Before bed this evening I was shaving my head and face in the shower, a fairly typical twice-or-so-a-week event. Having recently acquired a Dollar Shave Club four-blade razor I was giving it a go, just as I had four or five other shaving sessions before. As I was finishing up, going back over the top of the my head one more time, I felt the familiar tug of cutting one’s self. As typical for head cuts I was bleeding a bit, so I called for Danielle to tell me just how bad it was. She had a difficult time dealing with the sight of blood (needing to sit down at one point — as she did during this), but after I washed the blood off she was able to give it a look, and after setting a dry towel on my head for a while she used our largest bandage some Neosporin to patch it up.
At first I didn’t understand was the magnitude of the skin removed, thinking that it was just one of the usual small cuts that I get every couple of months, often the result of a small pimple or ingrown hair. While waiting for Danielle I managed to pull it out of the razor, setting it aside in a bit of water so I could look at it later. Shown above is the still-moist piece of skin, laid out on a stainless steel scale. This is 11mm x 20mm, and the ends are a bit thin and folded under.
Since the razor wasn’t brand new (it’d been used maybe four or five times before) I’m hesitant to fault it, but the Gillette Mach 3 that I’d used for years previously never did this after a similar number of uses on a triple-blade head. Then again, the flap of skin was stuck between the bottom two (leading and second) blades. This could have been because the leading blade was dulling, pulled up a bit of skin, and the second cleanly sliced it away.
Despite the hassle of cutting my head, the skin slice resulted in a very interesting photo. In it one can see bisected pores, small imperfections, and lighter colored and less translucent spots where the sample ended up a bit thicker than others. Click here to see the full resolution version, which is making me wish I’d had an higher resolution camera.
This should heal soon, but as it’s more superficial than scrapes I receive while biking I don’t anticipate it being much of a problem. Because there’s so much blood flow to the scalp small cuts and scrapes like this tend to heal quickly. Thankfully Danielle was here to dress it, as being on a not-quite-visible part of my head it would have been a huge hassle to do alone.