page copy changes and no pick changes.

Who we do not earn from

These names appear on the site because they are the right answer to something, and we earn nothing when you buy from them. Where a page recommends one, it says so on the page:

• Rockwell Razors - Brand-direct, partially on Amazon. No joined program.
• Henson Shaving - Brand-direct machinist razor. No joined program.
• Stirling Soap Company - Artisan soap maker, sells direct. No joined program.
• West Coast Shaving - Specialist retailer carrying blade samplers Amazon does not. No joined program.
• Maggard Razors - Specialist retailer, deep blade and brush range. No joined program.

The clearest example is the shaving soap roundup, where one of the best soaps in the category is sold direct by a maker we have no relationship with. It is still there and the page still says to buy it.

What the money does not change

• The order of the picks. Computed from four axes with published weights. The arithmetic for every score is printed on the page underneath it.
• Whether we name a skip. Every roundup names at least one product we would not buy. Several of those are products we would earn on.
• Whether we recommend buying nothing. Several pages here conclude that the answer is a free change to your technique rather than a purchase.

On prices

Where a live verified price exists it is shown inside the buy button with the date it was checked. Where one does not, the button reads “Check price” and no number appears anywhere. We do not publish remembered prices, and a figure older than 48 hours disappears rather than going quietly stale. The reasoning is on the methodology page, and the cost calculator is built around the same constraint.

Questions

Razor & Ritual is published by Fathom & Foundry. If anything on this page is unclear, or you think a disclosure is missing somewhere it should be, tell us - and the editorial policy covers the standards this page is part of.