The bank holds no blade product photography, no bathroom-shelf frames and no shaving frames, a gap the honesty section admits. The frame is the same one that fronts Card No. 103, the safety razor ranking this page is the sequel to: the instruments change, the terrain does not. Cross-page hero sharing follows the precedent logged in CREDITS.md.
Checked and updated October 2026
The short version. This Card is the sequel to Card No. 103, and it grades the ammunition the way that Card graded the hardware: on the record the maker prints, because a double edge blade is bought on material words, platinum, chrome, Swedish, surgical, and the words are claims about a strip of steel a tenth of a millimetre thick. The discipline is printed here before any score, in the same words as the hardware Card’s: this desk opened no tuck, loaded no blade and shaved with none of the eight; efficacy is graded nowhere on this page. The Feather Hi-Stainless wins at 81, on the fullest consumer document the shelf offers. The counts, each verified against the makers’ own pages, catalogues and packs as printed on the cards: a specification a buyer can open, stating material, coating and origin together, stands for 4 of 8 blades. A coating is named in the maker’s own print for 6 of 8, two of the six in the product name alone. A steel grade is named by the maker for 0 of 8, and a steel origin for 1 of 8, whose own channels disagree about it. A country of manufacture is printed for 8 of 8, once only in Russian, and once as a lottery among three plants. And a sharpness figure, the number the entire shelf is bought on, is printed by 0 of 8 makers. That zero is this page’s honest centre, and it is printed at the size it deserves.
First, the decision
One product, named before anything is scored: buy the Feather Hi-Stainless. Not because this desk has shaved with it, because it has not, with it or with any blade here, but because its maker’s house publishes the document a buyer of coated steel is owed and keeps it current. On one page, from the maker’s own US distributor: the steel named as stainless, the coating named as platinum, with the coating’s job stated in the maker’s words, it helps provide a smoother shave and extends the life of the blade; the origin printed as a badge, Made in Japan; and a shaves-per-blade range, three to ten, the only such figure any maker-side document on this page prints. Behind the consumer page stands the maker’s own professional catalogue, which describes its blade making in the language of a specification: triple grinding for the optimal edge angle, a double coating of platinum alloy and resin. The charges are printed on its card: the steel carries no grade, the sharpness carries no figure, and the distributor’s copy reaches for the superlative the document cannot cash, one of the world’s best, sharpest in the reputation the community’s instruments confirm and the maker never numbers. What carries it to first is that on a shelf of names and fine print, it is the record that answers the most questions in the maker’s own type.
Now the naming paragraph, because this shelf’s central fact is a word. On the blade shelf, a coating word is a name claim until a document prints it: it rides in the product’s title, and the buyer reads it as a specification. Read against the makers’ own print, the eight records divide into four classes. The documented coatings, four: Derby, whose catalogue names five layers; BIC, whose catalogue names two; Feather, whose house names platinum and whose catalogue describes the system; and AccuTec, which names its coating technology outright. The name-only coatings, two: Astra’s Platinum and Shark’s Chrome, words that stand in the title with no maker document behind either. The honest blank, one: the Kai, which claims no coating at all and charges the shelf’s highest price for the silence. And the absent document, one: the Gillette Silver Blue, whose maker prints nothing a buyer in English can open. The desk’s rule, stated plainly once: a blade is graded on the document the buyer is handed, the steel read as the class of statement it is, grade, origin or category word, the coating read as a document, a name or a blank, the origin read where the maker prints it and in the language he prints it in, and sharpness graded as what it is on every record here, a reputation, because no maker on this shelf has ever published the number.
The by-need rulings, one line each, printed here so a reader can leave with his answer before the cards:
The fullest document, and the community instruments’ sharpest blade: the winner (81), platinum printed, origin printed, a shave range printed.
The American record, address and all: the AccuTec blade (80), under either of its names, at a fifth of the winner’s price per blade.
The coating stack in full, on one of the cheapest blades here: the Derby Extra (79), five layers named in its maker’s catalogue.
The supermarket blade with a catalogue line of its own: the BIC Chrome Platinum (72), two coatings named by the maker, a third added by the channel.
The default blade, plant permitting: the Astra Superior Platinum (65), bought knowing the box decides the country.
Silence, at sixty cents a blade: the Kai Stainless (58), for the buyer who has read its card and wants it anyway.
