Two days ago I was walking through the local shop, needing a few things (including that fabulous moment when you realize your four year olds are switched on, but not completely, as Nora shouted loud enough for a ten block radius to hear: “Mummy! Do you need any more prune juice?” which, frankly, was awesome) and I saw a sale. A sale on wax strips.
Now I’ve tried wax strips before. They’re strips that (as per the instructions):
1) require you to warm them between your hands first
2) apply carefully to the bikini area
3) pull them off against the hair growth, as per the photo on the illustrations of the nubile young doe whose thighs do not meet, not even if she crosses her legs, and you pull off while maintaining a smile
4) have a perfect hair removal application and do not leave even a hint of redness
Riiiiiiiiight.
Only wax strips in my experience are awkward little buggers that:
1) my cold, undead-like Reynaud’s syndrome hands fail to be able to warm up past anything labelled “arctic thaw”
2) I can plaster all over my bikini area, but only while achieving yoga positions that make me see way more of myself than I really ever want to
3) my thighs meet. Let’s leave it at that.
4) not only fail to remove the majority of bikini line hair, but I spend weeks afterwards digging out the fucking ingrown hairs they did manage to remove. And I’m not that hirsute, it’s not like I look like Gunga Din down below or anything.
But faced as I am with wearing a bathing suit next week, I knew it was either get to the salon for a wax (£10, plus finding the twenty minutes to actually have a young salonist de-hair me) or take care of it myself. The wax strips were on sale for £7. They said “new, improved formula”.
Sucker that I am, I bought them.
Tuesday night I was home alone, and so once the twins were fast asleep I locked myself in the bathroom with the new box of goodies. Apparently, these wax strips are blackberry and elderflower scented, because what every woman wants is for her crotch to smell like a fruit salad, plus they have aloe to help hide those nasty “I just sat in nettles” little red bumps you get post-waxing. It was a double-sided strip of wax, so after warming them up in my armpits (cold undead hands still fail to warm up the strips, even new improved ones) I peeled the strips apart. I applied one, while carefully balancing the other very useful strip on my other leg. I got into a position that made me feel uncomfortably close to being in one of those hippy-female-getting-in-touch-with-her-body classes, the type where you kneel over a mirrror and convince yourself that your own version of dangly bits are beautiful, and I pulled.
Waxing your bikini line, whether you do it yourself or have someone else do it, can best be described as the following: Sweetmarymotherofgoddamnhurtslikeasonofabith.
Surprisingly, though, the formula has either improved or my hair follicles are feeling their age and simply give way at a stiff breeze, because most of it came off. The chick in the photos indicated that wax strips could be re-used until they weren’t sticky, and although she was a skinny bitch there was no way she’d lie, right? So I kept waxing.
It worked.
Although on the downside, what they fail to tell you is that sooner or later for the uninformed newbie, you’re taking off layers of skin, too.
I wasn’t left with the red bumpy “freshly waxed” rash so much as the results of a tractor pull in my lady garden.
Worse, as I swore and went cross-eyed from the pain, the carefully balanced other strip fell on the bathroom floor and, this being my life and all, fell wax-side down. I ripped the wax off the floor, parked it on my bikini line, and repeated. Only I got the previous strip stuck on my elbow, so when I pulled that off I not only ripped the hair off my forearm, the strip went flying and wound up halfway up the wall.
It’s hard to put into words my stunning lack of coordination, but suffice to say that by the end of my little home beauty session, I’d:
1) gone through 5 wax strips (and at 2 sides per strip, that’s 10 strips) that were, when finished, something that resembled a cat’s tongue licking a Yeti
2) managed to get that very sensitive little triangle bit in the middle of every female stuck on the wax, and let’s just say that I actually came up with new swear words of pain which are best uttered in Latin
3) removed all the hair I wanted to remove
4) actually bruised my bikini line, so I may be hairless there but I do look like I’ve been involved in a very rough rugby game
5) gotten wax on the floor, on the walls, and bizarrely on one window pane.
Result – it worked. But next time I’ll spend £3 more and have a professional do it.
And without further ado, my freshly abused waxed line and myself are off. We’re taking a break to ring in Alastair’s 50th birthday party. I’ll see you in a week and a half.
-S.
PS – I do have a post up today on In The Powder Room, and will do for next Thursday, if you want to pop in there. Today’s post is about dystopia which, you know, I almost never talk about.
Sorry but I laugh and I laugh at your description not you discomfort or pain.
I recall a post you wrote years ago where you referred to pudendal gardening. Thie images that turn of phrase evoke have remained with me.
