At the end of the 19th century, [King Camp Gillette] had the idea of creating a disposable razor blade that didn’t need sharpening. There was one problem with this idea: metallurgy was not yet advanced enough to produce paper-thin carbon steel blades and sharpen them for a close shave. In 1901, [William Nickerson] solved this problem, and the age of disposable razors began.
![The Skarp laser razor. Source](https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/skarp.jpg?w=400)
This Kickstarter would have you believe there is a new era of beard technology dawning. It’s a laser razor called Skarp, and it’s on track to become one of the most funded Kickstarters of all time. The only problem? Even with relatively good documentation on the Kickstarter campaign, a demo video, a patent, and an expert in the field of cosmetic lasers, only the creators can figure out how it works.
Instead of using technology that has been tried and tested for thousands of years, the Skarp uses a laser to shave hairs off, right at the surface of the skin. You need only look at a billboard for laser hair removal to realize this is possible, but building a laser razor is something that has eluded us for decades. This patent from 1986 at the very least demonstrates the beginnings of the idea – put a laser beam in a handheld package and plunge it into a beard. This patent from 2005 uses fiber optics to send a laser beam to a handheld razor. Like anything out of the sci-fi genre, a laser razor is a well-tread idea in the world of invention.
But Skarp thinks it has solved all of the problems which previously block lasers from finding a place in your medicine cabinet.
![](https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/weird-unshaven-pic-with-bg.png?w=314)
All of the early laser-based systems have a problem, at least according [Morgan Gustavsson], creator of the Skarp and inventor of intense pulsed light, a technique used to remove hair and treat skin disorders. None of the previous laser razors can cut all types of hair. Blonde, gray, red, and blond hair are all problems for laser-based razors, until “special chromophores” were identified in human hair that would respond to specific frequencies of laser light.
With Skarp, this laser light is delivered through an optical fiber running the length of a blade. When a hair comes in contact with this optical fiber, a small amount of light leaks through the fiber, burning the hair off. The Skarp team has even posted a demo video of the process, showing a razor-shaped object can, indeed, cut hair many magnitudes slower than a metal blade.
And so we come to the multi-million dollar question: is the Skarp real? This is usually the part where informed speculation kicks in, but for once I’m at a loss.
Still, using an unshielded optical fiber to cut hair doesn’t pass the sniff test. Using a AAA battery to drive a diode laser for a month doesn’t pass the sniff test. The sheer engineering that goes into designing optics, possibly manufacturing new laser diodes, and packaging all of this into an unbelievably small enclosure doesn’t pass the sniff test. I therefore turn this over to the most erudite and sometimes suspiciously cynical population on the Internet, the Hackaday comments section. What say you? Does anyone know how much laser power and at what frequency is required to shave a beard? Why on earth would an established inventor – a leader in his field – go to Kickstarter? How on Earth is this project on target to rake in four million dollars? There’s just enough details here to make an argument one way or another. You may do so below.
Must work pretty good considering everyone in the kickstarter video has facial hair.
This.
Pfft! You are just a suspiciously cynical population on the Internet. Get out of here with your logic and common sense!
Kickstarter said the company was “in violation of our rule requiring working prototypes of physical products that are offered as rewards,” adding that “suspensions cannot be undone.”
I had noticed the same thing. I was likewise amused.
I really Love this webSite
@bearded dragon
Even people with full beards still typically use razors, unless they also have *neck* beards.
The energy required to burn a hair with light that ‘leaks’ out would most certainly cause quite a large amount of heat build up in any impurity in the optical fiber…
To me, it almost looks like demo video is burning it off with a electricity… I’ve burned a hole through my finger nail touching a wire from one of those cheap USB-Plasma balls with the globe removed.
I’ve recently designed and prototyped a handheld laser cosmetic device.
1. laser diodes generate a lot of heat and must be cooled — I see no way of doing that in the device pictured
2. laser diodes require amps of power (our battery was capable of 60A pulses) — I’m skeptical that an AAA battery will power a laser strong enough to cut hair for a month.
Let’s see some power and thermal analysis, otherwise, I’d recommend against investing.
Maybe they pulse the laser? Which would also explain the slow cutting.
