12 ms·

Laser Razor suspended by Kickstarter

181 points by aram 11y ago

aram 11y ago
Since we all check the comments first, here are some links: KickStarter project page (suspended): https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/skarp/the-skarp-laser-razor-21st-century-shaving https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/skarp/the-skarp-laser-r... IndieGoGo project page (they re-posted the project there after being suspended): https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/the-skarp-laser-razor-21st-century-shaving#/ https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/the-skarp-laser-razor-21s... Demonstration video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOLwNJ7TXWA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOLwNJ7TXWA
- steckerbrett 11y ago
  There's no laser there. If there was a laser there it would be a significant hazard to everybody in the room, so it's good it's completely fake. With the sort of power you would need to be cutting hairs in any capacity simply looking at diffuse reflections (think a laser dot at a wall) would have the ability to permanently damage your vision. The video is someone fooling around with a piece of aluminum and a hot wire[0]. It's a testament to human stupidity that something this blatant managed to get $4M. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot-wire_foam_cutter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot-wire_foam_cutter
  - k__ 11y ago
    I don't know much about lasers and the videos seemed convincing to me... Now I'm sad that it's a fake, even if I wanted to wait till the first version came out.
    - steckerbrett 11y ago
      Light has a fun property of being bent when it passes through substances that have different optical densities. With some combinations of material and process we can exploit this property to achieve total internal reflection[0]. With a cylindrical glass rod we can fire light down it in such a way that it bounces off the walls and makes it to the far end without ever exiting through the sides. This is used in fiber optic communications to achieve low levels of loss transmitting light very large distances. However, the total internal reflection can partly break down if we apply something to the side of the glass tube, like touching it with a finger. The laser will strike through the glass cylinder and onto whatever is touching it, this is known as frustrated total internal reflection. What's supposedly happening in this product is the razor blade has a fiber with a laser being shone through it, when the fiber comes into the contact with a hair the laser exits the fiber and the thermal energy burns the hair. The problems here are pretty severe. • If such a fiber did exist it would give you severe burns on contact with your skin (a very close shave indeed). It would be like trying to shave with a red hot block of steel held up to your face. • Ever burnt some hair? It smells ghastly. I burned my beard once and the nauseating smell didn't go away for hours. Trying to convince consumers to go on a date while smelling like burning keratin would near impossible. • The amount of laser power going through the fiber would have the potential to remove your eyesight if you broke it. If you wanted to use this you would need to be wearing eye protection (sealed goggles), skin protection like welding gear, have signage and locks on your bathroom to prevent anybody unprotected from entering. • The amount of energy required for this sort of effect would be colossal, lasers are inefficient and need a lot of cooling (high power ones are often water cooled). If this existed just the hand piece would be something like a petrol pump nozzle leading to a massive cooling system and power supply. • Any slight impurity in the fiber would cause it to instantly melt when the laser was turned on. Unless something is perfectly optically clear there is some loss to heat as light passes through it. Glass fibers made for telecommunications are incredibly clear, but they still have enough loss that repeaters are needed on long runs due to losses. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_internal_reflection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_internal_reflection
      - kyzyl 11y ago
        While I'm not making any statement about the feasibility of the Skarp, I think you might be exaggerating the size of a moderately powerful modern lasers. At my company's R&D lab I have some 1W CO2 lasers that, similar to what what you describe, are about the size of loaf of bread. They run on three phase power, have inch-thick cables and required hilariously large cooling shrouds. Two facts about those types of lasers: They are cavity lasers designed to have very good beam quality, and they are OLD. I have a cabinet full of other types of newer, moderately powerful laser modules which vary from pin diodes to modules the size of a AA battery, to things the size of cigars. Some of them are pretty darned powerful. Any laser modules that are water cooled would DEFINITELY not be something you would want to hold up to your face, but I also don't think that's the kind of power required for cutting hair. I'm not saying that any laser running on a AAA battery at a useful power could last a useful amount of time, if you could figure out some secret sauce method for very quickly coupling a high intensity pulse (hairs have a very small area, after all) onto some hairs at a wavelength that they like to soak up then it seems.... possible. In theory the laser wavelength and power could even be tuned dynamically to match the hairs, that is if they had somehow figured out a way to fit a Mach-Zender modulator, an electro-optical modulator and a frequency comb into a razor handle--ha! Anyhow, I might be wrong in all this, but my point is mostly that it wouldn't take a water cooled laser to burn some hair. Come visit me in Vancouver and we can test it out (on your beard).
        steckerbrett 11y ago
        Perhaps a little exaggeration, agreed. The wavelengths you want are in the UV end of things, which I assumed would be mostly clumsy CO2 tubes. Just the concept of giving a consumer a high power laser they can't even see makes me extremely uncomfortable regardless of how plausible the rest of it is. Mistakes with that sort of thing are permanent, you don't get any second chances if you blast out your retina.
  - cabbeer 11y ago
    > It's a testament to human stupidity that something this blatant managed to get $4M. That's a bit harsh. Most people don't understand technology on a functional level. Ask a "regular" person how programming, the internet or their mobile phone works and they won't be able to give you a technical explanation. In fact, most modern technology tries to hide the internal workings.. "it just works".
    - Pxtl 11y ago
      Heck, ask a programmer what a MOSFET is.
      - jacquesm 11y ago
        Not everybody got into programming on the soft side. But I agree with you that on average most programmers would not know what that is.
        TeMPOraL 11y ago
        Especially today, now that most programmers aren't hobbyists who found a job matching their skills but people who explicitly learned to code because there's shitloads of money in the industry.
        asimilator 11y ago
        I think you can be a professional programmer because it's your passion and still not know what a MOSFET is. Computing is a large subject.
        TeMPOraL 11y ago
        Of course. My point is, people who started as geeks are statistically much more likely to know basic EE than people who explicitly chose to learn programming as a career.
        rnovak 11y ago
  - dhimes 11y ago
    If it's a single beam, yes. But what I find incredible is that it didn't work worth a damn. They were struggling to cut one hair at a time. Definitely not the razor I want. I wonder how much scamming goes on with kickstarter, etc. I've been involved in a couple of projects (as payer, not seller) and am batting about 1/3.
    - thomnottom 11y ago
      Just curious what you mean by 1/3. Is that how many have failed or how many you think are actual scams? Of the several I've done (of which there have been a few failures) there's only one that I would consider a scam (and they actually refunded the money). This one definitely sounds like a scam - especially how quickly they jumped to another platform without addressing the questions.
