Shaving like a gay man

We watch a lot of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy on Bravo. Not so much lately, as we’ve been pretty busy, but TiVo keeps us in the loop. Any­how, I have taken spe­cial note of the part where the gay guys scream and shud­der when the straight guy shaves. It seems they want us to shave with the hair, not against it. And slowly.

So I resolved the try it. My nor­mal shav­ing tech­nique is to not. Shave, that is. Hence the beard. But now that I am work­ing, and should look halfway respectable, I’ve begun to take it up again (no, I still have the beard, but now I’m shav­ing the non-beard parts on a more reg­u­lar basis). I must con­fess that my shav­ing would send the gay guys into con­nip­tions: fast, against the grain, with lit­tle regard for my safety or comfort.

I am try­ing the gay way now, and I must say, I am hav­ing mixed results. Shav­ing slowly gives me the hee­bies, I can feel each hair rasp­ing across the blade and it doesn’t feel good. And shav­ing in the direc­tion of the hair is nice and smooth, but does not give me a clean shave. I am always left with a short stub­ble that you can’t really see, but you can def­i­nitely feel. (My beard is fairly light, so since there isn’t a lot of face and neck stroking going on at work, I can prob­a­bly get by with this amount of stubble.)

Any advice out there? I’m using three blades already, though I haven’t changed the blade recently. I’ll try that next.