The steel column: a category word on eight packs, a grade on none
Count the makers who state what their steel is, beyond the word stainless. None of the eight names a grade: no AISI number, no chromium percentage, no named steel from any mill stands in any maker document this desk could open, for the Japanese surgical house, the American industrial plant, the Greek giant or the Turkish catalogue printer alike. The word stainless does the whole job on every record, and it is a category, not a specification: it promises the blade will not rust in the bathroom, and nothing about hardness, edge geometry or the steel’s source. Below the category word the record thins by kind. One maker names a steel origin for the graded blade, and manages to argue with itself about it: Derby’s English-language catalogue prints its Swedish steel line against the Premium blade and withholds it from the Extra, whose copy is otherwise the same, while the maker’s own brand-store listing claims Swedish steel for the Extra outright, so the Extra’s steel is Swedish in one of its maker’s channels and unsourced in the other, and this page prints the plurality rather than resolving it. Every other origin in circulation is the channel’s work. The Kai’s surgical grade is a retailer’s phrase, assembled from its maker’s genuine medical-blade business and printed for a consumer blade its maker describes nowhere; the Astra’s steel is sourced by no document at all; and the Silver Blue’s stainless stands in retailer specification tables, in the maker’s absence. The desk’s position is the one Card No. 103 took on alloys: a steel the maker will not grade or source is graded as a category word, at full length, and the channel’s upgrades are printed as the channel’s.
The coating column: two stacks, two single names, two titles, a blank and a silence
Count the makers who print a coating, and read what kind of print it is. The shelf’s fullest coating document belongs to one of its cheapest blades. Derby’s catalogue states the range’s construction in a single passage: perforated, hardened and sharpened, produced from high performance stainless steel, and developed with special chrome, ceramic, platinum and tungsten coating technology, with a polymer coat over the edge for comfort, five named layers, printed by the maker, in a catalogue a buyer can open. BIC’s catalogue is briefer and nearly as complete: top quality stainless steel, a polymeric and chrome platinum covering, made in Greece, a blade, its two coatings and its country in three lines. Feather’s house names the platinum, and the maker’s professional catalogue supplies the system behind the word, a platinum alloy coating for durability under a resin coating for low friction. AccuTec names its technology as a brand: the box says Comfort Coated, and the maker’s literature calls the system MicroCoat, an enrichment technology to reduce friction, the only coating on this page with a registered name of its own. Then the shelf drops to titles. Astra’s platinum is the product’s surname: it stands in the name, on the pack, and in no maker document behind it, a claim the buyer must take on the strength of the word itself. Shark’s chrome is the same construction one shelf down, a coating word in the title, with the polymer layer that presumably completes it appearing only in retailers’ copy. The Kai claims nothing, and the claim of nothing is at least a document of one line: stainless, the name, the origin, full stop. And the Silver Blue’s maker claims nothing anywhere a buyer can read it, which is a different thing from the Kai’s blank, and is graded differently on its card: the Kai’s silence is a published minimalism, the Silver Blue’s is an absence.
The sharpness column: the number nobody prints, measured by everybody else
Every blade on this page is bought, in the end, on one property, and no maker states it. Zero of eight publish a sharpness figure, a cutting force, an edge radius, a facet angle for the consumer blade, or any number a buyer could repeat, compare or argue with. Feather’s catalogue prints facet language for its professional blades, triple grinding, three facets named and none measured; AccuTec’s corporate prose says a blade must be sharp at the right angle with the right number of facets, and prints neither the angle nor the number. The figures exist, and they are all community property. The best-known instrumented project, Refined Shave’s cutting-force tests, measured the Feather the sharpest blade in its field and the BIC Chrome Platinum immediately behind it, with the Derby Extra at the mild end of the same table, results this page cites as a community document and grades nowhere as a maker record. A second instrumented project, cutting by time rather than force, returned a different order for the same blades and placed the Kai last of its sample, against the Kai’s standing reputation as the Feather’s only rival: the two instruments cannot both be the shelf’s ruler, and there is no maker figure to settle them, because no maker will print one. Grooming Take No. 7 argued that the number is not the dose; Take No. 2 argued that the number nobody prints is a shelf’s truest specification. On the blade shelf the two arguments meet: the dose is never printed either, Feather’s distributor’s three-to-ten shave range being the one maker-side figure that even gestures at it, and the number everybody buys on is supplied entirely by volunteers with instruments, arguing among themselves. A buyer is entitled to know that the argument is the specification. This page prints it as one.
The origin column: eight countries printed, one address, one lottery, one language
Count the packs that print a country: eight of eight, the shelf’s one complete column, and the column still manages three kinds of failure. The fullest origin document is the American one: recent boxes of the AccuTec blade print the maker’s name and street address, AccuTec Blades, Inc., 1 Razor Blade Lane, Verona, VA 24482, a plant a buyer could drive to, on a box of blades that cost twenty cents each. Feather prints Japan as a badge, BIC prints Greece in its catalogue and on its pack, Derby prints Turkey, Kai’s box carries Japan through the trade channel, and Shark’s pack and its Egyptian barcode carry Egypt. Then the failures of kind. The Astra prints a country on every pack, and the country is a variable: St. Petersburg for four decades, joined since 2022 by Gillette plants in China and India, with the fine print on each box the only statement of which blade is inside it, and the channel reduced to printing, as Maggard does on the listing this page links, that it cannot guarantee which country produced the box it is selling. And the Silver Blue prints its plant, Gillette’s St. Petersburg works, in Russian, on a pack sold worldwide: the fact is printed, and printed in the one language most of its buyers cannot read, by a company that prints its cartridge science in every language on earth. An origin is graded here as the document it is: an address outranks a badge, a badge outranks a lottery, and a lottery outranks a fact the buyer needs a translator to reach.