Thanx I needed the humor as my day started of bad and got worse as progressed.
This sounds as bad as my attempts to dye my eyelashes at home. After nearly blinding myself, the majority of my face and hands were dyed black, as well as the sink, floor, and even the wall paper around the mirror for good measure. Not to mention the bag of cotton balls I seemed to have gone through trying to remove said black stains. Why the fuck do they put in such a small bottle of dye remover?
Have a good holiday, and Happy 50th Birthday Alastair!!!!!
BTW, can I tell you how much I love you for referencing Gunga Din? Cause I do.
I – swear to God – have had far more luck and less bruised, rashy, ingrown mess with (wait for it) tweezers! Yes! I have spent an entire afternoon listening to radio 4 and tidying my bikini line HAIR BY HAIR. It hurt, I swore (I even sweored, which is in Anglo-Saxon and usually only used when a hero rips your arm out of its socket), it, did I mention, took all afternoon, and I had the neatest bikini line in the Universe for a whole month.
I can’t use wax at all. The rash I get looks even worse than the wookie-in-panties thing. Far worse. Massively, scaring-people worse. And then it scabs. Scabs. Oy.
Anyway. Have a lovely happy fantastic time, enjoy the bikini-wearing, and many many congratulatory greetings to Alastair.
Oh! I’ve done that plucking thing! It’s really effective, isn’t it? My problem is I have the ability to sit still that a chihuahua on cocaine has.
Now there’s a picture.
I cannot use anything (wax, blade, cream) on my bikini line. Bad things happen. So when neatening is required, I take a nail scissors, some time, and a private room with good lighting and trim any rogues very carefully at the skin line. Better result and no skin rashes…
You make me laugh, and reminds me of the time I home-waxed my underarms. There may have been screaming and blood.
I don’t wax. I don’t care if I look like a wookie. I will do some shaving and some trimming. But no waxing. The scenario that you have described, well, that would be delightful compared to what I would do to myself. :)
Every time I read one of these posts and burst out laughing, Evil Rob asks what’s so funny, and I can never quite explain it right…
Bwahahahahahaahaha!
I love you for posting this. Thank you!
Uh.. last point 2.. made me shiver. Poor gal. But hey, at least you look good, right!~
At this moment I am beyond thankful I don’t share an office with anyone. There’s no way I could explain my howling laughter away. Thanks for this.
Could you be any funnier???
And can’t there be a .com after this???
Sweetmarymotherofgoddamnhurtslikeasonofabitch.
LOL
I’ve tried all of it – the creams, the strips, the cold wax, the hot wax, the sugar wax, and the salon. All to a similarly disappointing and painful effect. The creams burned the skin, the strips didn’t do a damn thing but cover my entire lady area with sticky residue, the waxes sort of worked but required about five hours due to all the running back and forth to the microwave to heat the stuff up, and the salon really didn’t do what I consider a thorough or particularly symmetrical job. Plus – and I do not mean to be prejudiced or advance a stereotype – any wax under $20 is done in a questionable strip-mall nail salon by a Vietnamese woman who refuses to annunciate and keeps shouting to the other employees. And I just know she’s talking about me. Ergo I suffer and keep my eyes peeled for groupons. Unfortunately, all the ones I’ve found so far are to spas and salons that have reviews along the lines of “I got a third degree burn and/or MRSA at this place.”
I think this may be a part of why I’m not terribly fond of men – I know we choose to beautify ourselves, and only part of that is to look attractive, but I just wish they would show a little more respect for what our gender has to put up with (pap smears on lunch breaks! asking strangers, or worse, your boss, for a tampon! permanent bra strap marks!) I feel like there needs to be a holiday where women all get the day off and men have to give us nice things and tend to us. Once a year isn’t too much to ask, given how many of the 364 other ones we’re menstruating.
I wasn’t left with the red bumpy “freshly waxed” rash so much as the results of a tractor pull in my lady garden.
That is, quite possibly, the funniest thing I’ve read all month. I cannot wait to pass it on to my wife when I get home.
I just nearly got soda out my nose reading, “because what every woman wants is for her crotch to smell like a fruit salad.”
It was Cherry Coke, so I guess it fit with the theme.
Too effing funny!!! I am all pro at waxing my upper lip. That’s it. I can do the bikini area, but get a little apprehensive. What brand did you use?? I might be able to make do with them. I favor Veet on my side of the pond.
Think this was another one that should’ve been filed in the “men, look away!” category. The only gardening I have to worry about, aside from the usual facial and mustache, is on the mutant eyebrows.