I tried to run a LEGO 8.4v/10w motor off two standard 10440 lithium ion cells (AAA size) in series. Too much current, tripped the protection circuit in the battery after one second of slowly turning the unloaded motor shaft. A 1.5v AAA offers even less power.
I think he’s got it. the metallic blade has to be in contact with the skin to execute the cut. The microwire that we’re supposed to consider a LASER is actually just a wire with LED lights on the exterior to accentuate it. If they cut without the blade completing a circuit against the skin, then I’ll buy it’s a laser….otherwise and more likely VAPORWARE!
Absolutely right, it’s nothing more than a wire that’s only 2-3 thousandths thick, very delicate, which is why you see him fiddling so much instead of getting down to the business of shaving.
Nah, we routinely send 100KW peak power pulses through optical fiber without heating. Evanescent field coupling is a good technique to control the light “leaking” in a usable way.
Snort.
Snort what? It’s not a joke, they are ultra-fast pulses.
Snort, that wee thing has anywhere near 100KW capability.
If you dump all the energy in a laser rod in say 1 ns the rod doesn’t have to be very big to get to 100 kW.
what is your source volume in that rod? Anywhere on this device that can support such a size?
A quick google for an example of the peak power you can get out of small rods turned up this :
http://www.mirsurg.eu/pdf/june2009/CWH2.pdf
14.9 kW peak power from a 3mm*90mm rod and they were limited by the heating of coatings.
The problem is less the volume and more the cost and the lack of COTS miniaturized components. I don’t think you can do Q-switching at this price point. You might be able to do a relatively cheap amplifier to amplify a pulse from a diode laser, but then you run into the problem that a single stage amplifier makes inefficient use of the power stored in the gain medium. So you could maybe do pre-amplifier with fiber if it can be wound that tight, or maybe by using a long bounce path through a crystal. Maybe maybe maybe …
So yes, it’s theoretically perfectly possible to put a 100 kW peak power laser in there. I don’t think it’s realistic, but it’s possible.
They don’t really have the budget to put a DPSS in there, not a lot of room either.
A fool and his money are soon parted.
A fool and his money are soon partied! B^)
A fool and his money are soon kickstarted.
A fool with a party will get kickstarted.
In my experience the relationship is inverse, fools swim in money.
I cannot logically explain it though.
Hah hah, Kickstarter! will become the new April fools! but good year round.
Smells like…a scam.
Which, like burning hairs, can somehow be done with no smell at all!
Couple of thing come to my mind:
– if the slightly bent fiber can leak enough light to burn a hair off, wouldn’t it do the same to the skin it apparently touches in the video?
– shouldn’t the heating of the hair damage the fiber itself?
– laser that are powerful enough to burn burn things tend to not be eye safe, how would that be sorted?
– having worked with single mode fiber optics myself, I know very well that a bare optic fiber is extremely delicate and will snap at the first smallest scratch you can imagine, so – expected lifetime of a fiber?
Do not look at laser blade with remaining eye! XD
All good points. This thing is the next Scribble pen.
+1 on hair damage. I have a gas cooker and large beard which frequently catches fire when I peer under saucepans to light the cooker. I have a large number of split ends on my beard, and none on the hair on my head.
Dinner time must be entertaining at your place :)
No problem! Give away the razors, and then sell the replacement fibers!
Sure, except they make no mention of replacement fibers, and the product appears to have no provisions for such.
If I understand what is happening here, the laser light is to be leaking out onto objects that touch the fibre. In the demo video, the surface of the fibre changes texture when it burns a hair, but the laser light stops when the hair is cut. I would have expected continued emission where the fibre texture has changed. This uneducated nitpicking aside, Something looks odd about the laser light in the video, but I cannot seem to put my finger on it.
Don’t put your finger on it or it may burn.
That doesn’t look like laser fiberoptics whatever. Those flashes of light look like sparks. Like what you get on those wire meshes when a bug flies into it.
If so I’m mystified to it. I’m thinking it’s really just bare wire and touching the base to the skin then having the wire touch the hair and pzzt. Burnt hair. The wire is isolated from the base obviously.
The green lamp is probably just a red herring. Maybe make the sparks stand out more or something. Or maybe to mask the redness his skin seems to have.
I think you’ve hit on it quite nicely. Looks more like burning the hair off with an electrically heated wire than with a fiberoptic laser.