How the scores work
Every product is scored out of 100 on its published record, under a basis settled for this shelf as the sequel to Card No. 103’s hardware basis, in the grooming run’s five-row shape: specification and claim honesty, 30 (whether a specification stands in a maker document a buyer can open, whether the coating the name claims is a coating the maker’s print names, whether the steel is a grade, an origin or a category word, and whether any figure stands behind the sharpness claim); steel and coating record, 20 (the steel and the coating read separately, a named stack over a single named coating, a named coating over a word carried by the title alone, an honest blank over an unsupported claim, and a steel the maker grades or sources over one the channel grades for him); fit and format, 20 (the pack sizes and wrapper system the maker prints, any dimension the maker publishes, and whether the blade can be identified once unwrapped); value per blade, 15 (the checked price per blade read against the record it buys, printed in the table below); and longevity and service, 15 (any shaves-per-blade or durability figure the maker prints, and the stability of the record, names retired, plants moved and claims withdrawn counted where they stand). The discipline is printed because this shelf invites the confusion more than any in the run: efficacy is graded nowhere on this page. This desk opened no tuck, loaded no blade, shaved with none of the eight and timed no stroke; it asserts nothing about what any blade does to any face beyond what its published record and the reported consensus, labelled as reported wherever it appears, support. A high score means the published record is strong. The desk grades documents, not shaves. The precedent is the hardware Card this page follows, and behind it the watches Card, where a device is graded on its maker’s record in the same five-row shape.
Seven ranked, and the one sent home
Feather Hi-Stainless
The winner, and the shelf’s model of a blade document at consumer level. The record stands on the page of the maker’s own US house, Jatai International, Feather’s distributor in its largest export market, and it answers in one place the questions this page asks of eight makers. The steel is named as stainless steel. The coating is named as platinum, and named with its job attached, in the house’s own questions: the platinum coating helps to provide a smoother shave and extends the life of the blade. The origin is printed as a badge, Made in Japan, the blades coming from Feather’s Seki City works in the cutlery city the maker’s own history trades on. And the page prints the shelf’s only maker-side durability figure of any kind, a range for the blade’s working life, broadly speaking three to ten shaves, hedged honestly with the variables that move it, hair, surface, technique, maintenance. Behind the consumer page the maker’s professional catalogue speaks the language the consumer page omits: triple grinding for the optimal edge angle, and a double coating, platinum alloy for increased durability under a resin coating for low friction, the system behind the single word platinum stated as a system. The charges are the two blanks and a superlative. The steel carries no grade: surgical grade, in circulation everywhere for this blade, is a retailer’s phrase, printed by Country Knives and others, and by the maker nowhere for this product. The sharpness carries no figure, here as everywhere on this page; the community’s instruments place this blade first in the field, and that placement is printed on its card as a community measurement, not a maker claim. And the house copy reaches once for the phrase its document cannot cash, recognized as one of the world’s best double edge razor blades, a reputation stated where a figure should be. Reported wear, labelled as reported: the sharpest blade in the consensus, unforgiving in a heavy razor, and the default partner of the mild hardware at the top of Card No. 103. What carries it to first is completeness at the level the buyer actually reads: coating, material, origin and a life range, in the maker’s type, on one page.
$38.00 for 100 at Maggard Razors (October 2026), 38 cents a blade
Buy · $38.00 at Maggard Razors| Specification & claim honesty | 26 / 30 |
| Steel & coating record | 16 / 20 |
| Fit & format | 17 / 20 |
| Value per blade | 10 / 15 |
| Longevity & service | 12 / 15 |
AccuTec AccuForge, the blade sold as Personna Comfort Coated
The strongest origin document on the shelf, graded whole, including the strangest service record in the field. The blade is the Verona, Virginia production the wet-shaving world called the Lab Blue for a decade, a nickname this page corrects in the open: the product’s name is Comfort Coated, printed on its box, and Lab was never more than the community’s shorthand for the laboratory channel it leaked from. The maker behind it is AccuTec Blades, which bought the Verona plant, the last razor blade works in the United States, when the Personna industrial business was sold out of Edgewell in 2015, and its published record is an industrial maker’s record, fuller than any consumer brand’s here. The coating is named as a technology: Comfort Coated on the box, and in the maker’s literature MicroCoat, its registered enrichment technology for reducing friction. The steel is stated in the maker’s corporate pages with a plainness no one else attempts: all of its double-edge blades are made from stainless steel, which incorporates chromium to prevent corrosion. And the origin is printed to the standard this page wishes were the shelf’s: recent boxes carry the maker’s name and street address, AccuTec Blades, Inc., 1 Razor Blade Lane, Verona, VA 24482, with the product code BP9020 beside the barcode. The charges are the name and the anonymity, and both are printed because the record includes them. AccuTec has retired the Personna name from this blade entirely: the same Verona production is now sold under the maker’s own brand, AccuForge, its medical sibling renamed AccuThrive, at prices the channel reports at roughly two and a half times the old blade’s, and the maker has published no consumer word explaining the change. And current blades are unmarked: production once laser-etched Personna Super and Made in USA into the steel, and buyers now unwrap a blade with no name on it at all, identifiable only by its box, a fact reported by buyer after buyer and answered by the maker nowhere. A blade that cannot be identified once unwrapped is a fit failure no other record here commits, and it is graded in that row. Reported wear, labelled as reported: the smooth American workhorse, the connoisseur’s Lab Blue in everything but the name it no longer carries. What holds it at second is the pair of facts its card cannot tidy: the shelf’s best address, and a maker walking away from the name the address built.
