Those were my keys.

Take a good look at them. I know they’re a mess.

As someone who prides himself on being organized, efficient, and constantly prepared, I felt thoroughly embarrassed whenever I reached for the jingly jumble of chaos.

I knew I needed to switch things up, to rethink the way I organized my keys. So I looked to KeySmart. I’d seen KeySmart countless times while browsing through knife sites and Instagram accounts centered around EDC items.

For those unfamiliar with KeySmart, it’s a minimalist keyring that started out as a project on Kickstarter. Needless to say, the project was successfully funded and shattered its goals with 15,000 backers pledging a fair amount of money. They’ve since become a full-on business with an updated design and everything.

I admit, I was skeptical at first. This thing seemed unnecessary and gratuitous. Humans have carried keys around the same way for hundreds of years. Why do we need to change it? That’s when I realized I was being daft. Bucking the norm and finding better ways to do old things is how we came up with a bunch of cool inventions.

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I’m not sure who deserves the credit. Is it the peanut butter or the jelly that makes the sandwich complete? Is it the spaghetti or the meatball to whom the praise belongs? Does a perfect collaboration have only one crucial ingredient or is it the yin and yang that brings two ideas together? In the case of the Kershaw Emerson CQC series, I believe it’s both.

When Kershaw and Emerson Knives announced its collaboration back in 2014, I figured there was no way to successfully pull this marriage off. Building a quality Emerson design on a Kershaw budget seemed like a long shot. Still, I’d be lying if the original idea didn’t have me chomping at the bit.

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As someone who handles razor-sharp knives on a day-to-day basis, I’ve been cut on the rare occasion (nothing seriously mind you), so when the founder of NoCry Cut Resistant Gloves reached out for a review, I was intrigued.

They sent me three pairs to try out and here’s what I thought.

Purpose of Cut-resistant Gloves

If you’re a casual knife user, you might be wondering why anyone would need cut-resistant gloves. I thought the same until I met my wife. She’s a very competent and dexterous person, but when it comes to knives and food preparation, she’s a mess.

It started when she cut herself with a peeler a few times and grew worse after she sliced her finger chopping a sweet potato. Since then, she refuses to peel anything for fear of cutting herself. Her confidence is shot.

The NoCry Cut Resistant Gloves are the perfect solution for people like her. These gloves allow her to slice, dice, and peel without the fear of mixing blood and gore in with her famous homemade chili.

Aside from the typical use of holding items while cutting to increase confidence, NoCry Gloves also assist in a few other tasks. The folks at NoCry let me know that a large majority (around 80%) of people who bought the gloves use them in the kitchen. Ideal kitchen use for cut-resistant gloves is peeling, dicing, shucking oysters, grating cheese, or trying to cut a whole watermelon in 30 seconds or less.

Although I don’t have a mandoline slicer, many of the reviews on Amazon say that the gloves can also save a trip to the hospital.

The other 20% of users for these gloves are hunters and fishers. When you’re dealing with sharp knives in wet and slippery environments (filleting a carp or skinning a white-tailed deer), your hands become prone to slippage.

Initial Reaction to the NoCry Gloves

Enough background—let’s dive right in. The gloves arrived in a nondescript, resealable zippered plastic bag. Packed with the gloves were a proof-of-purchase slip and a print-out of some general instructions/care tips. You can tell NoCry is a fairly small operation from the packaging, and that’s not a bad thing.

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