That said, the performance is still admirable compared to most travel shavers, provided you don’t let your hair grow out too long. Like a lot of foil shavers, the Arc 5 does not like to cut hairs longer than a few millimeters. Shaving longer whiskers takes a great number of passes—and will almost certainly incur a few painful hair pulls. The Arc 5 is a neat, clean shaver for those who are already neat and clean.
The Arc 5 is also very much not a detail shaver. This is an attachment-free device that does what it does: It conforms itself broadly to a large surface area of your face and neck. If you’re someone with a beard line, or tightly maintained geometry on your sideburns or mustache, this shaver won’t serve you as a daily driver without a separate detail trimmer.
Photograph: Panasonic
Shell Game
But the shaver’s lack of sharp edges can also be virtue. The Arc 5 Palm is so broad-faced, so edgeless, so squishy in its shaving, that I feel comfortable using it in the shower without a mirror. (If you’re the sort of person who keeps a mirror in the shower, no offense, but I don’t understand.) Heck, I think I might even feel OK shaving while walking.
But now we’re back full circle to why I still like the white Arc 5 Palm, despite its narrow use case and middling shave and high price. I kinda just enjoy how it feels in my hand. Enjoyment is a vanishingly rare quality among shavers.
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Photograph: Matthew Korfhage
“Nagori,” the name of the new material from Mitsui Chemicals that provides Arc 5’s oddly organic texture, is the sort of word that people often like to call untranslatable. Nagori refers to a sort of instantaneous nostalgia, the kind you might feel for a season as it passes or a meal’s final course. It derives from an old Japanese phrase, “the remains of the waves,” referencing the shells and the tracks left behind when the tide goes back where it came from.
This material’s name almost certainly derives from the ocean minerals that form the basis of it. But it also describes the feeling I got when I pulled the shaver out of its packaging: an unplaceable nostalgia for an object that’s right here in my hand. Over time, I know, this feeling will dull. The Arc 5’s lightly granular seashell plastic will start to seem just like slightly nicer plastic.
But for now, I was able to have a small emotional experience with my travel shaver. Whether that feeling is worth $300 is between you and your accountant.
