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Would you pay $100,000 for a razor?

By Mike Wehner, Tecca mike Wehner, Tecca – Tue Jun 21, 10:41 am ET



$100,000 can buy many things: a brand new sports car, a boat, or a ridiculously luxurious vacation, just to name a few. But if you already have a new Audi in your driveway, a yacht at the marina, and just got back from a trip around the world, perhaps you'd rather drop your cold hard cash on a limited edition iridium razor. The pricey item is crafted by Zafirro, a company which seems to have just one product in its lineup, and just 99 of the "Zafirro Iridium" razors will be made.

The handle of the razor is made entirely of iridium, an extremely scarce and expensive metal that is so dense it could survive a drop into molten lava. Most iridium that appears on Earth is the result of crashed meteorites. The blades of the beast are made from artificially grown sapphire, making them hypoallergenic, not to mention many orders of magnitude sharper than your average Bic. The company boasts a 10-year blade life, and backs it up with free sharpening for a decade if the razor ever dulls.

The Zafirro Iridium, while promising "generations" of enjoyable use, is clearly made for the millionaire who already has everything. The company says the upgrade from a traditional razor to the $100,000 model is like changing from a CB radio to an iPhone, but unless your morning shave takes place at the mouth of a volcano, we're not sure it's worth it.

Zafirro via Laughing Squid

Wow. This product is just incredible. An Incredible waste of what must have been a very pretty collection of meteorites!

I'm in the need right now myself for a new razor(my handle is worn out) but couldn't imagine spending that much on one!

You get what you pay for. I mean, I drop my razors in lava all the time, and this baby would survive that. Seems like a good investment.

Who cares about the material of the handle? It's the blade that's important. And to me, 100,000$ at least right now represents roughly 210,000 blades. That's like 575 years even if I needed a new blade every day, which I don't. While I realize this isn't exactly about value for money, 100 grand for a mere decade (two, if you assume they'll make good on replacing the blade if it turns dull moments after finishing its first decade) seems a bit pricey even to me.

I've got a couple of 50 year old safety razors I'd shave with that worked as well as the day they were new. I've since moved onto other vintage straight razors, all of which are more than 10 years old. I think all of my shave stuff might have cost $100 if I include sending the straights out to be honed.

You can buy a LOT of really good DE blades for $20.

How many Batarangs would that be Bats?

Which kind? The basic funnily shaped thrown projectile ones, the funnily shaped projectile that goes kablooey ones, the Batman Returns guided Nintendarangs,the GPS equipped midrange late Modern Age ones?

And that's without the transmogrifier batarangs added to them mix.

Mang I just keep thinking about the Iridium. It seems like such a Bloody WASTE of such an Awesome Mineral.

I mean all the cool things you could make out of a mineral that is virtually not found on earth at all, and oyu make a shaver???

Are you guys okay with spark plug tips being made of iridium?

yes, why is that a big problem? It's being used for something useful rather then a novelty shaver handle that could be easily made of anything else.

An iridium spark plug will even last longer meaning less waste in the long run and only uses a tiny amount of it in each one. How many of those could be made instead?

Bats, lets go with the most simple kind hence the easiest to work out what they might cost.

Crossroads Inc. wrote:Mang I just keep thinking about the Iridium. It seems like such a Bloody WASTE of such an Awesome Mineral.

I mean all the cool things you could make out of a mineral that is virtually not found on earth at all, and oyu make a shaver???

I just spent half an hour searching the Internet to see how well a Iridium sword might fair. Turns out alloying Iridium with Steel might turn out a nice blade but a mostly pure Iridium blade would be much more expensive than one made of solid platinum or gold.

Now I have another entry on my list of "if I have to much money to ever spend it on anything I'll get me one of these list" screw the shaver lets get a nice Longsword made.

maybe a cutting edge of iridium and a spine of ultra high strength aluminium?

thinking about the weight issue - a normal sword in iridium would be a tad heavy.

