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Health & Home · Grooming

“50 years of razor rash on my neck. Then I found out why.” How a 71-year-old Whyalla fitter and turner 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 as a fitter and turner at the Whyalla steelworks, Brenton Tregenza spent three winters in his shed taking apart every razor and shaver he had ever bought. What he ended up with has quietly found its way into bathrooms right across South Australia. This summer, the last of them go out.

By Leonie Harbison · Whyalla, South Australia · 7 November 2026 · 9 min read

Every morning for fifty-three years, Brenton Tregenza did the same thing at 5:40. He ran the water hot, lathered up and shaved. At the Whyalla steelworks, where he spent 44 years as a fitter and turner, he had no say in it: a respirator only seals on a clean-shaven face, so for forty years he had to be smooth for every shift, every single day. “No seal, no start. That was the rule,” he says. “You didn’t argue with 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 smoko. Little nicks that bled into his collar no matter how careful he was. And summer was the worst of it: sweat and a rubber mask on a raw neck for eight hours.

His wife Lynette, married to him for 47 years, remembers it differently. “I washed his work 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 blokes, Brenton figured 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 vanity at the Tregenza house there is a bottom drawer that Lynette calls “the graveyard.” When Brenton 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 fitter would. Cartridges, gel, a new handle every few years, the electric ones and their replacement heads. “Somewhere north of thirteen thousand dollars 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 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, it was seventy-five dollars a pop for a new head. It went in the drawer.

What a fitter and turner sees under a magnifier

Brenton retired in the autumn of 2021, at 66. Within a month he was bored, and the big magnifying lamp from his old workshop was clamped to the bench in his shed. “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 specialists 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,” Brenton says. “Then you wonder why it burns.”

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 reckons, is just a slower way to get the same red neck.

The barber who finishes every neck with a foil

The piece that was missing came from the man who has cut Brenton’s hair since 1995. Nick Kounis has run a two-chair barbershop on Forsyth Street for 31 years. On one of his monthly visits, Brenton asked him why his neck never burned after a haircut, but burned every single time he shaved at home.

“That’s when the penny dropped,” Brenton 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 shed

What followed was what a retired fitter and turner 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. Lynette’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 station. You rinse it under the tap and you charge it with the same cord as your phone.

Then came the testing. The test pilots were the six retired blokes from the steelworks he meets for Thursday breakfast at the bowls club, plus Brenton’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

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

Brenton is honest about what he found, which is maybe the fitter 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 texta, 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 ads leave out, and Brenton 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 blokes’ 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 Tregenzas’ kitchen table by their granddaughter Shae, 21.

Some of the calls surprised Brenton. A lot of them come from adult children of fathers in their eighties whose hands aren’t as steady as they used to be, and whose aged 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 kids did.”

Others come from men with tough beards and tender necks, from truckies who charge theirs in the cab, from blokes on the mines who wear a respirator every shift the way Brenton did, and from wives who are, in Lynette’s words, “done scrubbing collars.”

What owners are saying

Why these are the last ones

This January, Brenton and Lynette are moving to Adelaide to be near their daughter Kylie and the grandkids. The house in Whyalla, the shed and the bench with the masking tape on the lamp have been sold. Settlement is on 31 January.

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

What is left are the shavers on the shelf in the shed: 238 of them. Brenton’s wish was simple. He wants them in bathrooms, not in moving boxes. So until the move, he is letting them go for A$69 each, less than a single replacement head for one of the big-name shavers, and Shae is packing orders at the kitchen table every afternoon. After 31 January, she will keep dispatching from her unit in Whyalla until the last one is gone. There won’t be any more.

Questions readers asked

Ninety days, Brenton’s way

“Give it the two weeks,” Brenton 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, Brenton says, he doesn’t think about his neck at all. “Which is all I ever wanted.”

Leonie Harbison