$19.50 for 100 at Maggard Razors (October 2026), sold under the Personna Comfort Coated name, 20 cents a blade
Buy · $19.50 at Maggard Razors| Specification & claim honesty | 26 / 30 |
| Steel & coating record | 15 / 20 |
| Fit & format | 16 / 20 |
| Value per blade | 12 / 15 |
| Longevity & service | 11 / 15 |
Derby Extra
The catalogue record, and the proof that a full document is not a premium product’s privilege. Derby’s maker, Azmusebat of Istanbul, publishes an English-language catalogue for its blade range, and the passage it prints for its blades is the most complete specification paragraph on this page: perforated, hardened and sharpened with the highest blade technology equipment; produced from high performance stainless steel; and developed with special chrome, ceramic, platinum and tungsten coating technology for optimum durability and shaving comfort, finished with a polymer coat over the edge, five named layers in the maker’s own words, with the house’s sharpening method named beside them, its Gothic Arch technology. No other maker here prints a stack; the Turkish catalogue prints one for a blade that sells at thirteen cents. The origin is printed with it, Made in Turkey, on the pack and in the maker’s identity. The card’s charge is the steel, and it is a charge about the maker’s own consistency. The catalogue’s copy for the range’s Premium blade carries a line the Extra’s copy does not, Swedish steel, while the maker’s brand-store listing claims Swedish stainless steel for the Extra itself: the Extra’s steel is Swedish in one of its maker’s channels and unsourced in the other, and the retail shelf, which repeats Swedish everywhere for this blade, is repeating the channel that flatters it. This page grades the catalogue as the maker’s considered document and prints the listing’s claim beside it, unresolved, because a maker’s two documents are part of its record. The second charge is the familiar zero: no sharpness figure, and the community’s instruments place this blade at the mild end of the field, a placement its copy never makes for itself, to its credit. Reported wear, labelled as reported: the gentle starter blade of the consensus, smooth before it is sharp. What carries it to third is that the fullest coating document in the field costs the buyer nothing extra to read and almost nothing to buy; what holds it there is a steel origin its maker states two ways.
$13.31 for 100 at Naked Armor (October 2026), 13 cents a blade
Buy · $13.31 at Naked Armor| Specification & claim honesty | 24 / 30 |
| Steel & coating record | 17 / 20 |
| Fit & format | 15 / 20 |
| Value per blade | 13 / 15 |
| Longevity & service | 10 / 15 |
BIC Chrome Platinum
The industrial giant’s blade, graded on the shortest complete document on this page. BIC publishes the Chrome Platinum in its own shaver catalogue, the trade document its Greek works, BIC Violex, sells the range from, and the entry is three lines long and answers three of this page’s four questions: top quality stainless steel double edge blade; polymeric and chrome platinum covering; made in Greece, each blade individually wrapped and packed in a box of five. A material, two named coatings and an origin, in the maker’s print, in one breath: no other record here is as economical, and only Derby’s is fuller. The steel carries no grade, the top quality doing adjective’s work where a specification should be, and no sharpness figure stands anywhere, the two blanks this blade shares with the field. The card’s distinctive charge is not the maker’s but the channel’s, and it is printed because buyers meet the channel first: the American retail shelf describes this blade as triple-honed and finished with a Teflon coating, two specifications that appear in no maker document this desk could open, the catalogue naming its two coatings and no third, and counting no honings. A maker cannot be graded down for its retailers’ inventions, and it is not; but a record is what a buyer is handed, and what the American buyer is handed for this blade is a maker’s three lines wearing a retailer’s five. The price completes the picture: in Europe this is a supermarket blade, sold beside the toothpaste; at the American door this page links it is 27.50 dollars the hundred, an import price for a commodity record, and its value row is graded on that arithmetic and not on the Athens shelf price this desk did not pay. Reported wear, labelled as reported: among the sharpest blades in the community’s instruments, immediately behind the Feather on Refined Shave’s table, and among the longest-lived in the consensus. What carries it to fourth is a complete three-line document from a maker that had every incentive to print nothing; what holds it there is the adjective where its grade should be and the price its document crosses the Atlantic at.
