Just to kind of give you a sense on my personal thought on the handles, I have 3 razors, an old one that’s either a Gillette or a Merkur (I honestly can’t remember which one) that I scrounged from my dad’s junk drawer, one I picked up from a grocery store or target or something that I believe is a van Der Hagen, and one my wife got from somewhere on Etsy, so I feel like that’s a pretty decent cross section of what’s out there.

All 3 shave just fine. They all shave a tiny bit differenly, but that really kind of comes down to personal preference and that technique/learning curve I mentioned. I wouldn’t really say any of them are significantly better or worse than the others.

The Etsy one is my usual razor, probably feels the nicest in my hand, the handle is a little longer which I like, but the real reason it’s my main razor is because it looks the nicest hanging on my razor stand and because my wife got it for me. I’m not crazy about how you change the blade because you basically unscrew the whole top and I don’t love needing to fiddle around with it that close to the blade.

The junk drawer razor is my traveling razor because its handle is kind of short and it fits better in my toiletry bag. It probably has my favorite blade changing method, there’s a little knob at the base of the handle you turn to unscrew the head and the top half of the head comes off. You can also halfway undo it which leave the blade a little loose without the whole thing coming apart which I find makes it easier to rinse hair out. If I had to pick one that shaves the best it’s probably this one, but it’s also the one I’ve had the longest so I’ve had more practice with it and I’m pretty sure that’s like 90% of the difference. It’s probably my best quality razor, even though it’s probably a few decades older than me everything about it still feels rock solid, but it also had probably a half century worth of tarnish, scratches, etc. that I’m too lazy to really clean up, so it’s also probably my ugliest.

The van der Hagan razor has sort of a butterfly opening thing for the blade. I feel like on a nicer razor that would be kind of nice, but with the fit/finish/tolerances it was made to, it feels a little cheap to me, like it wants to break (although it’s been years and it hasn’t broken on me yet, so my fears may be unwarranted) it has a slightly longer handle which I like, but it’s also skinnier, which I dont like. It probably gives me the worst shave, but it’s also my least used and again I feel like practice and technique probably play a bigger part in that than there being any significant shortcomings in the design. This one lives in my guest bathroom for when I shower and shave in there if my wife is hogging the master bath.

And when I say one shaves better than the other, the difference is pretty miniscule once you get used to the razor. When I first got it, I thought the Etsy razor shaved terribly, now that it’s been my main razor for years I’d be hard pressed to tell the difference between it and the junk drawer razor. And since it doesn’t get used as much anymore, I feel like I get worse shaves from the junk drawer razor than I did when it was my main razor. I also noticed my shaves get better with the VdH razor when I tried to use it more, but honestly I never put much time into getting used to it because I always felt like the handle was too skinny. But that’s personal preference, I like thick-handled heavy tools in general, some people like thinner handles and lighter weight.