It looks that way. Sitting in her Upper West Side office, Bauml, who has been selling nose hair clippers for half a century, can't stop the tears as she discusses the imminent demise of America's original and best nose hair clipper, the Klipette.

This week, the Hollis Co., maker of the Klipette -- and little else -- for those 50 years, will close. The Klipette will be no more.

"This is a very emotional time for me," says the 85-year-old Bauml, who has single-handedly run the company since her husband's death in the early 1970s.

"Klipette was my husband's baby. All my customers have been calling and writing, saying that a part of them is dying with Klipette. It's all very sad. I told my son that I don't want to be here the day he cleans out the office."

All this for a nose hair clipper?

No, not just any nose hair clipper but the Klipette, arguably the most important innovation in men's grooming since the comb. You may not know the product by name, but you've seen one, probably in an uncle's medicine cabinet or on your father's nightstand.

The Klipette is unmistakable: This unique contraption, which looks like a drill bit, consists of two concentric carbon steel cylinders held together by a simple screw. Hold it inside your nostril and turn the bottom, and voilà, nose hairs disappear without discomfort.

It is simplicity, it is precision, it is perfection itself.

If you haven't seen a Klipette, you've definitely seen the ads for them, all featuring a smiling man sticking a Klipette up his nose. ("So easy and safe!" the ad reads. "No pulling, no irritation, no infection.")

Before the invention of the Klipette, men had to either go to a barber or guide a pair of scissors up their nose with one hand and snip with the other. The former was an unnecessary expense while the latter was messy, imprecise and undignified. The Klipette revolutionized this chore, and took care of ear hair to boot.

Yet there's something bigger at work here, something more important than a mere nose hair clipper, something that explains Elsa Bauml's tears. The story of how a quirky tool was invented in a garage in New Jersey and then built into an international icon of hygiene is nothing less than the story of America itself, condensed down into those two nostril-width cylinders of hair-clipping steel.

Adolf Hitler set the story in motion.

Anton Bauml and his future wife escaped from Germany to America in 1938. But they were no common refugees. Elsa's relatives included two knights of the British Empire and an uncle named Henry Morgenthau Jr., who just happened to be the secretary of the Treasury at the time.

Anton's family was no less prosperous, having owned a bookstore where composer Richard Wagner shopped (and sometimes didn't pay his bills). In fact, the great anti-Semite once showed up at the Bauml store with his German shepherd and his cane and slapped Anton across the face after he got into a fight with Wagner's son, Siegfried.

"I'm just giving you back what you gave my son," Wagner told him.

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