Vintage Remington 6 Electric Shaver, Comfort Dial, c. 1968–1979

The Piece

A Remington 6 electric shaver, and a small masterclass in how American industrial design handled a bathroom object in the late sixties. The body is a flat black block, squared at the corners and softened only where the mould radius demanded it. A band of bright chrome runs the full perimeter as a single unbroken line. The front is divided in two: an upper panel carrying the controls, and below it a rectangle of grained black leatherette set flush into the face, put there for grip and for the look of the thing rather than for any mechanical reason.

The control is a chromed slotted dial, quartered by an arrow, and around it in sans capitals run the settings: CLOSER, TRIM, CLEAN, with COMFORT DIAL named beneath. At the foot of the panel the name plate reads REMINGTON in a squared geometric face, followed by the numeral 6 reversed out of a single block of mid blue. That blue rectangle is the only colour anywhere on the object and it does all the work.

The head carries six chrome shaving foils in a row, fine perforated screens above the cutter block, each separated by a slim bright rib. They are clean, unbent and free of the pitting these usually show. The whole thing is roughly the size and weight of a pack of cards in the hand.

History & Provenance

The Remington name on this shaver is not the firearms company, and the split is worth knowing. E. Remington and Sons made rifles from 1818 and first commercialised the QWERTY typewriter in 1873. In 1886 the firm sold the typewriter business along with the Remington brand to the Standard Typewriter Company, which renamed itself Remington Typewriter in 1902, merged with Rand Kardex in 1927 to become Remington Rand, and established an Electric Shaver Division in 1936. The rifle side went its own way as Remington Arms. So the shaver on your dresser and the rifle in the cabinet have shared a name but not a company since the 1880s.

Remington Rand merged with Sperry in 1955, and the shaver business ran as part of Sperry Rand through the period this example belongs to. It left in 1979, bought by Victor Kiam, whose line about liking the shaver so much he bought the company became one of the better known advertisements of the following decade. That sale is the useful ceiling here: the numbered Comfort Dial series and this particular graphic treatment belong to the Sperry Rand years before it.

What makes the object worth keeping is not the mechanism. It is that somebody took a great deal of care over a thing that lived next to a sink. The proportions, the single chrome line, the one blue rectangle: this is the same design confidence that was being applied to radios and cameras in the same years, applied to a shaver.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

This belongs on a dresser top or a shelf of men's objects, next to a cigarette case and a pair of cufflink boxes, where it reads as a small piece of sixties industrial sculpture rather than as a grooming tool. Black, chrome and one rectangle of blue is a restrained palette that sits well against brass and walnut. It is also the kind of object that stops people, because almost nobody expects a shaver to have been designed this carefully, and almost nobody has seen one survive in this condition.