Skip to main content

This $100,000 razor is made of meteorites, has just two blades

zafirro-iridium-razor
Image used with permission by copyright holder

What can you buy for $100,000 dollars? Well, if your a journalist, you’re probably used to living for 3-4 years on that amount of money or if you’re a parent, you may consider using it to put a kid through college. But for the monetarily inclined and highly vain readers in our audience, may we suggest this lovely $100,000 shaving razor? The Zafirro Iridium is the world’s most expensive razor, with a body made of iridium and two blades made out of sapphire. 99 are being manufactured.

For those who haven’t studied the periodic table lately (I’m sure you can hire somebody to do that for you), Iridium is one of the rarest and strongest metals–so rare, in fact, that it mostly comes from meteorites. Complimenting this wonderfully expensive body are two screws that are made from pure platinum and two sapphire blades, which are supposedly so sharp that the edge of the blade is only 100 atoms thick, or 5,000 times smaller than the width of a hair. We can only hope that you’ll never have to buy replacement blades. We can only imagine how much replacement blades cost, assuming they come in packs of four like.

zafirro-iridium-razor-sapphire-blades“Our goal in founding Zafirro was to take a quantum leap forward in razor technology, to build the sharpest blade ever made and make it last forever,” said Zafirro CEO Hayden Hamilton. “To launch our new blades, our aim was to create one of the most impressive consumer products ever made, something that could be equally at home in a Smithsonian technology exhibit or a MOMA design exhibition. We utilized expertise in fields as varied as rocket manufacturing, nanotechnology, and particle physics, to combine some of the rarest, strongest, and most technologically advanced materials in existence.”

Though Zafirro makes no mention of Gillette, it’s clear that the company is seeking to undo years of hard marketing by the 100+ year-old brand. If the general public gets wind that two blades is better than five, the Zafirro Iridium could upend the entire shaving industry. This is, of course, assuming that at least one person buys this ridiculously expensive grooming item. It will probably be the guy who bought this wallet.

Jeffrey Van Camp
Former Digital Trends Contributor
As DT's Deputy Editor, Jeff helps oversee editorial operations at Digital Trends. Previously, he ran the site's…
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more
AI turned Breaking Bad into an anime — and it’s terrifying
Split image of Breaking Bad anime characters.

These days, it seems like there's nothing AI programs can't do. Thanks to advancements in artificial intelligence, deepfakes have done digital "face-offs" with Hollywood celebrities in films and TV shows, VFX artists can de-age actors almost instantly, and ChatGPT has learned how to write big-budget screenplays in the blink of an eye. Pretty soon, AI will probably decide who wins at the Oscars.

Within the past year, AI has also been used to generate beautiful works of art in seconds, creating a viral new trend and causing a boon for fan artists everywhere. TikTok user @cyborgism recently broke the internet by posting a clip featuring many AI-generated pictures of Breaking Bad. The theme here is that the characters are depicted as anime characters straight out of the 1980s, and the result is concerning to say the least. Depending on your viewpoint, Breaking Bad AI (my unofficial name for it) shows how technology can either threaten the integrity of original works of art or nurture artistic expression.
What if AI created Breaking Bad as a 1980s anime?
Playing over Metro Boomin's rap remix of the famous "I am the one who knocks" monologue, the video features images of the cast that range from shockingly realistic to full-on exaggerated. The clip currently has over 65,000 likes on TikTok alone, and many other users have shared their thoughts on the art. One user wrote, "Regardless of the repercussions on the entertainment industry, I can't wait for AI to be advanced enough to animate the whole show like this."

Read more