Teflon Coated Double Edge Blades

If you've recently discovered that cartridge razors are a £30-a-month subscription to mediocrity, welcome. The double edge safety razor rabbit hole is deep, slightly obsessive, and populated entirely by men who will argue about blade metallurgy on forums at midnight. Voskhod is where most of them tell newcomers to start — and they're not wrong, which is unusual for forum advice.

What Voskhod actually is: a blade manufactured in Tula, Russia, under a brand that's been around since the Soviet era, now widely exported and sold in bulk packs of 10, 20, or 100. The Teflon (PTFE) coating is the headline feature — it reduces friction on the first few passes, which matters more than it sounds when you're dragging sharpened steel across skin that would like to remain intact. The blade itself is chromium-stainless steel, sharpened to a geometry that sits in the middle of the sharpness spectrum: not as aggressive as a Feather (Japan's contribution to minor facial lacerations), not as mild as a Derby. Roughly comparable to a Gillette Silver Blue or an Astra SP in terms of edge feel, though slightly smoother than the Astra on the first pass in most side-by-side tests reported across wet shaving communities.

Performance in real terms: most users get 3–5 comfortable shaves per blade before the edge degrades noticeably — 4 is the consensus number for normal-to-coarse beard types. That's on par with Astra Platinum and marginally better than Derby Extra, which tends to pull by shave 3. Feather blades last a similar number of shaves but start sharper, which is a feature or a bug depending on how much technique you have. The Teflon coating is most noticeable on shave 1 and 2, where glide is genuinely smooth; by shave 4 you're running on the underlying steel like everyone else. For context, a 100-blade pack costs around £6–9 depending on where you buy it — that's roughly 400 shaves for under a tenner, which makes every cartridge razor on the market look like a structured financial product designed to extract money from your face.

The honest limitations: Voskhod is not the sharpest blade in the world, which is fine for most men and a dealbreaker for a specific subset who want maximum closeness and have accepted the corresponding risk of weepers. If you have genuinely tough, dense beard growth and you're using a mild razor like a Merkur 23C, you might find Voskhod leaves more passes required than a Feather would. On an aggressive razor like the Merkur 34C or a Karve with a more open gap, Voskhod behaves very well — the moderate sharpness pairs with a more aggressive geometry rather than compounding it. It's also worth noting this is not a blade for complete beginners on day one; that said, it's far more forgiving than Feather for the first month of learning. The wet shaving community's standard advice — start with Voskhod or Astra SP, work out your angle and pressure, then experiment — is actually sound.

Verdict: Voskhod is the anti-cope blade. It doesn't promise transformation, doesn't come in aesthetic packaging designed to justify a premium, and doesn't have a brand story involving Swiss mountain springs. It's a competent, smooth, affordable blade that does exactly what a blade should do and costs so little that the value calculation is essentially unarguable. If your current shaving routine involves a five-blade cartridge and a can of foam, switching to a safety razor with Voskhod blades will likely be the highest ROI grooming change you make this year — not because it's magic, but because the baseline is embarrassingly low.