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Health & Home · Grooming

“50 years of shaving rash on my neck. Then I found out why.” How a 71-year-old Coventry toolmaker figured out what his razor was really doing to his skin, and built a shaver for the one spot no razor ever got right.

After 44 years of making precision parts for the car industry, Ivor Treadgold spent three winters in his garage taking apart every razor and shaver he had ever bought. What he ended up with has quietly found its way into bathrooms across the Midlands. This winter, the last of them go out.

By Hilary Kemble · Coventry, West Midlands · 7 November 2026 · 9 min read

Every morning for fifty-three years, Ivor Treadgold did the same thing at 5:40. He ran the hot tap, lathered up and shaved. In the toolroom of the Coventry car-parts supplier where he spent 44 years making press tools and moulds, a clean face was simply what a man turned up with. “My dad shaved every day. His dad shaved every day,” he says. “You didn’t think about it.”

What he did think about was his neck. “The face was fine. The neck was a war.” Red bumps under the jaw. A sting that lasted until lunch. Little nicks that bled into his collar no matter how careful he was.

His wife Sheila, married to him for 47 years, remembers it differently. “I bought white shirts for forty years and I scrubbed collars for forty years,” she says, and laughs. “I knew which days he’d been in a hurry before he did.”

Like most men, Ivor assumed the problem was him. “Sensitive skin, that’s what everybody tells you. So you buy the sensitive gel, and the sensitive blade, and you keep bleeding.” It took him until he was 66 to find out that the problem had never been his skin.

The drawer every man has

In the bathroom at the Treadgold house there is a bottom drawer under the basin that Sheila calls “the graveyard.” When Ivor pulled it out for us, it held a twin-blade razor from the 1980s, three generations of three-, four- and five-blade handles, one that vibrates, an unopened pack of refill cartridges, two electric shavers and a travel shaver that never left its box.

He did the sums once, the way a toolmaker would. Cartridges, gel, a new handle every few years, the electric ones and their replacement heads. “Somewhere north of six thousand pounds since 1973,” he says. “And my neck never got one bit better.”

“Every few years they put another blade on it and put the price up,” he says. “And every few years my neck got worse. That should have told me something.”

The electric shavers weren’t the answer either. The first one pulled “like somebody plucking your whiskers out with tweezers.” The second needed four or five passes on his neck to get it clean, and by then the skin was as red as it was after a blade. When its foil wore out, the new head cost more than a good pair of work boots. It went in the drawer.

What a toolmaker sees under a magnifier

Ivor retired in the spring of 2021, at 66. Within a month he was bored, and the big magnifying lamp from his old bench in the toolroom was clamped to the workbench in his garage. “Forty-four years, my whole job was to look at an edge and tell you why it’s not cutting right,” he says. “And I had never once looked at my own razor.”

So one evening he did. He shaved half his neck, then put the cartridge and a few of the cut whiskers under the lamp. What he saw is something barbers and skin doctors have explained for years, but most men have never been told.

A multi-blade razor works in steps. The first blade catches the hair and tugs it up out of the skin a little. The next blades cut it while it is stretched. When the hair snaps back, the cut end sits just below the surface. That is the famous “close shave.” On a flat cheek, it is mostly fine. On the neck, where the skin is loose and the hairs grow flat and in every direction, it is exactly where the trouble starts.

“You’ve got loose skin, hairs lying flat, five blades dragging over the same spot, and you go over it three times because you missed some,” Ivor says. “Then you wonder why it’s sore.”

The electric shavers had the opposite problem. Their foils were thick, their heads were too big to get under the jaw, and nothing in them was built to catch the long, flat hairs on the neck. So he had to press harder and go over everything again and again. Pressure plus passes, he says, is just a slower way to get the same shaving rash.

The barber who finishes every neck with a foil

The missing piece came from the man who has cut Ivor’s hair since 1995. Dev Mistry has run a two-chair barber’s on Earlsdon Street for 31 years. On one of his monthly visits, Ivor asked him why his neck never stung after a haircut, but stung every single time he shaved at home.

“That’s when the penny dropped,” Ivor says. “The barbers already had the answer. It just had never been put into something an ordinary bloke could use at his own basin every morning.”

Three winters in the garage

What followed was what a retired toolmaker does with a problem. Three winters at the bench, from the autumn of 2021 to the spring of 2024. Before he built anything, he wrote five rules on a strip of masking tape and stuck it to the lamp. It’s still there.

