Confessions of A Naughty Girl

Grooming Week: Hair Removal

Ouch, motherf*cker, ouch.

Listen, I'm not going to lie to you. We all have hair. If it's smooth and shiny and on your head, it's desirable. If it's tucked into a crevice somewhere (i.e. armpit, groin), the general rule of thumb is to get rid of it, or at least clean that shit up.

So with that said, let's talk hair removal. Areas that I know of include (but are not limited to): eyebrows, upper lip, chin, sides of the face, arms, legs, bikini, stomach, back, and just about anything else, except for teeth.

When contemplating hair removal, one basically has six options - shaving, tweezing (plucking), depilatory, waxing, electrolysis, and laser hair removal.

Shaving is the most common. It's cheap and effective, but you can get all bumpy and the occasional cut, and then that's bad. Really, really bad. I once sliced an inch-long slice of skin off of my shin because I was singing along with the Spice Girls in the shower and my razor slipped. (For the record, this was 1997.) I still have a scar. Sick.

Tweezing is fun to say. This requires pulling the hairs out at the root, one by one, with a tweezer. (Or, as my dad would call it, "forceps". I've tried to explain countless times that nobody uses forceps, because unless you're an OB/GYN, you're not pulling kids out of uteruses...uteri...uterises, well, you know what I mean.) The bummer to this is that if you're a hairy motherf*cker, you really might not want to spend three hours pulling hairs out of your leg, one by one. This is best used on the eyebrows and on stray hairs.

Depilatory is...well, I don't really know what it is, because it's one of those terms that somehow exists, but no one really ever uses, like "prophylactic" or "lazy Susan."

Waxing is my favorite, but it is the narcotic of hair removal. Once you've been waxed, you will become addicted. I went through a brief phrase in the summer of 2002 where they may as well have dipped me in a human-sized jar of wax and ripped it off, because I waxed anything I could think of, simply because I liked that "clean" feeling...legs, armpits, bikini area, you name it. Unfortunately, the price of waxing (usually done in salons, unless you're a pro) soon burned a large hole in my pocket and I had to limit myself.

Electrolysis is perhaps the most grotesque of the bunch. This entails going to a licensed aesthetician and having him/her stick a small needle in the pores where the hair(s) grow and zapping it with electronic current to kill hair at the root. And yes, it is absolutely as painful as it sounds. I lasted all of three sessions with my bikini area before I decided that I could deal with shaving for the rest of my life. But see, the big bonus of electrolysis is that after 10-20 sessions, the hair is permanently gone. But it still hurts like a bitch.

Laser hair removal is just like electrolysis in that it's permanent, but it involves lasers so it's not as painful. The downside is that it costs about $3,000 MORE per session than my yearly salary. Oh yes, this is hella expensive.

Conclusion: None of these methods is ideal, but men - women - everyone - you have got to take care of your shit. Hair, in today's society, is unacceptable in massive quantities in certain areas. If you suspect that you have a crazy amount of hair in a place, get rid of it. It's that simple. Next topic.

posted by KA @ 9:37 PM