      - dhimes 11y ago
        It's unclear to me also. I don't think I've actually been scammed, but it's possible and I'm kind of still waiting to find out. There's a trick to it: asking for the money in stages, because if you make it to a stage then you don't have to give everything back. So if you truly need $100K, you first set your goal to $15K, then $40K, then $75K, then $100K. That way if you fail to raise your $100K, you still get to keep your $75K or whatever your max was. It seems that it's against the spirit of the sites, but it works. On the books it's a failure, but the folks walk away with the money. Is it a scam? I'm not sure.
      - Albright 11y ago
        I'm 4/5, meaning that of the five projects I've backed, four delivered what they promised and one turned out to be, if not a total scam, at least a project where the creators lied about how far along they were in prototyping and currently haven't posted a project update in almost three months -- I'll give them the benefit of the doubt that their intentions were good, but they quickly got over their heads so they took the money and ran. (Here's that project: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wicoz/milk-nanny-the-worlds-first-smart-baby-formula-mil https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wicoz/milk-nanny-the-wo... ) I was very frustrated by the degree to which Kickstarter would take any responsibility after the project clearly started going south. Even though this project was a "Staff Pick!!", implying, to me at least, a higher quality project than normal, they didn't seem to have any interest in holding the creators to account. After they wouldn't refund my money, I did a chargeback through my bank. I then got a message from "Kickstarter Integrity" scolding me and telling me they were blocking my account from pledging for 30 days and telling me to tell my bank to cancel the chargeback! These guys take the money and run, and my integrity is challenged! It was pretty friggin' insulting. The experience might not have turned me off of Kickstarter forever, but I will definitely be more cautious before throwing my money at any other project on the site. It would be great to see a KS alternative which is willing to hold vendors more responsible.
  - anon4 11y ago
    The guy invented Intense Pulsed Light, i.e. the laser technology used in hair removal, so it sounded plausible he might have found a way to cut hair with a lower-intensity laser. Even if it cut it slowly, it might be better than razors for a lot of people.
    - SXX 11y ago
      Did you found source on that? Only source that I managed to find it's website of company he founded long time ago: http://www.medicalbiocare.com/html/corporate.html http://www.medicalbiocare.com/html/corporate.html Any other sources tell that IPL was invented by someone else.
      - DannoHung 11y ago
        He does have a patent from the mid 90's (which is when I think IPL was created?) that seems to be pertinent: https://www.google.com/patents/US5320618 https://www.google.com/patents/US5320618 I dunno, this whole thing is weird. Generally I have to defer to people saying that the system isn't using enough energy to burn hairs, but unless the guy in question has had some sort of mental break or something, I don't get why he'd be involved with it if it was a straight fraud.
    - amyjess 11y ago
      > The guy invented Intense Pulsed Light, i.e. the laser technology used in hair removal As somebody who has actually undergone laser hair removal, I can tell you that IPL is not laser. It's an alternative to laser that's used by some hair removal places, and it's generally considered less effective and less permanent than real laser. IPL is the budget option. It's also not technically a laser, either. IPL is non-coherent light over a range of wavelengths, while laser is coherent light over a single wavelength. The most effective options for laser hair removal are alexandrite and maybe diode lasers for people with pale skin and YAG lasers for people with dark skin. You won't see IPL recommended over any of these. Mind you, if what this project is selling is a temporary way to get rid of hair, IPL might be ideal for this particular use case.
  - Chathamization 11y ago
    There seems to be a large number of people who are convinced that the only difference between the present day and a SciFi wonderland is human will. For example, look at the people who think Mars colonization is a good idea, or the popularity of Ray Kurzweil (and to a lesser extent, people who are overly optimistic about self-driving cars).
    - nitrogen 11y ago
      All of the things you listed are significantly more feasible than a laser shaver.
  - happywolf 11y ago
    View it another way: shaving seems to be a pain for many people, to the point people are willing to throw millions at a dubious (sorry if this word isn't the best adjective) claim of shaving with laser. What if one could invent a working bladeless razor? It is a blue ocean waiting to be delved in. Just thinking out loud.
    - whitej125 11y ago
      Thought the same. Yes its fake... but taking a step back their ability to 'raise' here indicates that the world is filled with people (and I am one of them) that are not happy with the status quo of shaving technology.
- akx 11y ago
  And of _course_ the Indiegogo project was posted as Flexible Funding...
hoopism 11y ago
hackaday.com had a good writeup that was skeptical of this. http://hackaday.com/2015/10/01/ask-hackaday-i-love-the-smell-of-burnt-hair-in-the-morning/ http://hackaday.com/2015/10/01/ask-hackaday-i-love-the-smell... They have generally been good at writing up some of the more sketchy kickstarts.
- rasz_pl 11y ago
  like Soap router, hackaday approved!!1
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
- thehodge 11y ago
  > The Skarp razor is powered by a small laser which cuts through hair for an incredibly close shave without irritating or damaging the skin. I would read that as them seeing that the laser is cutting the skin but that could be easily be intentionally misleading marketing speak
wlesieutre 11y ago
"They have been incredibly helpful and they believe in the Skarp Razor as much as we do," the firm said of Indiegogo. is a very polite way of saying "Yeah, we don't believe in our own product either"
dogma1138 11y ago
It's sad that people thought it was real, forget about lasers and stuff it's basic common sense. A AAA battery doesn't store enough power to drive a laser capable of burning hair for any reasonable amount of time. When the laser isn't interrupted by the hair it has to go some where which means that heat is produced, if it can get something hot enough to burn the hair off it would get hot enough that you won't be able to hold it yet alone put it to your face. There's no way you would ever could get the laser beam close enough to the skin for a smooth shave without burning your skin off. And most importantly burnt hair smells like shit.... P.S. I assume that most people know at least 1 person that did laser hair removal, they should know it's a very painful and long process and it works only on dark hairs so again using this to shave anything but a fairly dark beard would never work.
- Kristine1975 11y ago
  And laser hair removal doesn't even destroy the hairs, it uses the hairs to transmit heat to the hair follicles to destroy those. Destroying the hairs themselves would require even more energy.
  - dhimes 11y ago
    I think laser hair removal is fundamentally different from what they were selling. I understand they are cutting the hair, not destroying the follicle.
    - dogma1138 11y ago
      We understand that which means that the laser has to be more focused and deliver higher energy density. Hair removal products are usually in the 20-50W ranges depending on wavelengths, the lightsaber wannabe hand held lasers are usually in the 500-2000 mW ranges and while those can burn skin and pop balloons they aren't powerful enough to burn hair. I just don't see them having the technology to make this work, if they had it would have military applications way before shaving ones. Just for size comparison this is a laser used for soft tissue removal https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c7/Sharplan_40C.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c7/Sharplan... And even it won't burn hair because it works on tissue with high water content only.
