Anyone who has used a traditional razor blade will know it doesn't work like the adverts claim. On TV there is a rugged man who looks happy as he shaves with one swift flick of the wrist. In real life, it takes nine attempts, and by the end there's blood everywhere and your face looks like a plucked chicken.
Of course the Philips ARCitec 1095x has a ludicrous advert too, where a man seems to live a life that revolves entirely around his facial hair, but when we got our hands on this particular razor we couldn't help but get excited. The ARCitec 1095x looks like the sort of thing you'd find knocking around a spaceship in 350 years time. Bits of it are made of carbon fibre -- that's the same stuff they build F1 cars out of -- and there's a blue status panel that tells you how much shaving time you've got on the current charge.
A jet wash cleaning system lowers the razor into the liquid bath and blasts the hair out of the blades while the shaver recharges. Exciting stuff.
We tried it on our not insubstantial chin fluff, and were impressed by how pain-free, and more importantly blood-free, the experience was. The razor did indeed seem to work on the tricky neck area too, although there was one spot that we couldn't persuade it to chew the hair off, in the end we just used the built-in sideburn trimmer, which did the job.
The Philips ARCitec 1095 is available from Amazon.co.uk and costs £180. That's Crave's shaving habits for you -- tomorrow, toothbrushes! -Ian Morris