I don’t think it’s a heated wire… I think it quite literally is the same damn thing as a bug zapper. The electric arc jumping to the hair will burn it.. Hence why he is going so slow… and they are using it under a colored lamp… looks ‘really’ yellow.
Thank you… I was struggling to remember the name. Like those “toy” tennis rackets you swat flys with or those lanters that attract and kill bugs. A bug zapper.
I vote for bug zapper as well, though it seem very weak. I guess it would otherwise be too painful…
A green lamp would make a wire glowing red appear grey or black.
I’m not saying this is the case, but it is the only reason I could think to use green.
If it’s glowing, it’s emitting its own light, not reflecting it so it’ll still be red.
Green filtering would though. You could do it with a certain amount of subtlety in post-production.
The thing that fascinates me is that they are touting an October 2015 delivery period….
Oh, good catch, if they do not see dime one till the 18th, that is a wicked fast ramp up into manufacturing.
…now that I have looked at the estimated delivery stuff, the October delivery seem to be for some sort of newsletter offered for $5.
Hah… After some experience watching scams – this is another indicator it may be a scam. Confuse people = a main goal of a fraud.
OK I missed that. It looks like a March 2016 delivery.
FDA approval?
Why would it need FDA approval? It’s neither a food nor a drug. Does Schtick need FDA approval every time they add another blade on to their latest and greatest multi-razor shaving system?
There’s a company that sells these ludicrously over-priced novelty razors, and they’re called “Schtick”? Company doesn’t have any Yiddish speakers then?
The company is called Schick. It was a joke about how their “technology” is all marketing.
Hearing aids are neither a food nor a drug yet they require FDA approval.
It isn’t food, a drug or being marketed as medical equipment. FDA has no purview here.
On the other hand I can see them running into problems with Consumer Product Safety Commission. Hmm, a retail device designed to burn off body parts (yes, hair is a part of your body). Can’t see that raising a red flag.
A razor is a retail device designed to cut off body parts.
Hair isn’t a body part, it’s hair. You don’t need FDA approval on scissors, fingernail clippers, or come to think of it toilet paper.
Look at the demo. Stop thinking about lasers, actually, look at it without knowing that is suppose to be done with lasers.
What do you see? (Next to the horrible lighting and camera work) As I see an hot-wire. Same thing used for cutting foam. You can see the solder joints quite well at 22 seconds on the left side.
If I look at the movies, I see a lot of bearded developers/engineers. That is a.) prejudice against all the bearded women out there and b.) I don’t think those engineers have any experience about what they do.
This… is totally what I thought when I saw it. Also he avoids touching his skin with it.
around the 1:17 mark it touches his skin.
And his hand flinches away in pain. You can tell it’s hurting him because the hand holding the razor is shaking a lot, he’s struggling to keep shocking himself.
He’s shaking because fear. Fear of burning himself yet again.
You beat me to it
I mean, not only is it TOTALLY obvious, but they cant even make a decent hot wire cutter!
Yeah, looks like a hot wire. I think this one will end up in tears . . .
I wasn’t think of a hot wire cutter but one of those high voltage bug traps. Now that I think about it more, his hand on the bare handle completes the circuit?
This was my thought, too. I don’t see any ‘flashes of light’, I see a hot-wire cutter.
Wouldn’t it be more feasible to have a focused beam that can focus just over the surface of the skin to remove the hair? Or something like that? A fiber optic is kind of hard to believe.
Skin curves.
I see no video of a working prototype..only a 3D printed item…until I see a working prototype I consider it a scam..
Watch the video it is a total scam – https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/skarp/the-skarp-laser-razor-21st-century-shaving/posts/1364296
The video is very green-tinted, it looks a little bit like someone is trying to cover up a red glow from a heated wire.
But regardless of what they have not have, kickstarter is ill-suited for taking new technology to a product. It has to be money for the production run, not money for developing the actual product.
If you look, you can see an illuminated area on the guy’s skin when the wire gets close to it, the kind of glow from a red hot piece of nichrome wire or something similar.
Fairly sure the skin illumination is reflection from the shiny edges of the larger metal body of the device.
The light looks like a model 9 or 10 “lite mite” by stocker & Yale, which uses a CFL “cool white” ring – probably at least 5000K or above. Ergo the green colour is likely not the light.