blakecallens 11y ago
If Indiegogo doesn't suspend them too, it could be a real watershed moment for them. It'll brand them as the place to go for scam products.
- driverdan 11y ago
  They already are.
  - InclinedPlane 11y ago
    https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/tellspec-what-s-in-your-food#/ https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/tellspec-what-s-in-your-f...
    - pbhjpbhj 11y ago
      I'm assuming from the context you're touting that as an example of a "scam product" - first time I've heard of them but http://tellspec.com/order/ http://tellspec.com/order/ has beta device for purchase at present and they appear to be getting plaudits eg "Selected to be part of the HIVE at TED Med 2015" is on their website (and confirmed at TED MED). Surely ordering the beta would show straight away that the product was entirely non-functional (ie fake)? Did I miss something that you're relying on to form this opinion? Edit: perhaps http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/small-business/sb-growth/day-to-day/backers-often-face-long-delays-for-crowdfunded-products/article23057331/ http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/small-busi... ?
      - InclinedPlane 11y ago
        Yes, almost certainly a scam, for a few reasons. The first being that hand-held Raman spectroscopy devices are currently the realm of extremely pricey systems that are targeted at industry primarily (we're talking $10k at the very, very low end). Building a hand-held device that could do even a tiny fraction of what those units are capable of would be hugely disruptive for that market. So why not approach that market at all? Probably because it's vastly more savvy than consumers. Additionally, there is absolutely zero hard info anywhere about their device, it's design, it's specs, anything like that. Not only isn't there a specrum, there isn't even a "this is what a spectrum from our final equipment might look like" representation. It's all smoke and mirrors. The biggest giveaway in that particular campaign though is something that most ordinary people won't pick up on: gluten. You tell someone that a spectrometer can detect sugar, they'll nod, you tell someone that it can detect gluten and they'll still nod, but people who know better will have their ears perk up. Because gluten is just a protein, and proteins are a nightmare when it comes to spectroscopy. Spectroscopy picks up the different bonds that are in a molecule. A simple molecule with only a few, very different bonds is easy to distinguish. But proteins are polymers made up of tens of thousands to millions of amino-acids, which blur together in spectroscopy. To distinguish different proteins from one another with any kind of spectroscopy (whether Raman, IR, or even NMR) requires high end equipment which can give you very high resolution spectra. A low cost, consumer grade spectrometer is going to have very low resolution and be even more difficult to do. If they could pull it off it would be a tremendous breakthrough. The idea that they've made such a huge leap without seeking traditional investors to go after the industrial market, without any substantive research backing is, frankly, not robust against the much more realistic probability that they are pulling some sort of scam that involves a device that maybe has some capability or other but is nothing like what they say it is.
ibmthrowaway271 11y ago
Do not look into razor with remaining eye?
vicbrooker 11y ago
Their prototype reminds me of concept car designs that look great but don't have enough internal space for an engine. You'd maybe fit a AAA battery in the handle but I haven't even seen a torch that works without more juice. Also, I was kind of suspicious when I noticed that more than half of the team have beards.
- steckerbrett 11y ago
  I doubt you could get more than a watt out of a AAA anyway.
  - thisisdave 11y ago
    A one-watt laser is pretty powerful (Class 4). Most laser pointers in the US can't exceed 5 milliwatts. One watt is several times what's needed to light various common materials on fire. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woiTedSKPrk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woiTedSKPrk
    - steckerbrett 11y ago
      They do additionally claim a 10 year battery life.
ipsin 11y ago
The name "Skarp" -- possibly in conjunction with "Kickstarter" -- immediately made me think of "scarper", i.e. the process of fleeing, ideally with the big bag of crowdfunding money.
RUG3Y 11y ago
"Don't worry, it'll be ready by spring." lol
DannoHung 11y ago
The thing that is weird about this case is that one of the principals, Morgan Gustavsson, is actually the dude who invented the real laser hair removal that is used in clinics and has been involved in dermatology since. I don't know if he was actually involved in this project or not, but that was the one thing that made me think that this maybe wasn't 100% a scam? Anyway, the implication they make in their pitch isn't that it's an open laser, but that it is a laser confined to a fiberoptic wire which leaks into the hair when pressed against it. Gustavsson has published some papers on this a few years ago in which he refers to the concept as a TRASER. Of course, if this really is such a revolutionary advance, why go to Kickstarter to bring it to market? Why not traditional investors. Gotta be easier to get funding for a significant manufacturing outlay, right? Just to not have to sell a piece of the company? To justify that there is a market? I personally don't have the background to make any judgments about this and I definitely don't understand the article he published, but I just thought it didn't completely fail the smell test.
- d23 11y ago
  > Of course, if this really is such a revolutionary advance, why go to Kickstarter to bring it to market? Why not traditional investors. The obvious benefit being that you don't actually have to give Kickstarter "investors" any money back.
  - spo8 11y ago
    Yeah, this shouldn't be overlooked. Kickstarter = funding without having to give anyone a stake.
  - pavornyoh 11y ago
    >The obvious benefit being that you don't actually have to give Kickstarter "investors" any money back. Shouldn't that make them have strong check and balances in place to help people funding these projects?
    - mesozoic 11y ago
      You would think...
BinaryIdiot 11y ago
How can you prove to potential buyers that you're able to produce the product you're selling them if you can't create a prototype demonstrating that it works? Let's say we take everything at face value and believe 100% they can do this and that it is not a scam. If there is no prototype it's still possible that it could not work as it's unproven.
aet 11y ago
A fool and his money, be soone at debate: which after with sorow, repents him to late.
jlebrech 11y ago
What made me skeptical of this is that it looked like too much of a polished system, you'd expect it to look more like a braun shaver than a gillette fusion, with more battery space. The AA battery was also a dead giveaway.
ortusdux 11y ago
In light of the recent actions of the Washington State Attorney General, it takes balls to try and pull a scam like this. The AG ruled against the people behind a kickstarter campaign for a card game when they did not ship rewards for two years. The original campaign raised 25k and the judgement was for 56k. The ruling was on behalf of 31 residents out of 810 backers. The company is slowly shipping units and it looks like the AG is backing off. But this whole thing brings up many interesting questions. The fine was 1k per WA resident + reimbursement + legal fees. Knowing that the AG has your back if things go south should undoubtedly embolden WA residents, which may lead to a higher percentage of backers coming from that state, which in turn would mean a higher fine if things fall through. I honestly was going to have my sister, a WA state resident, back this for me for my birthday, if it survived to the last day of funding. Links: http://www.atg.wa.gov/news/news-releases/ag-makes-crowdfunded-company-pay-shady-deal http://www.atg.wa.gov/news/news-releases/ag-makes-crowdfunde... https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/213177064/asylum-playing-cards/comments https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/213177064/asylum-playin...