1. Nothing goes below the skin. Two thin foils sit between the cutter and your skin. They cut the hair level with the surface, the way the barber’s foil does, and they don’t tug it out first.
2. Catch the long ones first. Between the two foils sits a narrow trimmer that picks up the long, flat neck hairs and two or three days of stubble, so the foils don’t have to fight them.
3. Small enough for the neck. The head is about as wide as two fingers. It fits under the jaw, around the Adam’s apple and under the nose, the spots big shavers can’t reach.
4. One button, no menus. Sheila’s rule. “If he has to read a manual, it stays in the drawer.”
5. Nothing to buy every month. No cartridges, no cleaning fluid, no charging stand and no hunting for the shaver socket. You rinse it under the tap and charge it with the same lead as your phone.

Then came the testing. The test pilots were the six retired men from his Thursday breakfast at a café on Earlsdon Street, plus Ivor’s own neck, every single morning. Fourteen versions in all. Some tugged. One was too loud. One was so big it was “basically a hairbrush.” Each time, something got smaller, thinner or simpler.

The half-and-half test

Sheila wasn’t convinced by a garage full of parts. She wanted proof. So one Sunday evening in 2024, Ivor shaved the left side of his neck with a brand-new five-blade cartridge and the right side with his shaver. On Monday morning, she looked at both sides in the light of the kitchen window.

Ivor is honest about what he found, which is perhaps the toolmaker in him. “Is it as close as a fresh blade on a flat cheek? A blade still wins by a whisker,” he says. “On the neck, it’s not a contest. And close doesn’t do you any good if it’s bleeding.”

How it works, in plain words

From the outside, it doesn’t look like much: a slim, dark gunmetal handle about the size of a thick marker pen, with a small rectangular head on top. Inside the head, three things do the work.

Two thin foils. These are stainless steel sheets with thousands of tiny holes. The hair pokes through, the cutter underneath snips it off level with the skin, and the foil keeps the cutter from ever touching you. That is the barber’s finish, in your hand.

One trimmer in the middle. The neck is where hairs grow flat and long. The trimmer between the foils lifts and cuts those first, so you are not pressing and going over the same spot five times. It handles up to about three days of stubble.

A head that moves with you. The cutting unit floats slightly, so it follows the curve of the jaw and the throat instead of digging into them. You hold it lightly and let it do the work.

The first two weeks

Here is something most shaver adverts leave out, and Ivor insisted we print it. If you have shaved with blades for decades, your skin needs a little time to get used to a foil. For most men that takes about two weeks. Some days in the beginning will feel almost too easy, and a few may feel a little tender. That’s normal, and it passes.

Who’s been ordering

It started with the Thursday breakfast. Then the men’s wives started ringing. Then their daughters. Since the spring of 2024, a little over 1,600 shavers have gone out, almost all by word of mouth, packed at the Treadgolds’ kitchen table by their granddaughter Bryony, 21.

Some of the calls surprised Ivor. A lot of them come from grown-up children of fathers in their eighties whose hands aren’t as steady as they used to be, and whose care homes don’t allow blades. “There’s no open blade on it,” he says. “If your hand jumps, nothing happens. I hadn’t thought of that when I built it. Their children did.”

Others come from men with tough beards and tender necks, from lorry drivers who charge theirs in the cab, from men who wear a mask at work and have to be clean-shaven every shift, and from wives who are, in Sheila’s words, “done scrubbing collars.”

What owners are saying

Why these are the last ones

This January, Ivor and Sheila are moving to Falmouth in Cornwall to be near their daughter Joanne and the grandchildren. The house in Earlsdon, the garage and the bench with the masking tape on the lamp have been sold. Completion is on 31 January.

“People ask if I’ll set it all up again in Cornwall,” Ivor says. “I’m 71. I built the thing I wanted to build, and it works. I’d rather spend the next few years with my grandchildren than in a garage.”

What is left are the shavers on the shelf in the garage: 238 of them. Ivor’s wish was simple. He wants them in bathrooms, not in removal boxes. So until the move, he is letting them go for £39 each, less than the £60 you pay for a new shaver head on one of the big-name shavers, and Bryony is packing orders at the kitchen table every afternoon. After 31 January, she will keep dispatching from her flat in Coventry until the last one is gone. There won’t be any more.

Questions readers asked

Ninety days, Ivor’s way

“Give it the two weeks,” Ivor says. “Then give it another two. If your neck isn’t better at the end of it, send it back. I don’t want anybody keeping a shaver that’s going to end up in a drawer. I’ve got a whole drawer of those already.”

For a man who spent fifty years scrubbing at the problem with one more blade, the answer turned out to be less, not more. Less pressing, fewer passes, nothing below the skin. And on most mornings now, Ivor says, he doesn’t think about his neck at all. “Which is all I ever wanted.”

Hilary Kemble