Why Are Slice Blades Safer Than Traditional Blades?

Slice® blades are manufactured to be safer than any traditional blades, metal or ceramic. We have a patent-pending technology that we call finger-friendly®.

Watch this video to learn why our blades are safer:

When it comes to blade safety, the design challenge is to create a blade edge that effectively cuts most materials but is safer than traditional blades. Slice's patent-pending design meets this challenge in several ways:

Shorter Initial Cutting Zone

Illustration demonstrates the differences in cutting edge design between Slice® safety blades and traditional blades.

The initial cutting zone is defined as the part of a blade’s edge that does the actual cutting. This zone is a result of the angle used to grind the blade. In traditional blades, the narrower angle creates a longer and sharper cutting zone, making users much more vulnerable to lacerations. Slice uses a patent-pending double-angle grind that shortens the cutting zone significantly and widens the grind angle. This creates an effective cutting edge that poses less risk to the user.

The Properties of Skin

Illustration demonstrates how downward force is dispersed with a wider Slice blade, while narrow traditional blades go straight into the skin.
Slice’s wider grind angle works with skin to disperse downward force.

Skin is hard on the outside and soft on the inside. Slice engineers took this into account when designing our blades. Our wider angle displaces the force of the blade against skin’s tougher, fleshy outer layer. In contrast, with nowhere for the exterior force to go but in, narrow traditional blades easily pierce skin.

Sharpness

Another factor that affects blade safety is sharpness. Traditional blades, be they metal or ceramic, are most dangerous when they are too sharp or too dull. Metal blades dull quickly, so their manufacturers ship them much sharper than necessary. Traditional ceramic blades mimic this dangerous design.

This level of sharpness is effectively an invitation for accidental skin cuts. After very few uses, metal blades dull to a safer sharpness level. They then continue to dull rapidly and soon are too dull to cut materials easily. That's when they become even more dangerous because users must exert more force to cut materials, which increases the risk of a slip and accidental cut: while the blades may be dull, they’re still sharp enough to cut you.

Ceramic is harder, so traditional ceramic blades (which mimic the initial sharpness of metal blades) start overly sharp and stay overly sharp longer, making them extremely dangerous.

Slice safety blades dull very slowly. As such, they don't need to be so sharp out of the box: they’re finger-friendly®. That is, the blade edge is safe enough to touch. This video demonstrates how much more dangerous overly sharp metal and ceramic blades are compared to a Slice safety blade:

Wear Resistance

Slice blades, made from extremely hard zirconium oxide, start off at a safe and effective sharpness to cut most materials and stay there much longer. In fact, Slice safety blades last up to 11 times longer than their metal counterparts. 

Line graph shows testing results of comparative blade sharpness over time (expressed in number of test runs, or cumulative card cuts).

The above results of third-party independent testing* show that Slice safety blades start out at the right sharpness to safely cut. They maintain that sharpness much longer than steel blades. In contrast, steel blades go from excessively sharp to dangerously dull, with much less time in the safe and effective cutting zone.

Injuries frequently happen during blade changes. Because Slice safety blades are safe to the touch and need to be changed less frequently than metal blades, their potential to injure the user is vastly reduced.

*Cutlery and Allied Trade Association (CATRA) Study performed December 2014