A woman shouldn’t have to shop in the male aisle for a razor because the products targeting her are more expensive, say students Abbie Beck-Cohen and Daisy Elsden.
Men’s and women’s razors are exactly the same item, except one is pink, one is blue and women have to pay tax for the ‘luxury’ of theirs, a little unfair when women are already earning less, right? We think so.
Our names are Abbie and Daisy, a third year creative team studying Creative Advertising at the University of Lincoln. We have recently been assigned the task of creating something that will get us ‘famous’ and be ‘effective’ as part of our third year final assessment grade, and more importantly to ensure we are remembered within the highly competitive advertising industry – so we have focused on an issue that we as women feel very strongly about.
It all began in the creative advertising studio. Whilst sat at our desk working on a brief for a well-known razor brand, we started discussing the fact that women sneakily use their boyfriend’s razors because they’re argued to be ‘better’ than women’s. We found this idea really interesting and asked how different men’s and women’s razors really are, and why women don’t just buy men’s in the first place? These thoughts took us down some interesting avenues, we soon discovered that there is little to no difference between the two gendered razors, and then asked the question; “why does a razor have a gender in the first place?” From this, the genderless razor was born.
At a recent meeting down in London we sat with a creative team who loved the idea and really encouraged us to take it further from paper to prototype, and that is exactly what we have done. One razor, half a can of white gloss spray paint and roughly four hours drying time later, we had ourselves a razor with no gender, completely white in colour, with no gender-specific copy or features.
The point being that a razor is simply a tool to shave hair. If a woman picks up a man’s razor it doesn’t stop working, it will shave her hair the same as it would shave men’s. But why should a woman shop in the male aisle for a razor because the products targeting her are more expensive? She shouldn’t.
In our opinion if brands are going to increase the price of women’s razors, but not men’s, then they are highlighting the gender gap. This then creates a problem, because women are being treated unfairly. Increasing the price of a women’s razor and not men’s is as ridiculous as sticking stickers on items such as milk and bread saying ‘just for men’ and ‘just for women’. If it can be used by both, there should not be a gender issue in our opinion, and there should definitely not be a difference in price, when they are essentially the same product.
This razor is an exaggeration of the issue that many brands are guilty of practicing: targeting genders and raising the price for women. We don’t believe this is fair for any product, whether it’s a razor or a can of deodorant, and we want to encourage people to think more about this and spread the word.