- rasz_pl 11y ago
  Yes, that punishment was pretty severe, offender had to ... promise to never do it again.
happywolf 11y ago
Anything that heats a hair to the point it burns off, no matter what the heat source is, will give out a bad smell. Good luck if one has thick beard, and no, I am not convinced this will work cleanly.
Paul_S 11y ago
Reminds me of that hologram device scam - bleen. It was so funny I couldn't tell if it was a scam or a parody trying to make fun of crowdfunding. Unfortunately it was flexible funding so people lost their money and whatever you think no one deserves to be scammed.
joshdance 11y ago
I really want a Kickstarter review site, where people can post projects. Since non-backers cannot post comments there is no way to let people know that 'this project is probably not going to work'. Snopes for Kickstarter?
- devindotcom 11y ago
  I've thought about that too. It would require on the ground reporting, though, which is pretty expensive. Kickstarter should add a "verified" tier or something that includes the cost of someone checking in on them in person halfway to the delivery date.
- jkestner 11y ago
  http://drop-kicker.com http://drop-kicker.com was excellent from an engineering viewpoint but it's gone dormant. http://eevblog.com/forum/crowd-funded-projects/ http://eevblog.com/forum/crowd-funded-projects/ is not bad if you want to hear a bunch of skeptical engineers tear things to shreds. A site that focuses on the shipping milestones, the true measure of success rather than meeting an arbitrary goal, would be valuable.
Sephr 11y ago
> Backers received an email from Kickstarter saying the Laser Razor was "in violation of our rule requiring working prototypes of physical products that are offered as rewards". Interesting. Was this a recent policy change? Control VR never showed any working prototypes either, and their campaign was allowed (this was in 2014). Their demonstration video was later revealed to be using another company's significantly more expensive product ($10k+ vs the $600 pledge price), with zero modifications. They never demonstrated any prototypes of the product they were claiming to develop themselves, yet the campaign went through and now they have everyone's money (>$400k) without delivering.
- canow 11y ago
  that policy is probably about a couple years old.
  - pbhjpbhj 11y ago
    Is there a site that tracks these sorts of policy changes (like http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ does for UK laws)?
    - jamessb 11y ago
      "TOSBack is a collaboration between the EFF, the Internet Society, and ToS;DR. Every day, we check the Terms and Policies of many online services to see if any of them have changed" https://tosback.org/ https://tosback.org/ But it is currently in beta and doesn't include Kickstarter.
- rasz_pl 11y ago
  >have everyone's money not everyones, just the suckers. Yes, we are at a point you are a sucker if you buy into crowdfunding without doing due diligence. Batterizer, MuOptics, Soap router, they all had signs of being scams from the start, but still managed to defraud people for over a $1mil.
funkaster 11y ago
lol... what I found funny and somewhat ironic is that most of the people in the video seem to wear a beard? (or lack of shaving) Maybe they're waiting until they can get their hands in an actual working prototype :P
MattGrommes 11y ago
As soon as I saw that Kickstarter kicked them off I was wondering how long it would take for them to get onto Indiegogo. Then, of course I see it only took 4 hours. If you're unaware, Indiegogo has shown that they're more than willing to be the platform of choice for scammers and nonsense products.
beloch 11y ago
To those looking for more concrete info on how this razor is supposed to work, here's the patent for it: http://www.google.com/patents/US9017322 http://www.google.com/patents/US9017322 As far as I can tell, the idea is to use evanescent coupling to transfer light into hair follicles. There's no free space laser beam, just an optical fiber that you drag across your face. They also claim that chromophores (color bearing molecules) in hair can be severed at relatively low powers with a mixture of several specific frequencies of light. So, what this product needs in order to work is a fiber that's durable enough to survive being dragged across skin while having very little cladding so as to allow evanescent coupling. That could be very hard to do, so the heads on these laser razors may wear out after a few shaves just like a metal razor. Second, they need to pack a high power multi-wavelength laser source and the power reserve to run it into a very tiny handle. Again, this is probably going to be pretty tricky. There's nothing here that looks outright impossible to me. Just very, very tricky.
- monochromatic 11y ago
  I'm also not sure what keeps the light from coupling into your skin, instead of just the hairs.
  - OniBait 11y ago
    From what I recall on their original Kickstarter info, the frequency of the laser light only reacts with something that is in hair and not skin. The "breakthrough" was finding something that worked for blond hairs.
- Florin_Andrei 11y ago
  > chromophores (color bearing molecules) in hair can be severed at relatively low powers What if you're blond?
  - darryl42 11y ago
    Or grey
  - 11y ago
Simulacra 11y ago
Unpopular opinion, but I think parents should be assigned based on actual working models of something. Not just an idea, but something that is actually been tangibly created.
steven2012 11y ago
This current phenomenon about crowdsourcing products is similar to the GroupOn/flash sale phenomenon, and as the products get shittier and shittier, and as more and more get disillusioned by it, the entire space will die. Kickstarter and IndieGoGo need to do a much, much better job policing this, otherwise they will be out of business in 2 years. There are too many shitty products with great marketing videos that are taking a lot of money, and they will likely all be disappointing as hell.
- DaveWalk 11y ago
  I like your highlighting of quality. Do you think it is a real or just perceived notion that the quality of items on Kickstarter/Groupon decreases as their popularity increases? At first glance it feels to me that it casts too broad of a net. Maybe if a user saw it as patronage when Kickstarting artistic endeavors, she might bristle at seeing baubles like laser razors being funded? Anecdotally I see this with video games on Steam Greenlight, but that service always seemed liked the Wild West to me.
- Shivetya 11y ago
  why does it seem that projects which go to IndieGoGo just never hold up to close inspection? The most famous I remember is Solar Roadways
danr4 11y ago
I don't like what has become of kickstarter, but I think it's more of it's users fault than the company. They are really trying to stick to their values and principals, and mission despite having the possibilty to go the usual 'lets raise bazillions and get some flippin growth and extinguish the competition' way
- jkestner 11y ago
  There's more than one Kickstarter. Lots of us live below the million-dollar campaigns that are more the product than whatever's being sold. With less hype and more right-minded Kickstarter patrons, everything's a little more straightforward. It's the middle-class campaigns that remain the heart of Kickstarter.
bsder 11y ago
Um, folks, you're missing the obvious. Optic fiber glass is SHARP AS HELL. So, make the thing light up with pretty lights and colors and expose a sharp glass edge for cutting. Works like a razor, cuts incredibly closely, and has ooh shiny for marketing. I'm not seeing a problem with this.
- mlvljr 11y ago
  you don't belong here
kazinator 11y ago
Laser Razor will clearly have to show actual hair removal to prove itself; fleecing countless sheep of millions is a mere metaphor.
jakejake 11y ago
I couldn't help but wonder if this would ultimately produce the same result as the "No No" shaver which, from what I read, is just a hot wire that burns the hair at the root. The reviews make it sound like its a rather slow and smelly affair shaving this way.

