 Like the majority of Americans, and many people around the world right now, I've been staying home as a part of the widespread quarantine effort against the COVID-19 pandemic. Also, like most people, I'm starting to really need a haircut and a shave. So to help me best learn how to groom myself while in isolation, I'm going to look back in history at the first origins of grooming, scissors, and razors, and cast and sharpen my own set and bronze. Then call in some remote advice from my barber and see how badly I can mess up my hair. Everything we use comes from 8,000 generations of collective innovation and discovery, but could an average person figure it all out themselves and work their way from the stone age to today? That's a question we're exploring. Each week I try to take that next step forward in human history. My name is Andy and this is how to make everything. Be sure to subscribe and turn on notifications so you don't miss the next step in this journey. Global pandemic themselves are a byproduct of humanity's development. Thanks to some of the early inventions and innovations that formed the building blocks of the bronze age, most notably agriculture and animal domestication, many were able to settle in large numbers, form cities, and expansive trade networks, which allowed both the invention of bronze alloy tools, as well as worldwide networks for diseases to now spread, which is something we've now had to deal with ever since. But let's try and focus on more of the positives, like now having these sweet, shiny metal alloy like bronze that open the door to tools like scissors and razors and make grooming yourself a little bit easier. It's believed shaving and plucking of hairs dated back before metals using sharp flint and obsidian stones, but copper and then bronze provided much more efficient tools. However, even then it wasn't done daily. While today we mostly take care of grooming by ourselves, barbers were a profession that dates back to at least 5000 BCE in Egypt and has remained popular ever since. For some advice on being my own barber, I reached out to someone who we talked to before on a different topic, Mustache Jim. We previously talked to him and our camera making video on his passion of large format photography, but he also works as a barber specializing in straight razor sheaves, haircuts, and beard trims. Thanks for joining us again. It's an honor to be a part of it. Well, I've been working as a barber throughout Minneapolis for about 20 years now. Homebound and working on my artwork right now. And also I'm working on a show, it means the world to me. To connect with people, I work on a show called Kindness Club. So you know about the history of barbers? Barbering has been around for an exceptionally long time. It's one of the oldest professions. Egyptian times they used to use obsidian as razors. It used to be where barbers were dentists as well as surgeons. They would hang a pole out in front where they would hang the bloody rags. The wind would whip the rags around the pole and create a candy striping effect. That's how the barber pole came to be. What suggestions did you have for everyone who's under quarantine right now and are thinking about cutting their own hair? You want to start simple throughout my barbering career. I've sort of prided myself on cutting without guards. And I enjoy the craft of sort of sculpting by using clipper over comb or freehand. But I would suggest use guards. You want to use a lot of mirrors in front of you, to the side of you. Use the mirror in your bathroom. Get different angles. One of the things that's going to be challenging as you do this, your hands are going to be going a different direction than you think. It's going to be really counterintuitive if you take a lot of breaks. One of the things that it's human nature to do is to panic and try to fix it really quick. And remember, you have all the time in the world. Put it down for just a minute. Take a breath and start again. I would suggest starting with scissors if you can. Because the clippers, you can get yourself in a lot of trouble really quick. You can kind of paint yourself in the corner. And understand, you know, you have to compromise. You know, just like, okay, it's a big risk. I'm not going to do it. Easy does it. Little at a time. Expect that you will make at least one mistake. Raise your speed pretty sharp then. That's pretty important, right? It's incredibly important for it to be really sharp. And through Microscope's view of it, you'll have little edges and like rough spots. Because once you get the edge on it, then you want to strop it. Like imagine this is the sharp end. So you want to go dull side first, dull side first. You need to do that a couple of times. And what that does is it smooths that blade even further. How do you tell when you have it to the right sharpness? I have hair on the back of my hand and I'll take a little patch and I'll test it. You start, you go with the grain. And then you take a second pass and you go across the grain in the cheeks and in the mustache area. And, you know, you want to still stay with the grain down here. And that's where people tend to have sensitive skin. You know, you go once with the grain, you go once across the grain. It'll get you really close. It takes a lot of practice, concentration, time and effort. Any other styling tips or techniques you'd like to share? Yeah, now's a good time to select air styles that are a lot more easily attainable. If you've got guards, use guards. Easy does it. Keep it slow. Keep it