As a guy with facial hair, I’ve been through my fair share of beard trimmers. I’ve destroyed several Remingtons that I’ve bought, and even managed to blow up a Wahl. Not sure how I did that.
Philips has yet to blow up on me, though, and with a new trimmer out, this reviewer is now waiting for his hair to get longer, coaxing it out using the promise of more trimming power that Philips apparently now has.
New to the brand’s personal grooming products are the HairClipper Series 7000 range of products, which is hardly a range given that it consists of one product, the HC7450/80.
This newbie relies on the proprietary “DualCut” system which has two sets of blades running at the same time, making it more likely that you’ll only have to do one or two passes compared to the several you might have when you’re pulling that beard back to early growth Wolverine compared with “there’s a nest in there.”
A turbo button helps by pushing the trimmer to a faster speed, as do self-sharpening titanium blades, but what also grabs our attention is a zoom wheel for changing settings.
In quite a few of the trimmers, you’ll find you need to set the length on the accessory that fits over the blades, offering you anywhere between five and ten settings for trimming the hair back to something more manageable.
The Philips 7000 clippers take a different approach, though, with a zoom wheel that you dial in on the handle of the clipper. This raises and lowers the trimming accessory into place, so if you select the setting of “6” and pull the beard trimming accessory off, replacing it with the one for your hair, it will stay at the measurement of “6” and keep things uniform if you trim both your beard and hair.
This means that the setting you select — and this can be rated from 0.5 to 23mm — will stay the same across the board, and even means you can be even more precise than the five or ten settings you have on your regular trimming accessory.
We did try it in our not-quite-nest state, and found that it cut the trimming time in half, and even felt easier, since we weren’t constantly running the blade back and forth hoping a patch of hair was cut to size when it didn’t feel we were making an impact.
The next think we’ll try is the head hair, but we still have a few weeks before that’s necessary.
That said, this will make it possible to cut down on the two separate trimmers — face and head — that we normally rely on, converging the two and even making the lengths comparable as we trim both sets of hair.
In Australia, the HC7450/80 will come with a battery capable of working cordless for up to two hours, though we suspect if you lean on the turbo button, you’ll find the battery life falls faster. Charging should take around an hour, and there’s even a hard case to store everything.
Pricing of the Philips HairClipper HC7450/80 comes in at $130, with availability hitting stores now.
