Pick up a pink razor at any UK pharmacy. Now pick up the equivalent product in the men’s aisle — same brand, same blade count, same lubricating strip, same packaging format, just a different colour and a different target demographic. In the vast majority of cases, the women’s version will cost more. Sometimes fractionally. Often significantly. Sometimes by thirty to forty percent.

This is the pink tax. It is not a conspiracy theory. It has been documented by consumer groups, investigated by parliamentarians, and confirmed by price comparisons conducted by journalists, academics, and ordinary shoppers with a phone and five minutes of curiosity. The products are functionally identical. The prices are not.

In shaving, the pink tax is particularly visible and particularly galling — because shaving is not an occasional purchase. It is a recurring cost that compounds over years. The markup that looks modest on a single pack of cartridges becomes a substantial sum when you add it up over a decade of grooming.

What You’re Actually Paying For

The justification most often offered — when one is offered at all — is that women’s razors are engineered differently, designed for the body’s contours, and therefore more expensive to produce. This is partially true and largely irrelevant. A five-blade cartridge with a flexible head costs roughly the same to manufacture whether it’s wrapped in pink plastic or blue. The ergonomic handle designed for leg shaving is not meaningfully more expensive to produce than the one designed for the jaw.

What you’re paying for, in large part, is the gender segmentation itself. The marketing cost of convincing women they need a separate product. The shelf space. The packaging. And the simple reality that for decades, women paid what they were charged because the alternative — buying from the men’s aisle — felt socially awkward in a way that the industry knew it could exploit.

That calculation has been changing. But not fast enough, and not consistently across the market.

SmartShave’s Position — One Price, One Standard

SmartShave doesn’t have a women’s blade and a men’s blade. We have a blade. It is engineered for a close, comfortable, irritation-free shave on any body — face, legs, underarms, or any other area that requires it. The same five-blade system with the same aloe vera and vitamin E lubricating strip. The same flexible pivoting head designed to follow contours. The same performance, regardless of who is holding it.

And the same price. Always.

This is not a marketing position. It is a product decision. There is no separate women’s SKU with a feminine font and a higher price. There is a razor that works, subscriptions at the same rates regardless of gender, and the understanding that the people who use SmartShave deserve to be charged for what they’re getting — not for what demographic their shopping basket suggests they belong to.

Better for Legs, Underarms, and Sensitive Areas

One practical note on blade design and body shaving: the SmartShave BB5 system — a five-blade cartridge on a flexible pivoting head — is genuinely well-suited to the curves and contours of body shaving. The pivot means the blade maintains even contact across uneven surfaces, which is where most irritation in body shaving originates: from a flat blade dragging and catching rather than conforming.

The aloe vera in the lubricating strip matters more on the body than on the face, because skin on the legs and underarms tends to be more reactive to repeated shaving. Aloe’s anti-inflammatory action reduces the redness and sensitivity that can follow a close body shave, particularly in areas where friction is higher. Vitamin E helps restore the skin barrier more quickly post-shave, which shortens the window of sensitivity that many women experience between shaving and getting dressed.

None of this requires a product sold in pink packaging at a thirty percent premium. It just requires a good blade, used fresh, with the right ingredients on the strip. SmartShave provides that. At the same price it charges everyone else.

How to Start — and What It Costs

The SmartShave trial kit is £9.99 and includes a handle and your first set of blades, delivered free to your door. There is no long-term commitment attached. You can shave with it for a month and decide what you think. The vast majority of people who start with the trial kit go on to subscribe — not because they’re locked in, but because the shave is noticeably better and the cost is noticeably lower than what they were paying before.

If you’d rather subscribe straight away, the monthly plan is £14.99 — fresh blades delivered every month, calibrated to your shaving frequency. If you’d prefer full control without a subscription, the one-off kit is £19.99: a handle, blades, and the option to buy replacement cartridges directly from the site whenever you need them. No schedule. No rolling charge. Just cartridges when you ask for them.

All three options come with the same product. The same price. The same blades that work just as well for shaving legs as they do for shaving a face.

The pink tax is real. But it’s also optional — if you know where not to pay it.