Electric shaving, decided

What this section covers

Electric shaving is a different trade from manual shaving, and pretending otherwise is how people end up disappointed. You give up the last fraction of closeness. You get back speed, the ability to shave dry, and near-immunity to the nicks and razor burn that drive people away from blades in the first place.

If that trade sounds acceptable, this section will tell you which one to buy. If it does not, the wet shaving section is where you should be, and the head-to-head lays out the decision honestly rather than selling you the more expensive one.

Foil or rotary, in one paragraph

A foil shaver oscillates blades behind a perforated screen and cuts in straight lines. A rotary shaver spins three or four circular heads and cuts in circles. Foil suits flat planes, fine-to-medium hair and shaving daily; rotary suits contoured faces, coarse or curly hair and shaving every few days. That is the whole distinction, and the full comparison covers the edge cases. The picks here are mostly foils, because the buyer this site is written for — someone leaving a cartridge razor and shaving most mornings — falls on the foil side of that line. One rotary is ranked alongside them so the comparison is a real one rather than a foregone conclusion.

The published numbers, and what they are worth

• Cutting elements. Braun publishes five for the Series 9, each with a named job. Panasonic publishes five blades plus a motor speed. Braun publishes no element count at all for the Series 7, which is why it cannot be compared numerically to its own bigger brother.
• Motor speed. Panasonic is the only maker here that publishes it — 14,000 cuts per minute producing up to 70,000 cross-cuts. That is a real figure and it is the reason the Arc5 is fast on dense growth.
• Runtime and quick charge. Between 45 and 60 minutes across the shavers here, which is three to six weeks of shaving. What matters more is the five-minute charge that buys a full shave — that is what makes a flat battery a non-event.
• Head replacement. The number that actually decides the cost of ownership, and almost nobody publishes it. Philips publishes a four-month blade life for the OneBlade and puts an indicator on the blade. Braun and Panasonic publish nothing comparable in their product specifications, which means the running cost of a premium shaver is the one thing you cannot plan before you buy it.

Wet or dry

Every premium shaver here is waterproof and can be used with lather. Whether you should is a matter of skin rather than machine: a dry shave is faster and a wet shave with a thin gel is gentler, and if you are getting irritation the wet option is the first thing to try. That, along with the pre-shave and pressure questions, is what the irritation guide is for.

One warning that applies to all of them: an electric shaver is designed to be moved slowly against the grain with the head flat on the skin, and almost every complaint of “it does not shave close enough” is somebody moving it fast and pressing. The technique is different from a blade and it is not intuitive.

If your skin reacts

Electric shaving is often recommended to people who cannot tolerate a blade, and it genuinely does help many of them, because nothing is scraping the top layer of skin away. The picks in the sensitive-skin roundup are the ones whose published design puts a guard or a flexing head between the cutter and the face. Read them alongside the razor bumps guide, because if ingrown hairs are the problem then a less close shave is the treatment, not a failure.

Buying one for somebody else

A shaver bought as a present is a different problem from a shaver bought for yourself: the recipient cannot tell you what his beard needs, so the box has to arrive complete. The gift-set roundup ranks on what each maker publishes as being in the box and on the warranty term, which turns out to separate the field far more sharply than any shaving specification does - exactly one maker here publishes either.

Your first one, and the flagship question

The commonest mistake with an electric is buying the top model to find out whether the format suits you at all - the beginner roundup ranks on simplicity, washability and being cheap enough to be wrong about, because the two-to-three week adjustment period is real and no amount of money skips it. If you are already past that, Series 8 against Series 9 comes down to one cutting element and two disclosure gaps that point in opposite directions, and the Series 8 review covers the two things Braun writes down that nobody else in this category does - what is in the box, and how long the shaver is expected to last.