WÜRM 22mm Shaving Brush | Micro Super Future Hybrid Synth Knot | Retro Shave Tech!

The word “STERILIZED” opens another, much darker chapter of shaving history. During the early twentieth century, contaminated animal-hair shaving brushes were linked to outbreaks of cutaneous anthrax. Wartime shortages and poorly disinfected animal hair created a genuine public-health problem, serious enough that sterilization and labeling requirements became part of the American brush industry. By the time brushes such as the B1086 appeared, the word STERILIZED had become a mark of reassurance. PURE BADGER mattered too, because KLENZO offered brushes in different grades. The B1086 was not coy about what it contained. This was a genuine badger brush from an era when knot material told the customer a great deal about the quality level of the tool in his hand.

ANOTHER FUN FACT: Early shaving-brush makers used several different sterilization methods. Some boiled the loose animal hair in water for hours. Others exposed it to pressurized steam in an autoclave, used prolonged dry heat, or soaked the finished brush in heated formalin, a formaldehyde solution. These treatments were meant to kill anthrax spores that could survive in contaminated horsehair and other animal fibers. #TheSporeYouKnow

Anyways...

The material of the handle is just as important to the story. The original B1086 was made from Lucite, and that meant something very different when the brush was new than it does today. Lucite was DuPont's name for a clear acrylic material introduced commercially in the 1930s. During World War II, acrylic became closely associated with aircraft canopies, windows, gun turrets, instrumentation, and other applications where engineers needed something transparent, lightweight, strong, and less fragile than glass. When these same materials began moving into civilian products after the war, they carried some of that technological prestige with them. Rexall was advertising Lucite shaving brushes by 1948, at a time when a transparent acrylic object still looked strikingly modern.

That is one of the things I love most about the original B1086. Today we look at a clear Lucite handle and see vintage design. When the brush was new, people would have seen the future! If you really want to shave like grandpa, you need to think like grandpa too. Come with me now as we crawl inside his mind. 

To him, this new material belonged to aviation, machinery, laboratories, and the rapidly advancing world of postwar technology!

Exciting stuff for sure. The B1086 was not retro futuristic when it was made. It was simply futuristic! Time eventually caught up with that future, passed it, and left behind this wonderfully odd little object that now seems to belong equally to the 1950s and to some science-fiction world that never existed. [the perfect candidate for the PAA Universe.]

All that just to say, this is exactly why we chose acrylic for WÜRM. Simply recreating the B1086 in clear material would have turned the project into a reproduction, and that was never our intention. We wanted to preserve the material language of the original while pushing the design somewhere new and fun. The connection to the Lucite ancestor remains immediately visible (right?), but the green transforms the character of the brush. Like a single, fractured facet of an alien prism, light moves through the segmented handle and catches the repeating geometry, creating shifting layers of depth throughout the body. Depending on the angle and the light, WÜRM can resemble vintage scientific equipment, an obvious energy cell, a reactor component, or some unknown irradiated specimen recovered from a craft whose point of origin has yet to be disclosed.  #GiantHungrySpaceWorm #BÜRP #EverythingIsFine

We also increased the scale (like we do). WÜRM is larger than the KLENZO that inspired it, with considerably more presence in the hand and a satisfying heft and weight that make the handle feel every bit as substantial as it looks. The enlarged proportions give those unusual accordion-like segments room to breathe, and acrylic brings enough density to the design that you immediately feel the difference when you pick it up. [You could also knock out a rabid squirrel with this sucker. I speak from experience. #Fact]

A Fellow "Mass Soul"

There is another fun connection here that we could never have planned. [I mean, not without traveling back in time and moving things around.] United Drug began in Boston, Massachusetts. Our business also began in Massachusetts! More than a century separates those two origins, yet this obscure design tied to an old Massachusetts operation, disappeared into shaving history, resurfaced decades later, and eventually found its way into the orbit of another Massachusetts shaving operation with a long-standing weakness for forgotten hardware, lost designs, obscure history, and unexplained details. Even the original B1086's circled M remains unresolved. [Seriously, it keeps me up at night.] I mean, when I allow my mind to wander...it may have identified a manufacturer, mold maker, supplier, factory, or something else entirely! Given the Boston connection, Massachusetts is tempting, but there is no evidence strong enough to claim that, so for now the M remains exactly what it should be: a mystery. [Again, all ears if you can solve this riddle. #PappyNeedsHisSleep]

What (YES), Is In A Name?

The name WÜRM brings another thread into the story for me. It is an indirect nod to “Starship Trooper” by YES, one of the great progressive-rock epics of the early 1970s! The final section of the piece is titled “Würm,” and it always spoke to my soul. In my minds eye right now I can conjure back up the images that music paints in my brain; a freaky, kaleidoscopic, scifi space worm! Turning and twisting, crawling through space-time, devouring everything in it's wake; stars, planets, galaxies...mankind? Rabid squirrels?  

Sorry, forgot where I was for a sec. 

Ahem...just listen to the track. [and wear headphones. *very important]

Soooo...I guess what I'm trying to say is, the original provides the theme. What comes next is interpretation. [at this point I totally forgot what we were even talking about. I sat there staring at a doorknob for like 2 minutes before it came back to me. But hey ho!]

WÜRM: Your New Favorite Brush (for real)

At this point, WÜRM started becoming more than the name of this ferocious brush. It became a new character in the PAA Universe, although exactly what kind of character still remains unclear. #irony--Machine, organism, droid, experimental grooming unit, recovered artifact, translucent extraterrestrial life-form with an inexplicable talent for building lather & world eating? We are still waiting on that report. 

What's Knot To Love?

For the business end of the brush, we brought back one of your favorite PAA knots, the 22mm Micro Super Future Hybrid Synth. Longtime Phoenix brush collectors will remember this knot from the Astraeus, where it quickly earned a following because of the particular balance it offers. The fibers are exceptionally soft and can give an almost gel-tip-like sensation on the face, yet the knot retains enough backbone, spring, and pushback to remain lively in use. ["lively" may be the wrong word. How about, Punchy?]-- It does not collapse into a shapeless puff, nor does it rely on stiffness to create backbone. It has enough structure to work a lather while retaining the softness that made the Micro Super Future such a pleasure to use in the first place. Can I get an amen?

Bringing it back for WÜRM also creates a little Phoenix continuity of our own. Astraeus was another exercise in Retro Shave Tech, taking inspiration from an unusual vintage transparent brush and pairing that visual language with modern synthetic fiber technology. Pointing out, this knot really looks great in translucent handles and it's a real daily driver too!

And this brings us to the end of yet another epic, PAA product description. Oh and remember: The world is WÜRM. [Specimen B1086]

...and it makes one hell of a shaving brush.

"Sci-Fi Shaving at its finest, Phoenix Shaving." #JustSayNo