Why aren’t you shaving with peanut butter, guac or hummus yet?

‘This is the closest shave I’ve had in a while’

| UPDATED noad

Are you still shaving your legs with a bic razor and an old loofer? If so, you could be doing it all wrong. We tried mixing things up with peanut butter, guacamole, jam, Marmite, and hummus. This is what we discovered.

Laura Fitzpatrick, second year Manchester

Here’s what I’ve got to say about putting weird shit on my legs.

Peanut butter:

Gillette should probably go into business with Skippy’s because peanut butter worked like a dream. Applied with a spatula, my legs may as well have been a slice of toast because smooth peanut butter gave the easiest application with a splendidly even spread. I smelt delicious and felt like a diva.

Shaving it off was a bit of a struggle where the peanut butter coated to the blades, but nothing that couldn’t have been sorted out with a quick rinse. The end product is angelic, as if a deity has blessed me with a leg as smooth as the peanut butter itself.

Guac:

Homemade and lumpy like your mum made it, but perhaps not fit for the bathroom. The avocado made for even better application than peanut butter, but little bits of tomato, onion and chilli made it a bit lumpy and uncomfortable, and I looked as if I had some really weird medical condition. Shaving it off felt like I had an even weirder medical condition and the rest was history once the chilli got onto my freshly shaved legs.

I smell pretty funky now and my dogs are now really confused and keep trying to lick my legs. I also think I might be getting a rash.

Jess Austin, second year, Leeds

If someone asked me before today which spread, Marmite, Jam or peanut butter I’d rather my legs with, I would probably choose jam. Today I would tell past me that she is an idiot. Jam shaving has left my legs all cut up- it’s hard to control a razor with such slippery legs, but at least they smell good.

Crunchy peanut butter was hard to apply and even harder to get off, it clogged up my razor and the nuts wouldn’t fit down the plug. Marmite would definitely be the preferred choice, although my legs did look like Ross in that episode of friends where he can’t work the tanning bed. It highlighted my blonde hairs and did the job quite nicely.

Although now my legs smell of yeast.

In the interest of breaking out of strict gender normative roles, we also enlisted a male-shaver for his opinion.

Samuel George Mitchell, second year Warwick

So here’s what we’re working with. Standard two/three day stubble. Past the point of alluring, dusty vogue and fast approaching the slightly-homeless, hasn’t-showered-in-a-while state of grooming.

Shaving products are painfully expensive. At some point in the last hundred years the secret kabbal of pharmaceutical twats who own Gillette and Braun et al got together and realised that men of all ages had no choice but to keep buying their shitty antiseptic products no matter how much they cost. In the age of designer stubble and manscaping, this price-fixing chicanery is turning companies like Gillette into some sort of follicle mafia.

Could smearing my face with peanut butter, hummus or guacamole really offer men of the world a way out of this fiscal prison? Only one way to find out.

Hummus

Pros: Spreads easily, but be sure to use a spatula. It doesn’t irritate the skin and almost it’s completely odourless.

Cons: Thanks to its gloopy consistency, it tends to stick together and is difficult to wash out of the razor. I’d recommended it for straight or cutthroat razors only. This will mess up your Gillette 5-Blade Fusion Power Pro Turbo Man Stick faster than you can say “rip-off”.

Guacamole

Pros: It is really, really tasty.

Cons: Guacamole lacks the adhesive quality of the other two, so it’s likely to fall off your face unless applied carefully and is too easily dislodged by the razor to really do its job. Most of the Guac you apply to your chin will basically end up in the sink before you’ve even finished shaving. And, because it’s full of lumpy peppers and shit, it basically clogs your sink 100 per cent of the time. It also makes you look like the Grinch.

Peanut butter

Pros: It’s very sticky, so it holds the skin perfectly as you carve out your goatee/soul patch/fuhrer moustache. It also washes away very easily and won’t ruin your plumbing. Peanut Butter is the cheapest of the three products I tried, and the easiest to smear across one’s deplorably broke-ass face. Good value, solid shaving product delivering a nice, snug shave that you may well spend the rest of the day stroking in admiration.

Cons: It will make you smell like peanuts.

Seriously, though. This is the closest shave I’ve had in a while. And it cost me nothing other than my dignity and a few minutes trying to scrub expensive South-American dip out of the plughole. Big-Facial-Hair can suck my hairless, hummus-smelling balls. This stuff works, and I’m sticking with it.