181 points by aram 11y ago

aram 11y ago

Since we all check the comments first, here are some links: KickStarter project page (suspended): https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/skarp/the-skarp-laser-razor-21st-century-shaving https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/skarp/the-skarp-laser-r... IndieGoGo project page (they re-posted the project there after being suspended): https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/the-skarp-laser-razor-21st-century-shaving#/ https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/the-skarp-laser-razor-21s... Demonstration video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOLwNJ7TXWA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOLwNJ7TXWA

steckerbrett 11y ago
There's no laser there. If there was a laser there it would be a significant hazard to everybody in the room, so it's good it's completely fake. With the sort of power you would need to be cutting hairs in any capacity simply looking at diffuse reflections (think a laser dot at a wall) would have the ability to permanently damage your vision. The video is someone fooling around with a piece of aluminum and a hot wire[0]. It's a testament to human stupidity that something this blatant managed to get $4M. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot-wire_foam_cutter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot-wire_foam_cutter
- k__ 11y ago
  I don't know much about lasers and the videos seemed convincing to me... Now I'm sad that it's a fake, even if I wanted to wait till the first version came out.
  - steckerbrett 11y ago
    Light has a fun property of being bent when it passes through substances that have different optical densities. With some combinations of material and process we can exploit this property to achieve total internal reflection[0]. With a cylindrical glass rod we can fire light down it in such a way that it bounces off the walls and makes it to the far end without ever exiting through the sides. This is used in fiber optic communications to achieve low levels of loss transmitting light very large distances. However, the total internal reflection can partly break down if we apply something to the side of the glass tube, like touching it with a finger. The laser will strike through the glass cylinder and onto whatever is touching it, this is known as frustrated total internal reflection. What's supposedly happening in this product is the razor blade has a fiber with a laser being shone through it, when the fiber comes into the contact with a hair the laser exits the fiber and the thermal energy burns the hair. The problems here are pretty severe. • If such a fiber did exist it would give you severe burns on contact with your skin (a very close shave indeed). It would be like trying to shave with a red hot block of steel held up to your face. • Ever burnt some hair? It smells ghastly. I burned my beard once and the nauseating smell didn't go away for hours. Trying to convince consumers to go on a date while smelling like burning keratin would near impossible. • The amount of laser power going through the fiber would have the potential to remove your eyesight if you broke it. If you wanted to use this you would need to be wearing eye protection (sealed goggles), skin protection like welding gear, have signage and locks on your bathroom to prevent anybody unprotected from entering. • The amount of energy required for this sort of effect would be colossal, lasers are inefficient and need a lot of cooling (high power ones are often water cooled). If this existed just the hand piece would be something like a petrol pump nozzle leading to a massive cooling system and power supply. • Any slight impurity in the fiber would cause it to instantly melt when the laser was turned on. Unless something is perfectly optically clear there is some loss to heat as light passes through it. Glass fibers made for telecommunications are incredibly clear, but they still have enough loss that repeaters are needed on long runs due to losses. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_internal_reflection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_internal_reflection
    - kyzyl 11y ago
      While I'm not making any statement about the feasibility of the Skarp, I think you might be exaggerating the size of a moderately powerful modern lasers. At my company's R&D lab I have some 1W CO2 lasers that, similar to what what you describe, are about the size of loaf of bread. They run on three phase power, have inch-thick cables and required hilariously large cooling shrouds. Two facts about those types of lasers: They are cavity lasers designed to have very good beam quality, and they are OLD. I have a cabinet full of other types of newer, moderately powerful laser modules which vary from pin diodes to modules the size of a AA battery, to things the size of cigars. Some of them are pretty darned powerful. Any laser modules that are water cooled would DEFINITELY not be something you would want to hold up to your face, but I also don't think that's the kind of power required for cutting hair. I'm not saying that any laser running on a AAA battery at a useful power could last a useful amount of time, if you could figure out some secret sauce method for very quickly coupling a high intensity pulse (hairs have a very small area, after all) onto some hairs at a wavelength that they like to soak up then it seems.... possible. In theory the laser wavelength and power could even be tuned dynamically to match the hairs, that is if they had somehow figured out a way to fit a Mach-Zender modulator, an electro-optical modulator and a frequency comb into a razor handle--ha! Anyhow, I might be wrong in all this, but my point is mostly that it wouldn't take a water cooled laser to burn some hair. Come visit me in Vancouver and we can test it out (on your beard).
      - steckerbrett 11y ago
        Perhaps a little exaggeration, agreed. The wavelengths you want are in the UV end of things, which I assumed would be mostly clumsy CO2 tubes. Just the concept of giving a consumer a high power laser they can't even see makes me extremely uncomfortable regardless of how plausible the rest of it is. Mistakes with that sort of thing are permanent, you don't get any second chances if you blast out your retina.
- cabbeer 11y ago
  > It's a testament to human stupidity that something this blatant managed to get $4M. That's a bit harsh. Most people don't understand technology on a functional level. Ask a "regular" person how programming, the internet or their mobile phone works and they won't be able to give you a technical explanation. In fact, most modern technology tries to hide the internal workings.. "it just works".
  - Pxtl 11y ago
    Heck, ask a programmer what a MOSFET is.
    - jacquesm 11y ago
      Not everybody got into programming on the soft side. But I agree with you that on average most programmers would not know what that is.
      - TeMPOraL 11y ago
        Especially today, now that most programmers aren't hobbyists who found a job matching their skills but people who explicitly learned to code because there's shitloads of money in the industry.
        asimilator 11y ago
        I think you can be a professional programmer because it's your passion and still not know what a MOSFET is. Computing is a large subject.
        TeMPOraL 11y ago
        Of course. My point is, people who started as geeks are statistically much more likely to know basic EE than people who explicitly chose to learn programming as a career.
      - rnovak 11y ago
- dhimes 11y ago
  If it's a single beam, yes. But what I find incredible is that it didn't work worth a damn. They were struggling to cut one hair at a time. Definitely not the razor I want. I wonder how much scamming goes on with kickstarter, etc. I've been involved in a couple of projects (as payer, not seller) and am batting about 1/3.
  - thomnottom 11y ago
    Just curious what you mean by 1/3. Is that how many have failed or how many you think are actual scams? Of the several I've done (of which there have been a few failures) there's only one that I would consider a scam (and they actually refunded the money). This one definitely sounds like a scam - especially how quickly they jumped to another platform without addressing the questions.
    - dhimes 11y ago
      It's unclear to me also. I don't think I've actually been scammed, but it's possible and I'm kind of still waiting to find out. There's a trick to it: asking for the money in stages, because if you make it to a stage then you don't have to give everything back. So if you truly need $100K, you first set your goal to $15K, then $40K, then $75K, then $100K. That way if you fail to raise your $100K, you still get to keep your $75K or whatever your max was. It seems that it's against the spirit of the sites, but it works. On the books it's a failure, but the folks walk away with the money. Is it a scam? I'm not sure.
    - Albright 11y ago
      I'm 4/5, meaning that of the five projects I've backed, four delivered what they promised and one turned out to be, if not a total scam, at least a project where the creators lied about how far along they were in prototyping and currently haven't posted a project update in almost three months -- I'll give them the benefit of the doubt that their intentions were good, but they quickly got over their heads so they took the money and ran. (Here's that project: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wicoz/milk-nanny-the-worlds-first-smart-baby-formula-mil https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wicoz/milk-nanny-the-wo... ) I was very frustrated by the degree to which Kickstarter would take any responsibility after the project clearly started going south. Even though this project was a "Staff Pick!!", implying, to me at least, a higher quality project than normal, they didn't seem to have any interest in holding the creators to account. After they wouldn't refund my money, I did a chargeback through my bank. I then got a message from "Kickstarter Integrity" scolding me and telling me they were blocking my account from pledging for 30 days and telling me to tell my bank to cancel the chargeback! These guys take the money and run, and my integrity is challenged! It was pretty friggin' insulting. The experience might not have turned me off of Kickstarter forever, but I will definitely be more cautious before throwing my money at any other project on the site. It would be great to see a KS alternative which is willing to hold vendors more responsible.
- anon4 11y ago
  The guy invented Intense Pulsed Light, i.e. the laser technology used in hair removal, so it sounded plausible he might have found a way to cut hair with a lower-intensity laser. Even if it cut it slowly, it might be better than razors for a lot of people.
  - SXX 11y ago
    Did you found source on that? Only source that I managed to find it's website of company he founded long time ago: http://www.medicalbiocare.com/html/corporate.html http://www.medicalbiocare.com/html/corporate.html Any other sources tell that IPL was invented by someone else.
    - DannoHung 11y ago
      He does have a patent from the mid 90's (which is when I think IPL was created?) that seems to be pertinent: https://www.google.com/patents/US5320618 https://www.google.com/patents/US5320618 I dunno, this whole thing is weird. Generally I have to defer to people saying that the system isn't using enough energy to burn hairs, but unless the guy in question has had some sort of mental break or something, I don't get why he'd be involved with it if it was a straight fraud.
  - amyjess 11y ago
    > The guy invented Intense Pulsed Light, i.e. the laser technology used in hair removal As somebody who has actually undergone laser hair removal, I can tell you that IPL is not laser. It's an alternative to laser that's used by some hair removal places, and it's generally considered less effective and less permanent than real laser. IPL is the budget option. It's also not technically a laser, either. IPL is non-coherent light over a range of wavelengths, while laser is coherent light over a single wavelength. The most effective options for laser hair removal are alexandrite and maybe diode lasers for people with pale skin and YAG lasers for people with dark skin. You won't see IPL recommended over any of these. Mind you, if what this project is selling is a temporary way to get rid of hair, IPL might be ideal for this particular use case.
- Chathamization 11y ago
  There seems to be a large number of people who are convinced that the only difference between the present day and a SciFi wonderland is human will. For example, look at the people who think Mars colonization is a good idea, or the popularity of Ray Kurzweil (and to a lesser extent, people who are overly optimistic about self-driving cars).
  - nitrogen 11y ago
    All of the things you listed are significantly more feasible than a laser shaver.
- happywolf 11y ago
  View it another way: shaving seems to be a pain for many people, to the point people are willing to throw millions at a dubious (sorry if this word isn't the best adjective) claim of shaving with laser. What if one could invent a working bladeless razor? It is a blue ocean waiting to be delved in. Just thinking out loud.
  - whitej125 11y ago
    Thought the same. Yes its fake... but taking a step back their ability to 'raise' here indicates that the world is filled with people (and I am one of them) that are not happy with the status quo of shaving technology.
akx 11y ago
And of _course_ the Indiegogo project was posted as Flexible Funding...