simple. And we're all in this together. Scissors first appeared sometime around 3000 BCE in Mesopotamia. First as spring scissors with two blades oppose each other and attached by metal band that worked as a spring between them. Cross-beleted scissors like most modern scissors would not be invented until around 100 AD by the Romans. First off, to cast the scissors and razors. For that, I got a little help from Greg, the shortcaster back before the world shut down when we were able to visit him in Austin, Texas. Spring action, what I'm thinking might give you a little spring action would be hardening this a bit. So if you just like pound that, that might give you some of the kind of tension that you need to get it to spring back. I think you're gonna get a shave with that. The beards. If you are interested in learning how to cast bronze yourself, check out Greg's website. And once travel is a thing that exists again, he might make a trip out to you to teach a lesson on bronze casting. Using his advice, I next polished off and worked hard on both the edges of the blades and spring of the scissors so they'd be more rigid. Center of frame. Okay, now thanks to Greg, we have the cast razor blade and scissors. Clean these up and polish them up a bit. What's left now is to actually sharpen them to a cutting edge and to actually shave hair and cut hair. It needs to be pretty sharp. So traditionally, they would often use basically just random stones they'd find with different grain sizes. You try to find ones with uniform grit and use them basically like wood sandpaper and go from larger grains to smaller grains to get a finer and finer polish. There'll be different parts of the world that are really well known for their different levels of consistency and fineness to their grain that you could get a really sharp blade. I've done this previously with a few different tools. It's very slow. It's not very accurate. See, it's kind of just a guesswork of the size of the grains. So I'm going to use a more modern alternative. This is basically the exact same thing. It just is completely uniform and will give you a guaranteed polish to a certain amount. And this allows you to more accurately move your way up to finer, finer grids and get a finer and finer polish. So first up, we're going to use a file. Just speed it up, get us really close in the ballpark and then start moving on to the wet stones. We start with 120 to 220, 400 to 1000, 3000 to 8000. And then there's a last step often done, especially with razors called a stope. Stope. Stoop. Strope. Strope. Strope. Usually a piece of leather and you basically just run the blade down it and this helps align the metal. There's some polishing with it, especially with a polishing compound. For this, I have a more modern one that comes with a polishing compound on it. This is just a stropping block because I had to finish it off and hopefully get a razor sharp blade. With a lot of my bronze tools, I only sharpen them somewhat of the way. Mostly because I'm oftentimes just hacking at things with an axe where a mostly sharp blade will do. It's not a whole lot of point getting them super sharp because it's going to dull pretty quick. So these will be really sharp, otherwise it's going to hurt. So it'll be interesting to see how sharp they can actually get. It'll probably be pretty hard to find someone who actually saves using bronze today. Bronze is likely not going to be able to get quite as sharp as actual hardened steel. I'm not sure how long it'll last. So it'll be a little bit of experiment and we'll see. Maybe I need to sharpen as I go. Maybe it'll last the whole shave. But overall, the process is actually probably a little bit easier than with steel because it's a softer metal. Should be a little bit quicker, but besides that, it should be basically the same process. And while bronze tools are not that common, maybe they'll come back with this whole pandemic. They have the added feature of being made with a copper alloy, which will actually kill any viruses and bacteria naturally where a normal surface, the virus can last up to a day or two with copper, only four hours between each use. It's disinfected automatically. We'll see, try it out, and hopefully not flip my throat or anything in the process. The scissors. To assist with the shave, I'm going to make a few different versions of shaving cream. First, the ancient recipe, likely used in the Bronze Age of animal fat, mixed with wood ash. A modern recipe that uses aloe and coconut oil. Something I've previously extracted before while making sunscreen. The hairstyles during the Bronze Age vary greatly from culture to culture and even person to person. Raids and knots were common with both men and women in various cultures, and upper class men would often completely shave their head and wear expensive wigs. In Egypt, they would even wear fake beards. And being entirely clean shaven was incorporated into religious aspects, such as with ancient Egyptian priests and getting to shave their entire body every three days. It's been about three days now of trying to sharpen both of these items, and it is driving me crazy. The days are honestly all starting to blur together, so I'm not exactly sure, but I spend a lot of sharpening and then resharpening and redoing everything and then sharpening it again and again and again. It's kind of a learned skill and I don't think I've mastered it, but the main problem I'm facing is that it's bronze, and I don't know how sharp you can actually get with bronze. They are definitely sharp. I can