$27.50 for 100 at Maggard Razors (October 2026), about 28 cents a blade
Buy · $27.50 at Maggard Razors| Specification & claim honesty | 22 / 30 |
| Steel & coating record | 15 / 20 |
| Fit & format | 15 / 20 |
| Value per blade | 9 / 15 |
| Longevity & service | 11 / 15 |
Astra Superior Platinum
The default blade of the wet-shaving world, graded on a record whose central fact is that it is not one record. The document a buyer is handed is a pack. On it, the coating claim rides in the product’s name, Superior Platinum, platinum asserted by title and documented in no maker publication this desk could open; Gillette publishes no consumer specification page for the Astra line in English, no steel statement beyond the class word, and no sharpness figure, here as everywhere. What the pack does print, in its fine print, is a plant, and since 2022 the fine print has become the most interesting text on the shelf. The Astra was for decades a single-plant blade, made at Petersburg Products International in St. Petersburg; current retail stock also arrives from Gillette plants in China and in India, with trade reporting adding Brazil, the same green pack over at least three works on three continents. The channel has begun printing the consequence. Razor Blades Club sells the Russian and Chinese Astras as separate products, at 12.99 and 10.99 euros the hundred respectively, two prices for one name; and Maggard Razors, the door this page links, states on its own listing that due to inconsistencies with some manufacturers outsourcing production it cannot guarantee which country is producing these blades, and invites the buyer to email and ask. A retailer’s disclaimer is not a maker’s specification, and it is graded as what it is: the honest sentence in this record was written by the shop. The credits are the price and the pack itself: at fifteen cents the Astra remains the blade the world learns on, its plant is printed on every box for any buyer who reads fine print, and the platinum in its name is at least a claim the whole trade repeats in the maker’s hearing without correction. Reported wear, labelled as reported: the smooth, forgiving default of the consensus, with a wax-dot wrapper the community complains about by name. What holds it at fifth is the shape of the whole record: a title claim, a lottery underneath it, and no maker document anywhere that ties the name to a single blade.
$15.00 for 100 at Maggard Razors (October 2026), 15 cents a blade
Buy · $15.00 at Maggard Razors| Specification & claim honesty | 19 / 30 |
| Steel & coating record | 12 / 20 |
| Fit & format | 15 / 20 |
| Value per blade | 11 / 15 |
| Longevity & service | 8 / 15 |
Kai Stainless
The premium minimalist, graded on a record that amounts to a refusal, priced as a luxury. Kai Corporation of Seki City is, with Feather, one of the two great Japanese blade houses, a maker of surgical blades and kitchen cutlery of the first rank, and for its consumer double edge blade it publishes, in English, essentially nothing: no product page with a specification, no coating statement, no steel statement beyond the word in the product’s name, Stainless, and no sharpness figure, in a field where nobody prints one but everybody else at least prints something. What the buyer is handed is a famously plain tuck and a box whose origin, Japan, arrives through the trade channel’s specification tables rather than any maker page. The claims in circulation for this blade are the channel’s, and they are printed here as the channel’s: the surgical grade stainless steel of the American retail copy is a phrase assembled from the maker’s medical business, true of the house and printed by the house for other products, and not printed for this one. The one physical fact the record does carry comes from the community’s instruments, and it is a fit fact with consequences: testers measuring these blades report a width slightly greater than the standard the rest of the shelf is made to, which seats the edge further out in a fixed razor, and the same instruments that find the width cannot agree on the sharpness, one project placing the Kai near the Feather and another placing it last in its sample. A maker who publishes nothing leaves his blade to be described by whoever measures loudest, and both descriptions stand on this card because the maker has settled neither. The credits are real: the Kai claims no coating it does not document, names no grade it does not print, and its silence has been stable for decades, a record that cannot decay because it was never published; and the house’s standing in every blade it does document is not in question. But this page grades documents, and at sixty cents a blade, half again the winner’s price and four times the Derby’s, the Kai’s document is the thinnest premium record on the shelf: a name, a category and a country, sold on a reputation the maker declines to write down.