I also didn’t see the end of the handle, which raises the issue of a corded power supply
And finally, the “fibre” looks welded or soldered to the leading edge of the body, rather than either being isolated or held with the usual fibre-optic mounting systems.
My money is on a HF/RF supply to the wire with earth to the body, i.e. just simple thermal electrolysis.
Ummm, anyone else see THE TOTALLY OBVIOUS WIRE BENDING THE HAIRS before “cutting” them in the “demo”?
Because its obvious.
It looks like a shave using nichrome wire, as you pointed out, will also take weeks to finish.
how come NONE of the developers in the video are clean shaven?
They are incognito.
A “chromophore” is in the visible part of the spectrum. A chromophore is the part of a molecule responsible for its colour. So claiming that they have identified a chromophore previously unknown sounds strange to me.
Why is it that NONE of the developers in the video are clean shaven?
I call BS.
Not one of the developers had a clean shave.
Demo video is clearly nichrome wire.
It is quite possible for given device to exist. If they use standing wave resonating cavity they don’t need to have strong laser source, all they need is to pump enough energy within it.
Can you post some info on this?
lol are you referencing tesla’s scalar waves?
no, he’s referencing an optical cavity. not everything resonance has to do with tesla…
1) My experience has only been with ST hotmelt connectors, but even so, I have made quite a few of them. I have never seen any unshielded fiber that would stand up to what they are doing. Additionally, one of the hazards with working with fiber is if you get the piece of glass in your eye, or if you somehow manage to have it break off intravenously. Getting it to break off in a vein is no small feat, but it is dangerous because the fiber is small enough to travel. If this was released to the general public and it was really an unshielded glass fiber, there would be a lot of injuries, what if a kid picked it up and played with it.
2) Who the hell would want to spend a week shaving? By the time you made it around to the other side of your face it would be time to start at the beginning again.
3) Did anyone else see his had jump when he touched the “fiber” to his skin? How close of a shave can you really get with this thing? Wouldn’t an electric trimmer do the same thing faster?
My bet is that there is something laser like inside that is used to heat the nichrome wire. Marketing gimmick.
Interesting idea – but I think that would take a massive amount of power.
indeed, it would be easier to just run a current through the wire and shine a light on it so people think “ooh, laser!” like so many devices on infomercials.
fake or not…that demo looks like the thing is so much worse than a typical razor.
and yeah, it looks like a hot wire to me as well.
I agree with the title, even if this product was real, who wants their bathroom to smell like burnt hair? Has to be one of the worst smells I can think of.
They claim it does not smell – that it simply ‘breaks’ the hair.
Ignore the smoke in their demo.
Yeah, reading the FAQ left me more confused. It’s low power enough not to damage skin/eyes, and doesn’t burn the hair, and It’s not a UV wavelength. So it uses a special wavelength of visible of infrared light, that causes hair proteins to decompose/melt at a low power, and apparently doesn’t occur in nature or artificial lighting (or all our hair would constantly be falling off).
Another weird thing, one of the founders claims to have ‘invented’ laser hair removal. Wouldn’t he be wildly wealthy?
Maybe he invented it while employed and assigned rights to the company, but still…
Why dont these presumably wealthy surgeons in the pitch fund it themselves, or get a bank loan? I suppose KS offers free advertising, but wouldnt it have made sense to have better prototypes in that case?
That one brat move star is wildly wealthy and begged for kickstarter to fund his project. Less risk of your personal assets for your pet project. Or perhaps the R&D ate all his cash?
>They claim it does not smell – that it simply ‘breaks’ the hair.
ok
>Ignore the smoke in their demo.
ok .. wait, whaaa. Ahaha You made me spit my water.
I want to propose a challenge to those who are running the KS: shave a male alpha gorilla and live! If one can do that and not get beaten to pulp, I will buy the highest ranked KS option. OTOH an enraged gorilla could indicate that laser razor isn’t good.
You will provide the gorilla?
That’s the other Kick Starter
Even a house cat would be enough,
OK lets pretend for a second that they have found some frequency of light that at extremely high intensities (more intense than the sun by many orders of magnitude) breaks down the molecules within hair. Lets assume that they are using a multimode fibre with a structure similar to:
Core for Visible light multimode 50-100 µm diameter
Cladding: 200-225 µm dia.