just slice through paper pretty easily, but hair is a bit harder. So I've been trying it and running it on my arm hair and takes a bit of force so I think you can do it. I think the fact that it's going to take a bit of effort is kind of obvious by the fact that the alternative they used to bronze was a pumice stone, which is not going to be too different than just trying to basically sand your hair away. So that's plan B, I guess. Here goes nothing. Oh, I did it. Now I'm in. Hey. That actually looks pretty good. A little stiff. Surprise how all these work. Mobs. Super sharp. I think there's a little bit more leeway when it comes to the scissors. It's two blades coming at each other, posing forces, putting pressure from both directions. It's not going to be so much how sharp it is. It will cut, but mostly just in a specific area where they align the best. I think it worked out pretty good, surprisingly. It's a little uneven in a few spots, but not by much. I think it was able to get surprisingly consistent cut. All things considered, it actually turned out pretty good. I was pretty skeptical of this. So I'll get rid of a little this hair. It's not perfect, but I don't think anybody will call me out on it. We'll see. All right. So we have the two different shaving creams I tried making. They have the historical pig fat and wood ash. I don't think they usually actually use pig fat. This guy is basically the primitive recipe for basically soap. Smells kind of gross. Smells like pig fat. And then for an alternative, hopefully a slightly better option. I have kind of a modern DIY recipe of about 50% allo and 50% coconut oil. Seems a bit more pleasant. See if either of them help at all. Filiard is trying to get this stuff off. I don't recommend this spa treatment. Let's try the other side with the yellow. Much more pleasant. There's definitely loose hairs. Oh, it really hurts. It's a fair amount of blood on there. Interesting. So that was not very successful. I'm bleeding all over here and then over here. It's just pig fat. Can't even tell what happened there. So it's hard to say if it's just because I don't know how to sharpen it or that I don't know how to shave with a straight razor well enough. I tried a variety of different techniques and got some hair removal but nothing that was really not painfully slow and ineffective. I guess it's a good exfoliator which compared to the next alternative, a pumice stone rub that on and that feels about the same I'd say. So that was a horrible experience. I think I'm going to reevaluate being clean shaven and maybe just having to beard is a little bit more preferable until we get to the iron age. All right, so I got well washed up and cleaned myself off now. Got the really disgusting pig fat and wood ash off my face. Then result, I'd say the razor was a bit of a failure. I did manage to remove some hair but mostly it just had a really bad rash and it really hurts. Even the back of my hand where I did the test shaves has developed a bit of a rash. Bronze razor not the greatest. At this point I'm kind of curious why exactly it failed. There's the possibility that I was just reaching the upper limits of how sharp bronze can get but it also might just been my own technique and inexperience and sharpening. I believe I followed all the steps very carefully put a lot of time into trying to get this razor sharp but didn't quite cut it very literally. But I'm sure there's probably somebody more knowledgeable out there who can maybe cue me in on what I need to do better next time. On the other hand though the scissors were actually pretty successful. I'm pleasantly surprised how effective they were. I thought it was going to be a pretty painful process of mostly pulling my hair with these as tweezers having to go back and even it out or just shave it all off in the end. But I'm actually pretty happy with the haircut. This is 100% done with these pair of scissors. I found I could do it pretty well. Once I figured out how to press them closer together so they aligned a little bit tighter that seemed to yield a little bit better results. I was able to cut larger chunks of hair. Not quite as effective as modern scissors. I still had to do a little at a time. And then just being patient as I went and not freaking out like must ask you I'm suggested. So it would be a pretty even cut that I'm pretty happy with. Cannot stand when my hair gets that long. So it's very, I feel very relieved that it's much shorter now. Hope this video has been helpful for anybody who's struggling with their own grooming techniques while they're in isolation. Hopefully being a guinea pig and trying to do it with some really primitive bronze age scissors could do a little bit more confidence to do it yourself. I think must ask him, gave some really great advice to help you get started if you want to do it yourself. I look forward to seeing how everybody and their hair looks once this quarantine is finally over. I feel like if I can do this decent of a job with primitive bronze age scissors that we cast ourselves, you don't really have much of an excuse. So look forward to seeing everybody then. Stay safe out there. Thanks for watching. Thank you to all of our patrons. See you next time. If you enjoyed this video, be sure to subscribe and check out other content we have covering a wide variety of topics. Also, if you've enjoyed these series, consider supporting us on Patreon. We are largely a fan-funded channel and depend on the support of our viewers in order to keep our series going. Thanks for watching.