$60.00 for 100 at Maggard Razors (October 2026), 60 cents a blade
Buy · $60.00 at Maggard Razors| Specification & claim honesty | 18 / 30 |
| Steel & coating record | 11 / 20 |
| Fit & format | 13 / 20 |
| Value per blade | 6 / 15 |
| Longevity & service | 10 / 15 |
Shark Super Chrome
The budget Egyptian, graded on a name and a pack. The maker is Lord, the Alexandria house of the Soliman group, one of the largest blade works on earth by volume, and the record it publishes for the Shark Super Chrome is the pack itself: the brand, the words Super Chrome, and an Egyptian manufacture carried by the pack print and its Egyptian barcode. The coating claim is the title’s: chrome, asserted the way Astra asserts platinum, by naming, with no maker document behind the word that this desk could open; Lord’s own consumer store lists the family’s blades, its Super Chrome among them, as products for sale rather than as specifications. The second layer every retailer repeats, a polymer coat over the chrome, stands in the channel’s copy, Maggard’s stainless steel and polymer coated among it, and is graded as the channel’s sentence, not the maker’s. The steel is stainless by category, its grade and source printed nowhere. And beneath the thin document sits the question this maker’s whole catalogue raises and no maker document answers: Lord sells the same three words, platinum, chrome and stainless, across a crowd of brands, Shark, Lord, Asco, Silver Star, Big Ben and more, and the community that uses them has argued for years, in a long-running attempt to decode the family, that the brands may cover as few as three distinct constructions. The suspicion is printed here as reported and as unproven in both directions, because that is its state: the maker publishes nothing that would settle how many blades it actually makes, and a buyer choosing among its brands is choosing among documents that do not say. The credits are the price, the pack’s printed origin, and a distribution so wide the blade can be bought on any continent for pennies. Reported wear, labelled as reported: sharper than its price suggests in the consensus, and brief-lived. What holds it at seventh is that everything beyond the title and the origin is somebody else’s copy, at a price that almost excuses it and a volume that does not.
$16.00 for 100 at Maggard Razors (October 2026), 16 cents a blade
Buy · $16.00 at Maggard Razors| Specification & claim honesty | 16 / 30 |
| Steel & coating record | 10 / 20 |
| Fit & format | 14 / 20 |
| Value per blade | 11 / 15 |
| Longevity & service | 6 / 15 |
The blade numbers, in one table
| Question, asked of the makers’ own print | Answer | Where it lands |
|---|---|---|
| A specification stating material, coating and origin together | 4 of 8 | Feather (distributor page), Derby (catalogue), BIC (catalogue), AccuTec (box and corporate pages) |
| A record carried by the pack alone | 4 of 8 | Astra, Kai, Shark, Gillette Silver Blue |
| A coating named in the maker’s print | 6 of 8 | Derby, BIC, Feather, AccuTec documented; Astra and Shark in the product name alone |
| A coating stack of more than one named layer | 3 of 8 | Derby (five), BIC (two), Feather (platinum alloy under resin, in the maker’s professional catalogue) |
| No coating claimed anywhere | 2 of 8 | Kai (an honest blank); Gillette Silver Blue (an absent document) |
| A steel grade named by the maker | 0 of 8 | Nowhere: the word stainless carries the whole column |
| A steel origin named by the maker | 1 of 8 | Derby, Swedish, claimed in its brand-store listing and withheld in its catalogue |
| A country of manufacture printed | 8 of 8 | Japan twice, the USA, Greece, Turkey, Egypt, and Russia twice over |
| An origin printed only in Russian | 1 of 8 | Gillette Silver Blue, the St. Petersburg plant line on the pack |
| An origin that changes from box to box | 1 of 8 | Astra Superior Platinum: Russia, China or India on current shelves |
| A plant address printed on the box | 1 of 8 | AccuTec, 1 Razor Blade Lane, Verona, Virginia |
| A sharpness figure printed by the maker | 0 of 8 | The shelf’s honest centre: the number is community property or it is nothing |
| A shaves-per-blade figure in a maker-side document | 1 of 8 | Feather, three to ten shaves, in its US house’s questions |
| A blade carrying no mark at all | 1 of 8 | Current AccuTec production: the name survives only on the box |
The value table
| Product | Score | Checked price | Per blade | The record the price buys |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Derby Extra | 79 | $13.31 for 100 at Naked Armor | 13 cents | The fullest coating print on the shelf |
| Astra Superior Platinum | 65 | $15.00 for 100 at Maggard Razors | 15 cents | A name, a title claim and a plant lottery |
| Shark Super Chrome | 57 | $16.00 for 100 at Maggard Razors | 16 cents | A title claim and a printed origin |
| AccuTec, as Personna Comfort Coated | 80 | $19.50 for 100 at Maggard Razors | 20 cents | A named technology and the plant’s address |
| BIC Chrome Platinum | 72 | $27.50 for 100 at Maggard Razors | About 28 cents | Three complete lines of catalogue, at an import price |
| Feather Hi-Stainless | 81 | $38.00 for 100 at Maggard Razors | 38 cents | The fullest consumer document here |
| Kai Stainless | 58 | $60.00 for 100 at Maggard Razors | 60 cents | A name, a category and a country |
| Gillette Silver Blue (the skip) | 39 | No maker price; import channel only | Not printed | No document at any price |
The value table is the honesty table of this ranking, and it refuses the shape a buyer expects. The fullest documents on the page are not the dearest blades: the Derby’s five-layer catalogue record costs thirteen cents, the American address costs twenty, and the winner’s complete consumer page costs thirty-eight, while the thinnest premium record, the Kai’s three facts, costs sixty, and the absent document is priceless in the literal sense that its maker prints no price for it in this market at all. Read the other way, the table is a price list for print itself. A named coating stack costs a maker nothing but the decision to publish it, and the two makers who publish fullest sell at the bottom of the price range; a reputation costs the buyer sixty cents a blade precisely where the maker has declined to document it. What the table will not show, because this desk did not test it, is a shave. It prices documents and the steel they name, and on that arithmetic the blade shelf is the one shelf in the grooming run where the document and the price argue in opposite directions.