When I think about the most pointless luxury consumption thing ever, this easily comes to mind as being somewhere in the top ten.

The summary production of these razors, if someone ever buys them, would be enough to supply 333 000 Kenyans with a Kenyan minimum wage for a month. It would be enough to feed the entirety of the FAO child anti-malnourishment programme in Kenya (14000 children) for over 2 years, if you supply them with food directly.

How many other pointless fucking luxury shit do we need to produce before this disgusting pestilence that calls itself "homo sapiens" will stop being not much more than a glorified ape intellectually?

Do they provide tools to extract it from lava in the event I drop it?

Stas Bush wrote: The summary production of these razors, if someone ever buys them, would be enough to supply 333 000 Kenyans with a Kenyan minimum wage for a month. It would be enough to feed the entirety of the FAO child anti-malnourishment programme in Kenya (14000 children) for over 2 years, if you supply them with food directly.

How many other pointless fucking luxury shit do we need to produce before this disgusting pestilence that calls itself "homo sapiens" will stop being not much more than a glorified ape intellectually?

You can apply that logic to anything. Heaven forbid someone actually buys the Lego Super Star Destroyer that's coming out*. Once its built all it will do is sit on a shelf.

*I may well get it.

Sharp-kun wrote:You can apply that logic to anything.

And so? How does a myriad of other stupidities excuse the existence of this particular stupidity?

Sharp-kun wrote:Heaven forbid someone actually buys the Lego Super Star Destroyer that's coming out*. Once its built all it will do is sit on a shelf.
*I may well get it.

Indeed. Although you could technically note that the LEGO SSD costs 0,004 of the price of the bullshit razor. And also that LEGO factories actually produce good toys and employ thousands of people all over the world. How many people produce the bullshit razor? Why are they entitled to getting $100000 for such a pointless product?

In essence, while an expensive luxury yacht is at least somehow explainable as a complex industrial project which employs dozens of engineers and hundreds if not thousands of skilled workers, which helps industry of the nation where it is ordered (e.g. Turkey) advance...

That razor advances nothing. That's not toys for kids. That's not some sort of progressive industry which will employ lots of people. That's not an industry which would use the labour of hundreds of engineers and maybe pay for their education, like shipbuilders and planebuilders and carbuilders sometimes do.

That's just SHIT. A pile of metallic shit.

The handle is certainly completely useless. It's not like common razor handles suffer from high wear or need to be replaced regularly.

Now the sapphire blade might actually be useful (tough probably overprized) - after all that's the part of the razor you actually use, and it might offer actual advantages over normal razorblades.

Serafina wrote:The handle is certainly completely useless. It's not like common razor handles suffer from high wear or need to be replaced regularly.

Now the sapphire blade might actually be useful (tough probably overprized) - after all that's the part of the razor you actually use, and it might offer actual advantages over normal razorblades.

The article makes it sound like most of the price comes from the iridium due to the rarity of the metal. Which means that item is fucking crazy. Once again the theory about prices being a mechanism which makes useless labour cheap and useful labour expensive bites the iridium handle dust and dies. Yeah, I know about abundancy and scarcity being factors which determine price regardless of moral or even practical considerations - but market fundamentalists had been trying to beat into everyone's head that "abundancy = cheapness = uselessness", whilst "scarcity = usefulness = expensiveness". I know Starglider likes to defend the concept of luxury consumption and particular examples of it as well. I wonder how he'd defend this piece of stupidity.

Looking at the image it looks like rendered CAD so I don't think that it has been produced yet. There are a fair amount of such luxury articles that are tried as a concept only, if they get an order of even one unit they'll make a profit.

I'd go for a sapphire blade, it it were for a 3/8 straight razor, but the handle is irrelevant.

Stas Bush wrote:I know Starglider likes to defend the concept of luxury consumption and particular examples of it as well. I wonder how he'd defend this piece of stupidity.

