The Blade Hoard: How Many Is Too Many?
Jeff put it out there with one line: Some of you guys have enough blades to last til doomsday lol.
Fifty-seven reactions. Forty-eight replies. Nobody argued.
The numbers that came back were something. Jack is at 3,000. Andrew put himself in the 3,000 to 4,000 range. Francisco cleared 2,000. Brian sits somewhere between 1,000 and 1,500 and figures they’ll outlast him. Randy has around 100 and considers himself reasonable. The group seemed mildly skeptical.
The math can make a kind of sense. Five shaves a week, each blade runs three or four times, you’re going through roughly 50 blades a year. A thousand blades is 20 years of shaves. Two thousand is 40. At a certain point, you stop buying for yourself.
Jonny added useful context: blade prices more than doubled over the prior three years. That reframes a lot of those stashes. Many of them got built when a hundred-count was genuinely cheap and buying in bulk was obvious math. The economics changed; the drawers didn’t shrink.
The favorite blade problem
Part of what builds the hoard is the discovery phase. You try a blade, it works, you buy a stack. Then you find one you like better. Now you have two large inventories of something you’ll use eventually but won’t reach for first.
Randy found Personna Comfort Coated early and mostly stuck with them. Tried Vikings along the way and wasn’t impressed. Has some Gillette Perma-Sharps he’s working through, with the Personna GEM on his to-try list. Ronald and Doug have both landed deep in Personna GEM territory and have more or less written off the rest of their collections. Ronald described the feeling plainly: after finding blades that work for his face, everything else feels like a step down. The earlier accumulation becomes a museum.
That’s the common shape. Discovery phase, land on one or two favorites, the rest sits. Still usable. Just not what you’d grab.
Marcus is running Parker blades, a couple hundred plus strays in the mix.
Blades vs. soaps
Darren put the comparison cleanly: at least blades are cheap, not like the soaps.
He’s right. A hundred-count of a solid DE blade runs less than most artisan soap pucks. The blade hoard looks dramatic in a photo, but it’s rarely where the money went. The soap collection is a different conversation. Martha is at 22. Jeff narrowed his down from 18 to 13 and considers that progress.
Blade counts are public in a way soap counts rarely are. You can picture a drawer full of 3,000 Perma-Sharps. People understand what that means. Soap pucks are subtler.
How many do you actually need
There’s no fixed answer. It depends on how often you shave, whether you run one blade to exhaustion or rotate, whether you stock up when prices dip, and what your long-term plans look like for the drawer when you’re done with it.
A sampler pack is the sensible starting point. If you haven’t worked through a range of blade types, you’re buying in bulk before you know what suits your face and your razor. Once you’ve found a known-good blade, buying a hundred-count makes practical sense. Beyond that, the math gets personal.
If you’re still sorting out which blades land for you, the razor blade buyer’s guide maps the main families so you’re not buying blind. Different coatings, different grinds, the spread between sharp-and-smooth and sharp-and-grabby depending on your skin and your hardware. Worth reading before committing to four figures of any single blade.
Happy shaving.