Shaving also serves as a pause – the same way mowing the lawn paradoxically marks the growth of grass. There is also the sensory – indeed, sensuous – aspect of running a thin metal edge across skin that becomes buried in shaving’s supposedly regular mundaneness. Step out of this banal frame, and the tryst with the morning mirror turns into a royal toilette. Shaving becomes a supreme human act, an enterprise that goes against nature, like the finest surgical craft, art or engineering feat.
Self-care and grooming, important as they may be in the social scheme of things, are the least salient features of the soap’n’scrape, foam’n’furnish routine. At its core, it’s about a daily ritual in the temple of the senses ending with a slap of aftershave. As the old chestnut goes: shaving da jawab nahin.