I wouldn't, but the notion that it is depriving millions of poor third worlders of anything is ridiculous. Just because you can denominate everything in dollars does not mean they are fungible. There is absolutely no way that donating $100k to your supposed worthy causes would actually employ 33,000 people for a year or fix child malnourishment. Monetary payment is passing tokens around and one rich person paying one oversold crafstmen or entertainer an excessive number of tokens does not alter the amount of food, minerals and mass market manufactured goods available for the real economy.

Starglider wrote:There is absolutely no way that donating $100k to your supposed worthy causes would actually employ 33,000 people for a year or fix child malnourishment.

Last time I heard, the world economy is worth many trillions of dollars. $100 k wouldn't nearly be enough to significantly impact the world market, e.g. the world price of grain. Even $1 million wouldn't be enough. However, that WOULD be enough to feed thousands. Not millions, no, but thousands - surely.

Starglider wrote:Monetary payment is passing tokens around and one rich person paying one oversold crafstmen or entertainer an excessive number of tokens does not alter the amount of food, minerals and mass market manufactured goods available for the real economy.

You see, if you buy $100 k worth of food for Kenya, you won't change the very big-big picture, that's true, you won't be able to feed millions, etc. But that wouldn't seriously impact food prices, and $100k worth of food is actually a very small number by First World standards. However, it would be enough to prevent malnourishment of thousands.

Yes, there's millions of malnourished in the world. Yes, that's a small dent in the wall. But if you ask me which is more important, iridium razor or a few thousand people spared from deforming bones - I guess the latter.

Also, if he uses $100 k to buy the food for Kenya from the First World, yes, the absolute number of food available inside the First World would decrease. Which would mean a very-very small rise in the price of First World food. However, nobody in the First World is starving or even malnourished. Whoop de fuck.

Stas Bush wrote:

There is absolutely no way that donating $100k to your supposed worthy causes would actually employ 33,000 people for a year or fix child malnourishment.

Last time I heard, the world economy is worth many trillions of dollars. $100 k wouldn't nearly be enough to significantly impact the world market, e.g. the world price of grain. Even $1 million wouldn't be enough. However, that WOULD be enough to feed thousands. Not millions, no, but thousands - surely.

What $150,000 can do to help the world.

Stas Bush wrote:However, that WOULD be enough to feed thousands. Not millions, no, but thousands - surely.

This is a red herring. Unlimited amounts of food aid would not fix the problems in Africa; in fact it is very arguable that aid exacerbates the problems by destroying the incentive to farm locally. That is a completely separate debate though.

It is amusing that as a supposed opponent of capitalism you are taking a monetarist viewpoint, i.e. that spending money on yachts is better because it involves engineers and lots of craftsmen. Or perhaps that is just a warped version of the soviet attitude of industry for its own sake. In reality, luxury yachts are more objectionable precisely because they do employ a large number of people with useful skills. The valuable labor of those individuals is consumed building toys for a few individuals, when it could have been employed to produce items and advancements of more general applicability. In the market this is seen as an increase in the cost of marine construction to everyone else, i.e. middle class people trying to buy a riverboat have to pay more. Arguably over a long enough period rich people buying yachts will cause more people to learn the relevant trades, and economies of scale may eventually reduce the costs for everyone. This is a tenuous hope though, and there's no way around the fact that pulling thousands of highly skilled people off mass-market projects to work on vanity projects deprives the rest of the economy of those people.

Conversely for this product the only labor involved was a lot of marketing and PR, and a fairly small amount of crafting. The money is transferred from a very rich idiot to moderately rich executives and some designers and metalworkers, who will then proceed to spend it as usual. Arguably they will spend it on things more in keeping with the Stas Communoid Ideal than the original very rich idiot would have. The real opportunity cost to the economy is (a) the labor and (b) the materials. The labor in this case was fairly worthless; do you really think the PR people who came up with this are capable of doing anything genuinely useful? A small amount of skilled craftsman time is involved which would have some value to the rest of the economy, but the loss is insigificant compared to trying up engineers making luxury yachts.