hoopism 11y ago

hackaday.com had a good writeup that was skeptical of this. http://hackaday.com/2015/10/01/ask-hackaday-i-love-the-smell-of-burnt-hair-in-the-morning/ http://hackaday.com/2015/10/01/ask-hackaday-i-love-the-smell... They have generally been good at writing up some of the more sketchy kickstarts.

rasz_pl 11y ago
like Soap router, hackaday approved!!1

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

thehodge 11y ago
> The Skarp razor is powered by a small laser which cuts through hair for an incredibly close shave without irritating or damaging the skin. I would read that as them seeing that the laser is cutting the skin but that could be easily be intentionally misleading marketing speak

wlesieutre 11y ago

"They have been incredibly helpful and they believe in the Skarp Razor as much as we do," the firm said of Indiegogo. is a very polite way of saying "Yeah, we don't believe in our own product either"

dogma1138 11y ago

It's sad that people thought it was real, forget about lasers and stuff it's basic common sense. A AAA battery doesn't store enough power to drive a laser capable of burning hair for any reasonable amount of time. When the laser isn't interrupted by the hair it has to go some where which means that heat is produced, if it can get something hot enough to burn the hair off it would get hot enough that you won't be able to hold it yet alone put it to your face. There's no way you would ever could get the laser beam close enough to the skin for a smooth shave without burning your skin off. And most importantly burnt hair smells like shit.... P.S. I assume that most people know at least 1 person that did laser hair removal, they should know it's a very painful and long process and it works only on dark hairs so again using this to shave anything but a fairly dark beard would never work.

Kristine1975 11y ago
And laser hair removal doesn't even destroy the hairs, it uses the hairs to transmit heat to the hair follicles to destroy those. Destroying the hairs themselves would require even more energy.
- dhimes 11y ago
  I think laser hair removal is fundamentally different from what they were selling. I understand they are cutting the hair, not destroying the follicle.
  - dogma1138 11y ago
    We understand that which means that the laser has to be more focused and deliver higher energy density. Hair removal products are usually in the 20-50W ranges depending on wavelengths, the lightsaber wannabe hand held lasers are usually in the 500-2000 mW ranges and while those can burn skin and pop balloons they aren't powerful enough to burn hair. I just don't see them having the technology to make this work, if they had it would have military applications way before shaving ones. Just for size comparison this is a laser used for soft tissue removal https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c7/Sharplan_40C.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c7/Sharplan... And even it won't burn hair because it works on tissue with high water content only.

blakecallens 11y ago

If Indiegogo doesn't suspend them too, it could be a real watershed moment for them. It'll brand them as the place to go for scam products.