Which one to buy
For most buyers, the Feather Hi-Stainless (81): the only blade here whose maker-side page answers the coating, the material, the origin and the life range before the money moves, at the top of the mainstream price range and worth it on the record alone. For the American document and the shelf’s best arithmetic, the AccuTec blade (80), bought under whichever of its names the channel stocks, knowing the blade itself now carries no name at all. For the coating stack in full at thirteen cents, the Derby Extra (79), and for the sharp budget blade the community’s instruments place second in the field, the BIC Chrome Platinum (72), bought at a European price if you can and the import price if you must. The Astra (65) is bought as the world’s default, by a buyer who has read the fine print on his own box and knows which plant he got. The Kai (58) is bought as an object of faith in a great house, on a document this page has printed at its full, short length. The Shark (57) is bought by the hundred for pennies, on a title and an origin. The Gillette Silver Blue is not recommended at any price this desk could verify: the most famous blade name in the field is the one whose maker will not write a word about it, and this page does not link what it sends home.
How this page was made, and what it rests on
Every specification on this page was read on a record a buyer can open, in October 2026: the makers’ own pages, catalogues, boxes and corporate literature, and the listings of the retailers named on the cards, each opened and read this pass. Feather’s stands on its US house Jatai’s product page and questions, and on the maker’s own professional catalogue, where the coating system is described. AccuTec’s stands on the maker’s corporate pages, its box print as reported from current production, and its technology literature. Derby’s stands on the maker’s English-language catalogue, quoted in the trade and read against its brand-store listing, where the Swedish claim the catalogue withholds appears. BIC’s stands on the maker’s own shaver catalogue. The Astra’s stands on its pack print and on the channel’s documents, Razor Blades Club’s separate Russian and Chinese listings and Maggard’s outsourcing note on the listing this page links. The Kai’s stands on its pack and the trade channel’s specification tables, the maker publishing no consumer page in English that this desk could find, a limit printed rather than papered over. Shark’s stands on its pack, its maker’s store listings and its American retailer’s copy, labelled as the channel’s wherever it appears. The Silver Blue’s stands on its pack’s Russian plant line and on the documented absence of everything else, checked across its maker’s consumer channels before the absence was graded. The community’s instrumented sharpness work, Refined Shave’s cutting-force table and the cut-time project, is cited as community measurement wherever it appears and graded nowhere as a maker record.
Four premises the brief carried were corrected by the record, and the corrections are printed because a correction is a finding. First, the American blade’s famous name is a nickname: no product called Lab Blue exists, the box says Comfort Coated, and the maker that owns the blade today is AccuTec, which has since retired even the Personna name in favour of AccuForge; the page grades the record under both names rather than scoring a ghost. Second, the brief’s eighth seat was contested between two Egyptian and Moscow records, and it went to the Egyptian: Moscow’s Voskhod built its name on a coating claim, Teflon coated, printed large on its pack for years, and the claim no longer stands on its current pack, which the channel now describes as chromium-coated, so the record this page could verify end to end, Shark’s, took the seat, and Voskhod’s withdrawal is itself graded in the longevity column’s logic and awaits its own Card. Third, the Astra is not the Russian blade of its reputation: one name now covers at least three plants, and the page grades the lottery rather than the memory. Fourth, two grade words in wide circulation, Swedish for this Derby and surgical for this Kai, are printed by neither blade’s maker for the blade itself, and are graded as the channel’s words wherever they appear. The H&M rule holds here as across the desk’s Cards: no H&M product exists in this category’s field as briefed, none was scored, and no garment bookkeeping was triggered. On photography: the bank holds no product photography for any of these eight blades, so the cards run imageless, as every grooming Card in this run has, and the hero is the beard portrait Card No. 103 carried, the terrain standing in for the instruments because the instruments cannot. Prices were checked on October 22, 2026, per blade arithmetic printed beside each; the AccuForge-branded version of the American blade is listed in Europe at 79 euros for 250, and the Personna-named door this page links is the cheaper way to buy the same plant’s blade while the name lasts. Prices move, and the stamp above says when this page was last read against them.
Questions, answered from the record
What is the best razor blade for men?