Buffer: 400 µm dia.
Jacket: 550 µm dia.
For leakage of 1%, unless they do something amazing they would need to remove the Jacket and Buffer layers, so that would leave a single 200-225µm fibre coming in contact with human hairs with a diameter of 56–181 µm. I think that fibre might break very very very fast.
That actually sounds like the demo video they put up..
Other than the fact that it is shot in a weird murky green light – it shows an extremely thin fillament – fiber or maybe nichrome as alleged here..
They claim the ‘industrial produced fibers’ will be fully supported, and that they cannot answer the types of questions raised here on HaD because of their ‘IP’.
Meanwhile it is already patented, so claims about IP seem patently disingenuous! What are they afraid of revealing that someone who actually has purchased the object wouldnt be able to figure out themselves?
Kickstarters that claim they cannot answer questions because of IP… How many have actually succeeded? Any?
>Kickstarters that claim they cannot answer questions because of IP…
Lets see, we had Soap (Brians favourite :P), MoooOprics, Buttsexizer, cream of the crop
don’t forget my favorite, Bleen!
that “demo” is using a hot wire!
So.. Having watched various KickStarter scams closely over the last few years, this appears to be another one.
The main reason to believe this is a quick scan of the backer-comments.
The creators are quick to answer things such as “can you send to australia?”, but simply ignore questions like “the demo videos show very slow ablation, is there a reason to think it will work faster in the final version”.
It is a scam. I would bet the cost of the razor that it is a outright scam. The $5 newsletter also points towards scam in my mind.
And here I go being unfair: the creators look like self-centered failures – their eyes say potential scam artist. Men who want to be rich. Etc.
There is one demo video with what is obviously a fibre optic cutting hair excruciatingly slowly – then there is another video shot under glaring obfuscating green light (for some reason), which appears to be an entirely different technology – and a poor one at that.
I want this to be real, but I can’t figure out how there’s enough energy in a battery to last through an entire month of shaves. And that whole bit about the chromophores needing to be specific to the hair seemed really strange to me.
I’m not a physicist, I never got through optics, but you need energy to make this work and I can’t see how tuning it is going to make that much difference, especially if it’s tuned in a general way to work on anybody.
As a man with a rather thick beard and bumpy skin, I won’t this to be real, I just can’t grasp how they’ve solving the power problem and why they can’t disclose the patents that they claim to have. Patents in the US are a matter of public record, so once they’re granted any Tom, Dick or Harry that wants to see them can.
I briefly backed before canceling because this just doesn’t pass the sniff test and if they do manage to make good on it, I’ll just buy one and be happy to have been proven wrong. It’s just too much to wager on a product where they can’t even show us a properly working prototype.
Do not get fooled by this.
– it really shall not work at all that way they say
– the proto video is really telling it all: you can see a string cutting the hairs, not a laser. I think the string is just an electric blade, practically a resistor generating heat that melts the hairs… just like the strings in a toaster, just thinner.
I’m wondering if the cutting “surface” isn’t a fiber at all, looks like a cavity where a fiber emits the light into the “blade” like a light-saber, with the far side of the “blade” to absorb or reflect the light. Basically the same way he shaves his arm in the demo.
Not that I’m not skeptical, just pointing out a possibility.
As I understand it the wire is supposed to just be a trigger for the laser. I’m skeptical that they can follow through between the amount of juice this would take, the chromophores, lack of information on the patents and the lack of a prototype that works as described.
I hope that I’m wrong about my skepticism, but $189 is just way too much to give for something with so many valid questions left unanswered. Especially since other people are willing to take the risk.
I’ll buy it and be thankful to have been wrong about the product if they ship it. I’ve yet to find a method of shaving that works properly. Even having a professional barber use a straightrazor on me wasn’t sufficient to get a good close shave.
TIL: Burnt hair and scams smell the same.
This is a supreme load of bullshit. All the issues mentioned above cover it: slow speed, eye protection concerns, power consumption, fiber damage, clearly visible heating wire in the video, etc. Yet another scam to gradually disillusion the public and make crowdfunding legitimate projects slightly more difficult.
If this thing really worked Gillette would be beating down this guys door, no need for kickstarter.
Besides that thing on TV called no-no (which does not work) can do it all according to the ads.
