Best Safety Razor Kit – Our Top Shaving Kits

The best safety razor kit is an excellent way to start shaving with a safety razor. However, with such a wide array of options available you need to know what to look for.

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Top Picks:

• Merkur Futur Shaving Set – Star buy
• Gentleman Jon Deluxe Wet Shave Kit – Large deluxe kit
• OneBlade Genesis Black Tie Shave Kit – Premium pick
• Supply Single Edge Starter Set – Sleek and modern
• RoyalShave DE Safety Razor Shaving Set – Good mix of components
• Edwin Jagger 3 Piece DE 89L Shaving Set – Most elegant
• MÜHLE RYTMO Steamed Ash 4-piece Pure Badger Safety Razor Shaving Set – Rustic look
• Viking Revolution Luxury Safety Razor Shaving Kit – Big kit for great price

Safety razor kits are a popular choice among resellers who import cheaply made shaving kits and sell them at a “high end grooming” price.

On the other hand, many traditional shaving brands have been manufacturing top quality shaving sets pieces for decades using their own superior components.

Best Safety Razor Kit

Merkur Futur Shaving Set

The Merkur Futur came top of our list of the best safety razors to buy today. This top German safety razor brands also offers the space age Futur design in a full shaving set that comes complete with a matching shaving brush, stand and shaving bowl.

The Merkur Futur is a high quality adjustable safety razor that’s great for beginners because you can find the right level of aggression for you.

The shaving brush supplied is made of silvertip badger hair, which is renowned as the highest grade of badger shaving brush hair.

A Merkur branded shaving bowl is also provided in beautiful frosted glass and fits snugly into the shaving stand.

The whole set is available in polished chrome or matt satin chrome.

You can also buy the sleeker MK-78C which does not include the shaving bowl.

Read our full Merkur Futur review here.

Gentleman Jon Deluxe Wet Shave Kit 

Gentleman Jon is a great shaving brand with wonderful graphics. They offer two shaving kit options with a “complete kit” and “deluxe kit”. The deluxe kit offers a washbag and shaving stand for both home and away.

This is a good budget shaving kit that offers all the essentials for a great price. In terms of quality, the razor isn’t the highest and we suspect this may be a white-labelled import. Similarly there doesn’t seem to be any information about the hair of the shaving brush besides that it is a form of badger.

However, the sheer array of shaving bowl, alum block, shaving soap, blades, bag, stand, brush and safety razor make this a very comprehensive kit.

Viking Revolution Luxury Safety Razor Shaving Kit

This is a very popular shaving kit thanks to its range of pieces in a presentation tin. The set includes the trio of safety razor, shaving brush and shaving bowl complete with shaving soap, pre-shave oil and and aftershave balm. All for a very reasonable price.

Viking Revolution’s tagline “Join the shaving revolution” certainly says a lot about this product – a perfect entry point for beginners to the traditional shaving who stand to benefit from a complete kit of good quality products for a low price.

Neither of the individual pieces are the highest quality you can find – the razor certainly isn’t a Merkur – but then it doesn’t need to be. This is a great gift to get an excellent start to wet shaving without committing too much time, money and energy upfront.

OneBlade Genesis Black Tie Shave Kit

The OneBlade shave kit isn’t your standard shaving kit, but then the OneBlade Core and Genesis are definitely not ordinary safety razors.

Like the Supply razor they use injector style single edge blades in a piece of ultra-premium design based on hand assembly of precision-engineered parts in high quality steel.

The set comes in a beautiful leather case and includes a solid steel cradle to display the razor, which also features a pivoting head, very elegantly.

Read our full OneBlade review here.

Supply Single Edge Starter Set

The Supply razor is a modern Kickstarter sensation that resulted in a razor based on aerospace manufacturing methods. Supply razors are made using Metal Injection Molding which is a high-tech process whereby powdered metal is mixed with a glue-like binder, injection molded and then the binder removed. 

It’s available in both alloy and steel and utilizes injector style blades – a close relative of double edge razor blades that have also been around for decades as an open-source design. This is sure to win favour from people who want a modern shaving tool that’s just as effective as traditional safety razors.

Supply extends this same commitment to quality in all their products and so this set comes with a beautiful synthetic silvertip shaving brush and Supply shaving cream which ranked high in our list of top shaving soaps.