driverdan 11y ago
They already are.
- InclinedPlane 11y ago
  https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/tellspec-what-s-in-your-food#/ https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/tellspec-what-s-in-your-f...
  - pbhjpbhj 11y ago
    I'm assuming from the context you're touting that as an example of a "scam product" - first time I've heard of them but http://tellspec.com/order/ http://tellspec.com/order/ has beta device for purchase at present and they appear to be getting plaudits eg "Selected to be part of the HIVE at TED Med 2015" is on their website (and confirmed at TED MED). Surely ordering the beta would show straight away that the product was entirely non-functional (ie fake)? Did I miss something that you're relying on to form this opinion? Edit: perhaps http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/small-business/sb-growth/day-to-day/backers-often-face-long-delays-for-crowdfunded-products/article23057331/ http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/small-busi... ?
    - InclinedPlane 11y ago
      Yes, almost certainly a scam, for a few reasons. The first being that hand-held Raman spectroscopy devices are currently the realm of extremely pricey systems that are targeted at industry primarily (we're talking $10k at the very, very low end). Building a hand-held device that could do even a tiny fraction of what those units are capable of would be hugely disruptive for that market. So why not approach that market at all? Probably because it's vastly more savvy than consumers. Additionally, there is absolutely zero hard info anywhere about their device, it's design, it's specs, anything like that. Not only isn't there a specrum, there isn't even a "this is what a spectrum from our final equipment might look like" representation. It's all smoke and mirrors. The biggest giveaway in that particular campaign though is something that most ordinary people won't pick up on: gluten. You tell someone that a spectrometer can detect sugar, they'll nod, you tell someone that it can detect gluten and they'll still nod, but people who know better will have their ears perk up. Because gluten is just a protein, and proteins are a nightmare when it comes to spectroscopy. Spectroscopy picks up the different bonds that are in a molecule. A simple molecule with only a few, very different bonds is easy to distinguish. But proteins are polymers made up of tens of thousands to millions of amino-acids, which blur together in spectroscopy. To distinguish different proteins from one another with any kind of spectroscopy (whether Raman, IR, or even NMR) requires high end equipment which can give you very high resolution spectra. A low cost, consumer grade spectrometer is going to have very low resolution and be even more difficult to do. If they could pull it off it would be a tremendous breakthrough. The idea that they've made such a huge leap without seeking traditional investors to go after the industrial market, without any substantive research backing is, frankly, not robust against the much more realistic probability that they are pulling some sort of scam that involves a device that maybe has some capability or other but is nothing like what they say it is.

ibmthrowaway271 11y ago

Do not look into razor with remaining eye?

vicbrooker 11y ago

Their prototype reminds me of concept car designs that look great but don't have enough internal space for an engine. You'd maybe fit a AAA battery in the handle but I haven't even seen a torch that works without more juice. Also, I was kind of suspicious when I noticed that more than half of the team have beards.

steckerbrett 11y ago
I doubt you could get more than a watt out of a AAA anyway.
- thisisdave 11y ago
  A one-watt laser is pretty powerful (Class 4). Most laser pointers in the US can't exceed 5 milliwatts. One watt is several times what's needed to light various common materials on fire. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woiTedSKPrk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woiTedSKPrk
  - steckerbrett 11y ago
    They do additionally claim a 10 year battery life.

ipsin 11y ago

The name "Skarp" -- possibly in conjunction with "Kickstarter" -- immediately made me think of "scarper", i.e. the process of fleeing, ideally with the big bag of crowdfunding money.

RUG3Y 11y ago

"Don't worry, it'll be ready by spring." lol

DannoHung 11y ago

The thing that is weird about this case is that one of the principals, Morgan Gustavsson, is actually the dude who invented the real laser hair removal that is used in clinics and has been involved in dermatology since. I don't know if he was actually involved in this project or not, but that was the one thing that made me think that this maybe wasn't 100% a scam? Anyway, the implication they make in their pitch isn't that it's an open laser, but that it is a laser confined to a fiberoptic wire which leaks into the hair when pressed against it. Gustavsson has published some papers on this a few years ago in which he refers to the concept as a TRASER. Of course, if this really is such a revolutionary advance, why go to Kickstarter to bring it to market? Why not traditional investors. Gotta be easier to get funding for a significant manufacturing outlay, right? Just to not have to sell a piece of the company? To justify that there is a market? I personally don't have the background to make any judgments about this and I definitely don't understand the article he published, but I just thought it didn't completely fail the smell test.

d23 11y ago
> Of course, if this really is such a revolutionary advance, why go to Kickstarter to bring it to market? Why not traditional investors. The obvious benefit being that you don't actually have to give Kickstarter "investors" any money back.
- spo8 11y ago
  Yeah, this shouldn't be overlooked. Kickstarter = funding without having to give anyone a stake.
- pavornyoh 11y ago
  >The obvious benefit being that you don't actually have to give Kickstarter "investors" any money back. Shouldn't that make them have strong check and balances in place to help people funding these projects?
  - mesozoic 11y ago
    You would think...

BinaryIdiot 11y ago

How can you prove to potential buyers that you're able to produce the product you're selling them if you can't create a prototype demonstrating that it works? Let's say we take everything at face value and believe 100% they can do this and that it is not a scam. If there is no prototype it's still possible that it could not work as it's unproven.

aet 11y ago

A fool and his money, be soone at debate: which after with sorow, repents him to late.

jlebrech 11y ago

What made me skeptical of this is that it looked like too much of a polished system, you'd expect it to look more like a braun shaver than a gillette fusion, with more battery space. The AA battery was also a dead giveaway.

ortusdux 11y ago

In light of the recent actions of the Washington State Attorney General, it takes balls to try and pull a scam like this. The AG ruled against the people behind a kickstarter campaign for a card game when they did not ship rewards for two years. The original campaign raised 25k and the judgement was for 56k. The ruling was on behalf of 31 residents out of 810 backers. The company is slowly shipping units and it looks like the AG is backing off. But this whole thing brings up many interesting questions. The fine was 1k per WA resident + reimbursement + legal fees. Knowing that the AG has your back if things go south should undoubtedly embolden WA residents, which may lead to a higher percentage of backers coming from that state, which in turn would mean a higher fine if things fall through. I honestly was going to have my sister, a WA state resident, back this for me for my birthday, if it survived to the last day of funding. Links: http://www.atg.wa.gov/news/news-releases/ag-makes-crowdfunded-company-pay-shady-deal http://www.atg.wa.gov/news/news-releases/ag-makes-crowdfunde... https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/213177064/asylum-playing-cards/comments https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/213177064/asylum-playin...

rasz_pl 11y ago
Yes, that punishment was pretty severe, offender had to ... promise to never do it again.

happywolf 11y ago

Anything that heats a hair to the point it burns off, no matter what the heat source is, will give out a bad smell. Good luck if one has thick beard, and no, I am not convinced this will work cleanly.