So in summary this is a monetary token transfer from rich idiots to somewhat less rich con artists with the only real loss being the irridium, unless it is recycled, in which case this is just an odd shaped piece of irridium bullion.

Starglider wrote:This is a red herring. Unlimited amounts of food aid would not fix the problems in Africa; in fact it is very arguable that aid exacerbates the problems by destroying the incentive to farm locally. That is a completely separate debate though.

Because clearly feeding 14000 malnourished just to avoid bone damage = destroying agriculture in Africa. Because $100000 is "unlimited food aid". Wait, you are strawmanning my point.

Starglider wrote:In reality, luxury yachts are more objectionable precisely because they do employ a large number of people with useful skills. The valuable labor of those individuals is consumed building toys for a few individuals, when it could have been employed to produce items and advancements of more general applicability. In the market this is seen as an increase in the cost of marine construction to everyone else, i.e. middle class people trying to buy a riverboat have to pay more. Arguably over a long enough period rich people buying yachts will cause more people to learn the relevant trades, and economies of scale may eventually reduce the costs for everyone. This is a tenuous hope though, and there's no way around the fact that pulling thousands of highly skilled people off mass-market projects to work on vanity projects deprives the rest of the economy of those people.

I never said the yacht is good, however, it is better than a fucking iridium razor because the yacht actually requires tools and engineers, which need to be made, and can technically save a shipbuilding plants by giving it money to survive and expand production. It is still a gross misapplication of resources, of course.

Starglider wrote:So in summary this is a monetary token transfer from rich idiots to somewhat less rich con artists with the only real loss being the irridium, unless it is recycled, in which case this is just an odd shaped piece of irridium bullion.

Savings don't exist in Starglider world. Neither does misallocation. Giving $100 000 from a rich idiot to a rich idiot doesn't mean it will be spent on something useful. As opposed to making some more of the extremely expensive luxury bullshit.

Are you two seriously in a pissing match over something that neither of you will ever be able to afford? You might as well be yelling at each other over who's a better lay - Jennifer Aniston or Angelina Jolie - you've got about the same odds of fucking one of them as you do of buying this razor.

Stas Bush wrote:

Starglider wrote:There is absolutely no way that donating $100k to your supposed worthy causes would actually employ 33,000 people for a year or fix child malnourishment.

Last time I heard, the world economy is worth many trillions of dollars. $100 k wouldn't nearly be enough to significantly impact the world market, e.g. the world price of grain. Even $1 million wouldn't be enough. However, that WOULD be enough to feed thousands. Not millions, no, but thousands - surely.

Starglider wrote:Monetary payment is passing tokens around and one rich person paying one oversold crafstmen or entertainer an excessive number of tokens does not alter the amount of food, minerals and mass market manufactured goods available for the real economy.

You see, if you buy $100 k worth of food for Kenya, you won't change the very big-big picture, that's true, you won't be able to feed millions, etc. But that wouldn't seriously impact food prices, and $100k worth of food is actually a very small number by First World standards. However, it would be enough to prevent malnourishment of thousands.

Yes, there's millions of malnourished in the world. Yes, that's a small dent in the wall. But if you ask me which is more important, iridium razor or a few thousand people spared from deforming bones - I guess the latter.

Also, if he uses $100 k to buy the food for Kenya from the First World, yes, the absolute number of food available inside the First World would decrease. Which would mean a very-very small rise in the price of First World food. However, nobody in the First World is starving or even malnourished. Whoop de fuck.

Isn't it more a matter of logisitics than actual availability of food? It seems that the bigger cost isn't the food itself, but transporting it to where it needs to be before spoilage, and distributing it to the people who need it. In which case that 100K can disappear rather rapidly...