Gillette makes money from blades, not razors. That’s why they killed the double edge razor in favour of current multi-blade crazeness. Vintage DE Gillettes are the most comfortable shaving methods for everybody who tried it even once, de razors produced today hardly compares. Yet, Gillette stopped making it ages ago: DE blades are just too cheap compared to mach ultra vibrating fusions or whatever they are called.
“The laser beam is contained inside the fiber & is also well below eye safe levels.”
A laser below eye safe levels means one below 0.5 milliwatts. That isn’t enough energy to cut through hair under any circumstances. However, the PLAINLY VISIBLE WIRE present on the head of the razor in that video is likely the real culprit: It’s probably an electric “hot wire”, such as the type used to cut foam. In this case, it’s being used to slowly burn through hair. No thanks. I know what burnt hair smells like and I’d rather just continue to let my beard grow.
Also, someone should let Dave Jones know about this. He’s got a special way of dealing with crap Kickstarter campaigns. :D
What about de nono shaver?
http://www.nonopro.com
ahh yes with the patented thermodynamic wire, what is that exactly?
It’s a “Thermicon”. Or, in English, “hot thing”.
There are thousands of complaints about these. They’re horribly overpriced, don’t work, and the refund policy they make such a big deal of in their ads, is bullshit, almost nobody gets a refund, they’re very difficult about it.
Just going from what I’ve read.
If it was that good, they’d sell it in shops, which have proper refund policies.
Hey Brian,
Thanks for posting another great Kickstarter advertisement. My favorite part was at the end where you said none of their claims make any sense and you cant see any way that it would possibly work. Cool new technology huh!
Keep up the good work,
AC
If you say “don’t buy this, it’s shit”, then it’s not an advertisement.
It isn’t quite as crazy as it looks. If the fiber end is mirrored, it can use less power unless needed. The idea that nothing escapes an optical device until another object gets close – not touching – when energy is coupled to the other object is hardly new. It is the basis of some polarizers and in siphoning power off an optical fiber by placing another one very close to it. The EM field of light extends outside the fiber or the face of a prism, etc. That the power is only used when a hair contacts the fiber is not unreasonable. Staying optically active long enough to burn through – as the optical properties of the hair change – is hard to picture. Have no effect on skin is also reasonable. The hair has optical properties that can couple with the fiber and skin does not. A charger makes a lot more sense than a one month battery (Was that in there? I missed it.).
Maybe they will all shave when they get a working prototype.
Kickstarter rules are pretty clear: working prototype is required.
I see two videos on kickstarter. First shows me piece of hot metal cutting some hair. Second shows me hot tiny wire. I though we are talking about laser here.
Main vid shows what actually looks like a fiber optic with laser light in it being used to clumsily cut hairs slowly.
The second video may be the same type of laser-cutting, but it is tinted green in a way that can only be called suspicious give the way green filter will make red and shaded of orange hard to distinguish.
Has a single kickstarter where “we would answer that but we have to protect our IP” was floated as an excuse ever actually been fulfilled?
Looks like a “NoNo” hair removal system with fiber optic lit edge.
They may have something that works but not the way they describe.
Ok here is a back of napkin calculation (correct me if I made any mistakes)
Assume you grow 1 g of facial hair per day (the weight of a paperclip)
Energy required to melt 1 g of paraphin wax: 200 J/g (couldn’t find data on hair)
(so you need 200 J per day to melt your hair)
Energy in AAA battery ~ 6,000 J
Assuming 100% of energy from battery goes into the hair, you get 30 days of use.
This is obviously not happening, most of the energy is just passing down the fiber optic cable and will wind up heating something up. How much of the battery’s energy will actually go towards melting hair? Maybe 5%?
You don’t need to melt all the hair, just enough to cut a thin line through it, the video shows removed hair being brushed away, so it would be less than 200J per day.
That said, I don’t believe it’s genuine, and looks a lot more like hot wire than laser.
I was thinking for people shaving daily, you are not going to grow a hair that is longer than the diameter of the fiber so I assumed the fiber would have to melt the whole hair since it is just a nub. I admit my calculation has so many assumptions it is fairly worthless.
A human hair is about 70 microns in diameter, and grows about 0.5mm per day. The volume of that new-grown cylinder is pi * 0.035^2 * 0.5 = 0.0019 mm^3. Quick google search suggests there are an average of 20,000 hairs on a man’s face; if you had to completely vaporize all of them that’s 38mm^3 of material to cut through.
