Shave Cadets, Meet The Moon Stryker Shave Brush!

A double homage to vintage shave tech and vintage sci-fi cinema...that just hits.

Some releases feel so inevitable, they might as well have been written in the stars. The Moon Stryker is one of them. Why? Because today, our time of "launch",  marks exactly 123 years, October 4th, since Georges Méliès’ Le Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon) premiered in the United States!

And here’s the kicker: the *Century Brush Company’s Canal Street factory was only a ten-minute subway ride from the Eden Musée theater where Méliès’ rocket famously struck the Man in the Moon’s eye. Any one of the 31 workers employed there in 1902 could have sat in that audience, their heads swimming with lunar dreams before returning to their bristle-setting benches. The coincidence is almost too perfect: cinema’s first space fantasy unfolding just steps from the factory floor of one of shaving’s forgotten artisans.

*Leopold Ascher Brush Corp. (New York)

A Space-Age Revival with a Touch of Cinema Magic

Back in mid-century America, Century was a quiet player in shaving gear. Collectors know Rubberset and Ever-Ready; Century is the brand you find less often, the one whispered about in forums. Most of their brushes were practical: marbled Bakelite, smooth resin, tidy and conservative. But every so often, Century let their imagination drift off-world. That’s when the so-called “rocket” brush was born, an Atomic Age oddity with a flared skirt like rocket exhaust nozzles, jaunty, pink colored rings, and that familiar stamp:

“Century U.S.A. / Set in Rubber / Sterilized / Pure Bristle.”

It was shaving gear inspired as much by pulp sci-fi as by grooming tradition. Sounds familiar, eh?

Enter The Moon Stryker 

The Moon Stryker reimagines Century’s Rocket for modern hands. It’s scaled up for a more substantial grip, created from high-gloss acrylic in cream with a new, bold oxblood stripe, and engineered to outlast its mid-century ancestors. Unlike vintage casein or brittle plastics of yore, this acrylic won’t yellow, warp, or crumble. It gleams like cream and shrugs off water, soap, and time itself.

The Snickle Way

Inside, we’ve set our newest synthetic knot, a 24 mm Hybrid Snickle Synth, a faux badger blend with a unique fan-bulb profile. Expect soft tips for comfort, firm backbone for punchy performance, and fast loading from even the hardest soaps. Not to mention bristles you won't need to baby like animal hair! in short, it's a beast! A brush built for orbit, not obsolescence. 

Fan + Bulb = Beast Mode

When you deep-dive the forums, you’ll see the eternal debate: “fan for face-lathering? Bulb for backbone?” The Snickle Synth Hybrid says: why choose? We’ve fused the two. This knot gives you feather-soft fan tips that stimulate the skin, and behind it lies a dense bulb core that refuses to collapse under pressure.

You’ll feel it in the load, soap dives in quickly, like a fan, but the brush keeps its shape and push. No floppy flop. No limp “couldn’t handle that soap” moments. Because the bulb core is doing the heavy lifting, you get real backbone. Want to press into hard pucks or milk your dense soap? Snickle delivers. [Long time fans who remember our Duro Knot from years back will love the Snickle. In fact, you might say this is grandson to the Duro!]

As a synthetic, it rinses lightning-fast, no waterlogging, full shape drying and no funk. And unlike some pure fan synths that sag or feel rubbery, Snickle holds its loft proud. You get the best of both worlds: silky flow plus structural integrity. That’s the kind of hybrid the shave cadets dream about!

Inspired by Méliès’ Moon

If you didn't already guess, our name and logo pay homage to Georges Méliès’ 1902 masterpiece, Le Voyage dans la Lune. Méliès, part magician and part filmmaker, conjured exploding lunar creatures, painted mushroom forests, and fired a cannon straight into the Moon’s eye. His dream launched an entire genre. Heck, this is the grandpappy of Star Wars as far as I'm concerned!

Century’s Rocket brush and Méliès’ Rocket share the same DNA as Phoenix Shaving: whimsy, optimism, and a dash of the surreal. They remind us that everyday mundane objects, whether a film prop or a shaving brush, can carry cosmic wonder.