Paul_S 11y ago

Reminds me of that hologram device scam - bleen. It was so funny I couldn't tell if it was a scam or a parody trying to make fun of crowdfunding. Unfortunately it was flexible funding so people lost their money and whatever you think no one deserves to be scammed.

joshdance 11y ago

I really want a Kickstarter review site, where people can post projects. Since non-backers cannot post comments there is no way to let people know that 'this project is probably not going to work'. Snopes for Kickstarter?

devindotcom 11y ago
I've thought about that too. It would require on the ground reporting, though, which is pretty expensive. Kickstarter should add a "verified" tier or something that includes the cost of someone checking in on them in person halfway to the delivery date.
jkestner 11y ago
http://drop-kicker.com http://drop-kicker.com was excellent from an engineering viewpoint but it's gone dormant. http://eevblog.com/forum/crowd-funded-projects/ http://eevblog.com/forum/crowd-funded-projects/ is not bad if you want to hear a bunch of skeptical engineers tear things to shreds. A site that focuses on the shipping milestones, the true measure of success rather than meeting an arbitrary goal, would be valuable.

Sephr 11y ago

> Backers received an email from Kickstarter saying the Laser Razor was "in violation of our rule requiring working prototypes of physical products that are offered as rewards". Interesting. Was this a recent policy change? Control VR never showed any working prototypes either, and their campaign was allowed (this was in 2014). Their demonstration video was later revealed to be using another company's significantly more expensive product ($10k+ vs the $600 pledge price), with zero modifications. They never demonstrated any prototypes of the product they were claiming to develop themselves, yet the campaign went through and now they have everyone's money (>$400k) without delivering.

canow 11y ago
that policy is probably about a couple years old.
- pbhjpbhj 11y ago
  Is there a site that tracks these sorts of policy changes (like http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ does for UK laws)?
  - jamessb 11y ago
    "TOSBack is a collaboration between the EFF, the Internet Society, and ToS;DR. Every day, we check the Terms and Policies of many online services to see if any of them have changed" https://tosback.org/ https://tosback.org/ But it is currently in beta and doesn't include Kickstarter.
rasz_pl 11y ago
>have everyone's money not everyones, just the suckers. Yes, we are at a point you are a sucker if you buy into crowdfunding without doing due diligence. Batterizer, MuOptics, Soap router, they all had signs of being scams from the start, but still managed to defraud people for over a $1mil.

funkaster 11y ago

lol... what I found funny and somewhat ironic is that most of the people in the video seem to wear a beard? (or lack of shaving) Maybe they're waiting until they can get their hands in an actual working prototype :P

MattGrommes 11y ago

As soon as I saw that Kickstarter kicked them off I was wondering how long it would take for them to get onto Indiegogo. Then, of course I see it only took 4 hours. If you're unaware, Indiegogo has shown that they're more than willing to be the platform of choice for scammers and nonsense products.

beloch 11y ago

To those looking for more concrete info on how this razor is supposed to work, here's the patent for it: http://www.google.com/patents/US9017322 http://www.google.com/patents/US9017322 As far as I can tell, the idea is to use evanescent coupling to transfer light into hair follicles. There's no free space laser beam, just an optical fiber that you drag across your face. They also claim that chromophores (color bearing molecules) in hair can be severed at relatively low powers with a mixture of several specific frequencies of light. So, what this product needs in order to work is a fiber that's durable enough to survive being dragged across skin while having very little cladding so as to allow evanescent coupling. That could be very hard to do, so the heads on these laser razors may wear out after a few shaves just like a metal razor. Second, they need to pack a high power multi-wavelength laser source and the power reserve to run it into a very tiny handle. Again, this is probably going to be pretty tricky. There's nothing here that looks outright impossible to me. Just very, very tricky.

monochromatic 11y ago
I'm also not sure what keeps the light from coupling into your skin, instead of just the hairs.
- OniBait 11y ago
  From what I recall on their original Kickstarter info, the frequency of the laser light only reacts with something that is in hair and not skin. The "breakthrough" was finding something that worked for blond hairs.
Florin_Andrei 11y ago
> chromophores (color bearing molecules) in hair can be severed at relatively low powers What if you're blond?
- darryl42 11y ago
  Or grey
- 11y ago

Simulacra 11y ago

Unpopular opinion, but I think parents should be assigned based on actual working models of something. Not just an idea, but something that is actually been tangibly created.

steven2012 11y ago

This current phenomenon about crowdsourcing products is similar to the GroupOn/flash sale phenomenon, and as the products get shittier and shittier, and as more and more get disillusioned by it, the entire space will die. Kickstarter and IndieGoGo need to do a much, much better job policing this, otherwise they will be out of business in 2 years. There are too many shitty products with great marketing videos that are taking a lot of money, and they will likely all be disappointing as hell.

DaveWalk 11y ago
I like your highlighting of quality. Do you think it is a real or just perceived notion that the quality of items on Kickstarter/Groupon decreases as their popularity increases? At first glance it feels to me that it casts too broad of a net. Maybe if a user saw it as patronage when Kickstarting artistic endeavors, she might bristle at seeing baubles like laser razors being funded? Anecdotally I see this with video games on Steam Greenlight, but that service always seemed liked the Wild West to me.
Shivetya 11y ago
why does it seem that projects which go to IndieGoGo just never hold up to close inspection? The most famous I remember is Solar Roadways

danr4 11y ago

I don't like what has become of kickstarter, but I think it's more of it's users fault than the company. They are really trying to stick to their values and principals, and mission despite having the possibilty to go the usual 'lets raise bazillions and get some flippin growth and extinguish the competition' way

jkestner 11y ago
There's more than one Kickstarter. Lots of us live below the million-dollar campaigns that are more the product than whatever's being sold. With less hype and more right-minded Kickstarter patrons, everything's a little more straightforward. It's the middle-class campaigns that remain the heart of Kickstarter.

bsder 11y ago

Um, folks, you're missing the obvious. Optic fiber glass is SHARP AS HELL. So, make the thing light up with pretty lights and colors and expose a sharp glass edge for cutting. Works like a razor, cuts incredibly closely, and has ooh shiny for marketing. I'm not seeing a problem with this.

mlvljr 11y ago
you don't belong here

kazinator 11y ago

Laser Razor will clearly have to show actual hair removal to prove itself; fleecing countless sheep of millions is a mere metaphor.

jakejake 11y ago

I couldn't help but wonder if this would ultimately produce the same result as the "No No" shaver which, from what I read, is just a hot wire that burns the hair at the root. The reviews make it sound like its a rather slow and smelly affair shaving this way.