Read our full Supply razor review here.

RoyalShave DE Safety Razor Shaving Set

This impressive Royal Shave shaving kit features a Merkur 23c – Merkur’s most popular razor – and a huge silvertip badger shaving brush. Plus you get a styptic pen, towel and shaving soap in a bowl.

Royal Shave are renowned for doing shaving kits the right way – curating high quality pieces from the best manufacturers rather than stamping a logo on mass-produced sets.

Because of that lots of their components are available to buy separately (see the range here) so you can craft your own shaving kit.

Edwin Jagger 3 Piece DE 89L Shaving Set

Edwin Jagger is another leading razor manufacturer and the DE89 is regarded as one of the best safety razors around offering a smooth and comfortable shave.

The shaving brush provided is made from Pure Badger hair which although basic will still perform well.

One of the big perks of the Edwin Jagger de89 razor is it is available with a huge range of handle colours and materials. We go through some of these in our review of the DE89.

These Edwin Jagger shaving sets are also available in these matching colours, although our favourite is the classic chrome.

Like the Merkur Futur set it is quite clear that while this set doesn’t offer many extras like soap or even a bowl, the components provided are of a very high quality.

MÜHLE RYTMO Steamed Ash 4-piece Pure Badger Safety Razor Shaving Set

Muhle is an excellent razor brand with the Muhle R41 and Muhle R89 among popular safety razor choices.

The Muhle R41 is a classic choice for experienced shavers who want an aggressive shave thanks to its open comb design. However, the Muhle R220 in this shaving set is much more beginner-friendly for a comfortable shave.

Both the safety razor and brush feature a beautiful ashwood handle in a canonical shape with chrome fittings. This is comfortable to hold, durable and looks great. The ash has been steamed to a high temperature to make it very water resistant.

Muhle also shares our environmental focus on traditional shaving and is a member of the Environmental Alliance of Saxony. Their products come completely free from plastic.

The shaving brush is Pure Badger, which is not the most luxurious but still reliable with good stiffness in a generous 21mm knot size.

Buying Separately? Our Top Choices

While it’s great to find a matching shaving kit from a single brand, it is also very easy to put together a kit yourself from superior components. This will allow you to have much more choice.

Stand –

Shaving Bowl – Edwin Jagger Porcelain Ivory Shaving Bowl with Handle

Razor – Merkur Futur – or choose from our best safety razors

Shaving Brush – Simpsons – or choose from our best shaving brushes.

Shaving cream – Mitchell’s Wool Fat Shave Soap – or choose from our best shaving soap guide.

Buying Guide

One thing to watch with safety razor kits is the fact that if you combined the very best safety razor, shaving brush and other accessories you would end up with a product that’s prohibitively expensive.

As shaving kits are popular gifts people tend to look more for value to get the best safety razor starter kit. As such you should pay attention to what you’re actually getting. For instance, you may see references to the grade of badger used in the shaving brush.

While “pure badger” and “best badger” sound great they are actually lower grades of badger compared to Silvertip badger.

You can read about this in our shaving brush guide, but the short answer is that a safety razor kit for beginners with a lower grade of badger shouldn’t matter too much as a beginner is unlikely to notice much difference.

However, if you are paying a premium for a luxury shaving kit then do check the quality of things like the brush.

The same goes for shaving soap. A lot of safety razor kits feature a very basic puck of shaving soap as an afterthought. That’s not such a bad thing as its a nice extra and the user can then choose their own shaving soap that matches their preferences.

Alternatively, many shaving kits don’t come with any shaving cream at all. In either case, it might be worth buying some shaving soap separately to complement the set as you’ll know the required preferences better than any basic soap provided with the kit.

The safety razor should be your top priority as this is likely to be the most valuable part of the kit. Thankfully safety razors are a fairly simple design and difficult to get wrong. We’ve found the cheapest imported safety razor still perform well in the short term.

But like we said about the shaving brush, make sure you are getting the right deal by making sure the safety razor provided in the shaving kit is of a decent quality.

Branding is a good indicator here. If the safety razor is a Merkur, Edwin Jagger, Feather, Parker or Muhle then you should have a top quality razor. Don’t be afraid of modern brands like Vikings Blade either.

If in doubt, check our list of the best safety razors as we’ve been pretty comprehensive in our research.