And here’s some poetry in timing: for decades Méliès’ film was thought lost, until a hand-tinted reel resurfaced and was restored at the end of 2011 and shown again to the world in 2012. That was the same year we began our own little rocket, launched with nothing but soapmaking passion and imagination. Two different rockets, one cinematic, one aromatic, both reborn in 2012.

Coincidence? We Think Not. lol

When you line up Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon with Apollo 11, the similarities are downright mind-blowing. A bullet-shaped capsule launched skyward, explorers bouncing across an alien surface, magic mushrooms, then plunging back to Earth to splash down in the ocean and be “rescued.” Seventy years before NASA, a Parisian magician-filmmaker had already storyboarded the Moon landing. Coincidence? What say you?

Rediscovering the Century Rocket: A True Space Oddity

This homage began with a chance rediscovery. For the life of me, I cannot remember how I first came into possession of an original Century Rocket brush. Maybe it was picked up at an antique market, maybe handed off in the shuffle of a meet-up. However it arrived, it was forgotten, tucked into a box until I stumbled across it again while unpacking from a cross-country move.

There it was, grinning up from the carton: my Century Rocket. “Oh yeah,” I thought, “I forgot all about you!” The timing was perfect. I fell in love all over again, the retro-futuristic lines, the sci-fi shape, the strange beauty of an Atomic Age relic hiding in plain sight. This was soooo Phoenix Shaving; leaving it unresurrected would have been a crime.

And while “Century Rocket” was never its official name, you won’t find a 1950s ad boasting about it, I think my nickname fits. Look at the tapered body, the flared skirt like fins, the playful pink rings around the collar. This wasn’t an accident. In the late 1940s and ’50s, American design was drenched in rocket dreams: tailfins on cars, starbursts on clocks, chrome-plated lamps that looked ready for liftoff. The Century Rocket was born of that same cultural fever.

Maybe It Was For the Misses?

And here’s the most intriguing wrinkle: was it even made for men? The cream-and-pink of the original brush feels more vanity table than barbershop. By the 1950s, women were being sold leg-shaving creams and pastel razors in magazines like McCall’s and Ladies’ Home Journal. Companies were eager to tap the women’s grooming market. Could Century have flirted with that trend too, dressing up a bristle brush in Atomic curves and feminine hues for the modern housewife? We may never know, but the possibility makes this already obscure design even more fascinating: a lost Space Age artifact that might have doubled as a beauty tool.

Fun Fact: Why “STERILIZED” Matters

That bold STERILIZED stamp on the base isn’t just marketing, it’s history. After anthrax outbreaks in the 1910s were traced to unclean animal-hair brushes, New York’s Board of Health in 1920 required all shaving brushes to be sterilized and labeled. By the time Century’s Rocket rolled off the line, likely between 1950 and 1955, “Sterilized” was both a reassurance and a badge of modernity.

The Moon Stryker in Short

• A modern homage to the rare Atomic Age, Century Rocket Brush

• Cream & oxblood acrylic handle, built to last

• 24 mm hybrid Snickle Synthetic knot: soft tips, firm backbone, lather machine

• A design echoing the very first sci-fi film ever made!

Back in Orbit

Century has always been the underdog of vintage brush brands. Collectors know Rubberset and Ever-Ready; they stumble less often across a Century. That makes the Rocket design even more obscure, even more collectible. It’s not just a brush, it’s a cultural artifact, a relic from an age when space travel was still fantasy but its curves had already landed in American bathrooms. BOOOOM!

When I hold it now, I don’t just see a shaving tool. I see an artifact of optimism, whimsy, and imagination, one that resonates perfectly with Phoenix Shaving’s ethos. It also feels damn good in the hand; Solid and substantial. Everything you've come to expect from our Phoenix Shaving Brush Line!

And so, after decades of silence, the Century Rocket is back in orbit, reborn as The Phoenix Shaving  Moon Stryker, ready for many, many more missions into the future! SHAVE ON!

NOTE: If you have anymore detail on this particular model brush by Century (Leopold Ascher Brush Corp of New York), please shoot us an email. It would be wonderful to fill in some of the historical gaps before they are lost forever! Write: Support@PhoenixShaving.Com