I can’t find any specs on the density of hair, but it seems to sink sometimes and float other times, so we’ll just say it’s the density of water, 1g/cc. The total volume of hair we calculated then actually weighs 38 milligrams, not 1 gram. Your power calculations are off by a factor of 25.
It would be interesting to meet the person who grows 1000mg of hair on their face every day, though. Would that mean he had to shave off half an inch of hair every 24 hours? Or would it mean he had 500,000 hairs on his face, with a beard that looked like a mink coat?
Good work! +1
Maybe his entire head grows a beard :P
You haven’t met my brother. More hair than man, he is.
Also has had an awesome muscled body from the age of 3, despite doing no exercise. I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say it’s hormonal.
BTW great follow up. how’d you find info on # hairs on a face and growth per day? I am actually surprised I was within a factor of 25 because I had to just guess a round number for mass of hair. Growing 1/2 inch of hair per day sounds cool, but it would also be cool to have mink coat face, can’t decide which is better.
+1 for hot wire…
If you watch the video closely you can see the wire actually touches his skin. You would see burn marks if it were a hot wire.
On the ends of the wire you can see light being emitted where it mounts to the handle.
Apparently they think someone will steal the IP through the video by determining the wavelength of the laser (hence the green light).
They have another demo video, but you can’t see anything important in it.
The other video is in color and shows a laser fiber also cutting the hairs.
Also, they have a patent and are presumably going to release the product in less than 6 months – I am not impressed by their concerns for their IP.
I dont think ive ever seen a kickstarter suceed when the creators have resorted to claiming IP as a reason they cannot clarify the products action.
Kickstarter has now said they are neither a place to invest nor purchase products. It should be renamed giftgiver or something.
Real men dont shave.
FACT!
Real men absolutely do shave. Maybe not everywhere…maybe not every day…but if you think you don’t need a razor when you have a beard, you’re mistaken. There’s a huge difference between a manly, well-kept beard, and the all-natural scraggly unabomber model.
Little known fact: it actually takes MORE effort to maintain a good-looking beard than it does to just shave it off every day.
Beards take more work???? What???? Maybe if you have a silly chin strap and call that a beard.
Now a handle bar….. that’s high maintenance.
If you’ve got a beard and you’re not at least maintaining the edges of it (cheeks, jawline and neck), it’s probably not a good looking beard.
A good soldier shaves in the morning, and a good lover shaves in the evening.
I don’t know whether this thing uses a laser or not. (But I doubt it.) One thing I’m certain of however is that the video demonstrates that it’s an ineffective device.
the video of them using the “real” razor also very blatantly does not show us the whole razor. only the cutting end with the guy holding the razor in a very awkward way, This would be, I presume, because they are shielding us from seeing the wires they have attached to it- it’s not running off of battery power because it takes to much power to run a hot wire to poorly cut through hair on your hand without burning yourself….
I second that. Also, how could they afford to fund “years of research” but not afford or find funding for a production run?
At the 2 second mark of the demo video when he is switching hands, it looks like power cables are coming out of the side facing away from the camera, requiring him to hold it oddly for the rest of the video. They should said if the prototype was running on a bench supply (understandable for prototype) instead of trying to hide it with slight of hand.
Wanna burn hair? How about cash?… your cash!
Not interested… NEXT!!!
What are those funny looking formulas on 0:15 on the whiteboard???
Looks quite nonsenical to me, but maybe someone knows what it really means
I haven’t digested it yet, but this appears to be *a* patent that is held by the participants:
http://www.google.com/patents/US9017322
They list a large chunk of the visible spectrum, and much that is not visible. I am now kinda hoping this is real, because that could mean either a really cheap source of fibre lasers or cheap nonlinear optical crystals to play with. Mind you, I am not an experienced laser nerd, but I thought to get many frequencies out of a laser you either had some major inefficiencies, or some very expensive kit. So, I am thinking more and more this is some sort of scam.
It is proper way of patenting things. So other won’t be able submit same idea with different numbers
This one more detailed with proper explanation. No a fake as some of the people suggesting here.
http://www.google.com/patents/US20140276685
I think this is the same document as the one listed above. One is listed as the application, the other as a grant. And just to play the devil’s advocate here, I do not think the patent office has to check the technical feasibility of an application. Just that nobody has previously applied for and received a patent for that device.