On the published record, the Feather Hi-Stainless at 81 of 100: its maker’s US house prints the platinum coating, the stainless steel and the Japanese origin on one page, with a shaves-per-blade range of three to ten beside them, the fullest consumer document on this shelf. Behind it: the AccuTec blade sold as Personna Comfort Coated and now as AccuForge at 80, the Derby Extra at 79, the BIC Chrome Platinum at 72, the Astra Superior Platinum at 65, the Kai Stainless at 58, the Shark Super Chrome at 57, and the Gillette Silver Blue sent home at 39.
What steel are these blades made from?
Stainless steel, all eight of them, and that category word is where every maker stops. A steel grade is named by the maker on none of the eight records: no AISI number, no chromium percentage, no named steel stands in any maker document this desk could open. A steel origin is named by a maker for exactly one blade, the Derby Extra, and its own channels disagree about it: the maker’s catalogue reserves the Swedish steel line for its Premium blade while its brand-store listing claims Swedish steel for the Extra. The other grade words in circulation are the channel’s: surgical grade for the Kai, a phrase from its maker’s medical business that the maker does not print for this blade, and Swedish for the Astra, whose steel no document sources at all.
Which blades actually print their coating?
Six of the eight name a coating somewhere in the maker’s own print, and the six divide by kind. Four document it: Derby’s catalogue names five layers, chromium, ceramic, platinum and tungsten under a polymer finish; BIC’s catalogue names a polymeric and chrome platinum covering; Feather’s US house names a platinum coating, and its maker’s professional catalogue describes its blade coatings as a platinum alloy under resin; AccuTec names its coating outright, Comfort Coated on the box and MicroCoat in its technology literature. Two carry the claim in the product name alone: Astra’s Platinum and Shark’s Chrome stand in their titles, with no maker document behind either word. And two claim nothing: the Kai names no coating at all, and the Gillette Silver Blue’s maker prints no coating statement anywhere.
How sharp is each blade, in numbers?
No maker on this page prints a sharpness figure: zero of eight. The number the whole shelf is bought on exists only in community instruments, which are cited on this page as community documents and never as maker records. The best known of them, Refined Shave’s cutting-force tests, measured the Feather the sharpest blade in its field and the BIC Chrome Platinum immediately behind it, with the Derby Extra at the mild end; a second instrumented project, measuring cut time, put the same field in a different order and the Kai last, against its reputation. The instruments disagree because there is no maker figure to settle them, and the disagreement is the finding: sharpness is the one number every blade is sold on and no blade publishes.
Why does the same Astra blade come from different countries?
Because the name is a brand, not a plant. Astra Superior Platinum has been made for decades at Gillette’s St. Petersburg plant, and since the trade disruptions of 2022 current retail stock also arrives from Gillette plants in China and India, with the pack’s fine print the only place the plant is stated. Razor Blades Club sells the Russian and Chinese versions as separate products at different prices, 12.99 and 10.99 euros the hundred. Maggard Razors, the door this page links, prints the honest version on its own listing: due to inconsistencies with manufacturers outsourcing production, it cannot guarantee which country is producing the blades in the box. The blade is graded here as that record: a platinum claim in the name, over a plant that is a lottery at the point of order.
What happened to the Personna Lab Blue?
Lab Blue was never its name. The blade’s product name is Comfort Coated, printed on its box beside Made in USA and, on recent boxes, its maker’s address: AccuTec Blades, 1 Razor Blade Lane, Verona, Virginia. AccuTec, the plant’s owner since the Personna industrial business was sold out of Edgewell in 2015, has since retired the Personna name from the blade entirely and sells the same Verona production under its own brand, AccuForge, with its medical sibling renamed AccuThrive. Current blades carry no etching at all: earlier production was laser-etched Personna Super and Made in USA, and the blade a buyer unwraps today is anonymous, identifiable only by its box. The record is graded whole, name changes included, at 80.
Why was the Gillette Silver Blue sent home?
Because there is no document to grade. Gillette publishes no consumer product page for the Silver Blue, no specification, no steel statement beyond the class word its retailers supply, and no coating statement of any kind; the words Silver and Blue in its name are explained by no maker document, and there is no silver in or on the blade in any record this desk could open. What the maker prints stands on the pack, in Russian: the producing plant, Gillette’s St. Petersburg works. The same company publishes blade science by the page for its cartridge systems, so the silence is a decision about what the buyer of this blade is owed. A famous name and a Russian fine-print line are not a specification. Scored 39 and sent home.
The blade shelf read whole, the neighbouring documents are the hardware Card this page is the sequel to, the aftershave shelf the shave ends in, and the two Takes that argued the missing number before this shelf supplied eight more proofs of it. Read Best Safety Razors for Men, Card No. 103, whose basis and whose winner this page’s winner was made to load; Best Aftershaves for Men, for what the makers print about the hour after the shave; Grooming Take No. 2, the number nobody prints, which eight blade makers confirm without exception; and Grooming Take No. 7, the number is not the dose, on a shelf where neither the number nor the dose is printed and the reputation does the work of both.