Yeah, unless they think it’s impossible on the face of it (i.e., perpetual motion), PTO assumes it works.
Inventors haven’t had to prove their invention actually works since 1880, when the US Patent Office stopped requiring a working example or functional scale model in order to be granted a patent.
I hear that you can hack it into a lightsaber, or a teleporter, why not.
But only the deluxe one for the first 500 backers though, keep that in mind.
They’re using FTIR in the fiber optic fiber to release the laser light and burn the hair.
https://www.google.com/search?q=ftir+multitouch&tbm=isch
In their demo video, you can see the fiber bend and the bright spots are from debris resultant of previously cut hair.
http://mobrienphotography.com/Misc-Pics/Skin-Touch.PNG
In order to overcome the fragility of the fiber, they are likely going to attempt bonding the fiber to the cut groove. I’d wager that they’ll use some for of optical bonding.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_bonding
I call legit
You can go to any drugstore or device store and buy light-based hair removal devices for women.
You can also go to a lot of places where they remove hair for you with lasers, again meant for women.
Yes you can remove hair with laser/light, but no you can’t shave with a thing the size of a disposable shaver that way. The size doesn’t fit,
There is a huge difference between indiscriminately dumping energy on the hair (and in the skin, it’s also meant to damage hair follicles) and dumping it into a small section the hair, destroying tiny segments of the hairs takes many orders of magnitude less energy.
I suspect that the silent green-yellow video is a bad slight of hand. Notice how you never see the surface touching the skin? And how the hand holding the razor conceals the razor’s base? There’s a concealed metal razor that’s doing the actual cutting, or a power lead enters the base for a heated wire.
These colour corrected screenshots (yay smplayer) show various details.
def wire “cutting by heating” the hair.
http://i61.tinypic.com/2s1spzs.jpg
http://i57.tinypic.com/1q3k0l.jpg
http://i59.tinypic.com/350rwh3.jpg
http://i57.tinypic.com/2dume5j.jpg
http://i61.tinypic.com/4ki3aw.jpg
While I too think the kickstarter is BS, optical fibers are surprisingly flexible and strong in tension, it’s just that (as I already wrote) that they are delicate and will snap if you scratch them…
1) The resolution of their videos is not good enough to see what’s going on, if it’s a wire, fibre, or magic string and if it’s glowing, leaking photons, or emitting unicorn farts.
2) Bare fibre that thin absolutely can flex with a very small radius and is surprisingly strong.
I’m still totally calling it bullshit on this device, I’m just not 100% sure what flavour yet, and I don’t think we’ve seen enough detail to really know.
“… emitting unicorn farts.”
Great one!
Here’s the thing: At points it clearly touches his skin. It doesn’t burn him. It isn’t a hot wire.
The only amazing technology here is the one that will allow these scammers to walk off with close to $3 million dollars of a bunch of idiots money. Kickstarter should at least be a little bit ashamed for taking part in this – or preferably hauled off to prison.
The only party to be ashamed of themselves is the media; the bunch of unscrupulous journalists passing and amplifying the hype and not doing their jobs properly. No dirt digging, no fact checking. What a bunch of fat cats.
Kickstarter is just neutral and should stay so.
Problem is Kickstarter is a scam magnet. There’s a million cons you could pull and make a ton of money that you’re not even legally obliged to give back, as long as you give out your promotional keyrings or whatever. Spend 5 minutes on Youtube looking up perpetual motion machines, where the geniuses surmise that it’s drawing energy from a magnet. PLENTY of suckers in the world. It’s still morally wrong to take advantage of them. Nobody supports snake-oil salemen.
Kickstarter makes it very easy to con people. Therefore they have a moral obligation to do something about that. Of course that would cost them money, so why bother? Kickstarter itself may well be the biggest Kickstarter scam.
And I didn’t even mention Facebook “prize giveaways” AKA “like farming” scams. Hundreds of thousands of keen suckers per hour, throwing themselves at obvious cons.
It is but one more reason to not have Facebook. The popular science YouTube channel Veritasium has a video worth seeing, “Facebook Fraud”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag