The Bikini Wax Disaster
“Wax on. Wax off. Yeah right!”
Mr. Miyagi was full of shit. The wax does NOT come right off… not even with a little elbow grease.
Anyone who knows me even a little would probably agree that “graceful” isn’t an adjective that applies to me. My husband has repeatedly said I’m the most accident prone person he’s ever known. And I have the hospital records to back it up. Even little tasks carry a risk of danger when I’m involved. The simplest grooming tasks. Nothing life threatening… usually. Still, I think I’m the only person I’ve ever met who’s actually stepped on a hot curling iron. It fit perfectly into the curl of my toes. It’s amazing how hot actually feels cold at first, until the brain registers what’s happening. And blistering burns are interesting to treat when they’re on the soft fleshy underside of your toes. I don’t recommend it.
I wouldn’t say I was ever against grooming rituals, per se. I’d willingly risked the inevitable catastrophe with a smile nearly every day. And seriously, is there’s anything more dangerous than taking a razor blade into a wet shower?
I’ve been shaving my legs since Junior High, and despite the tediousness of the whole regimen, I imagine I’ll be doing it well into old age. But shaving the bikini area has never been my favorite. First of all, it involves a fair degree of yoga-like positions to reach everywhere, and then, as I said, it’s fraught with peril. So sure, I’d often considered alternative methods of hair removal for this area of my body. All it took was one spur of the moment decision in the grocery store, and the rest as they say, is history.
It was a typical Saturday night at my house, back in the era I refer to as “between husbands,” and by typical, I mean I was left to my own devices, and half bored out of my mind. The kids were in bed. The house quiet. I’d showered and brushed my teeth, wrapped myself in nothing but a towel, and on this particular fateful evening, I was readying myself for my very first bikini wax. In hindsight, I realize my tragic mistake. I’d never as much as waxed my car at that point in my life, let alone my bikini area. Yet here I was, heating the thick, melted peanut buttery substance to a near boil in order to smear it over the tender skin of my groin area.
Hindsight is a valuable tool that would only be valuable if it was foresight, which, sadly, it’s not. And so, I smeared. In my own defense, I read the directions. Twice. And followed them to the letter. My skin was clean, and the hair in the area to be waxed was of the specified length. I applied the desired amount of wax to the area, letting it cool for the allotted amount of time. So far, so good. I just had to grip the edge of the wax and pull in a fast upward motion in the opposite direction of the hair growth. Just like pulling off a Band-Aid. I could do that. No problem.
Big fucking problem.
There was no handle to this wax. Just a layer of sticky mud, hardened onto my body like superglue. Try as I might, I couldn’t find any spot I could pry up to use as a starting point to begin the required “ripping out the hair” motion. And that’s what it all boiled down to, the ripping out of hair. Had I taken the time to think it through, that simple sentence would’ve stopped me cold and saved me from myself. Hindsight is always too late. So there I stood, in my bathroom, completely naked, staring dumbly at my reflection in the mirror.
But listen… I went to college. I was a smart cookie. Surely I could find a simple solution for my dilemma. Then I remembered watching someone getting their eyebrows waxed at a salon—I’d yet to have mine waxed at that point—and the technician had used a small linen cloth to tear the hair out with. Eureka! All I needed was a cloth.
So I began ransacking drawers, looking for anything that would work as a cloth wax handle. I ended up cutting a swatch from a spare bed sheet. It was me or the sheet, and I won.
I pressed the credit card sized cotton swatch against the hardened wax and tried to quickly pull as instructed. Like pulling off a Band-Aid.
Well, the cloth pulled off easily enough, with not a single trace of wax attached to it. I stared at my crotch in the mirror, and at the edge of despair, an idea came to me. The wax was cold and hard. I needed to add more so the cloth would stick. It made perfect sense at the time. Get the cloth to stick. Fast upward pulling motion, like pulling off a Band-Aid. No more wax.
So, I dipped the spreader back into the sticky gunk and buttered the area like a piece of toast. Press the little cloth to the wax. So far so good. Let it cool for a second. Done. Now, pull in a fast upward motion against the hair growth. Think Band-Aid. Think Band-Aid.
Think more hardened wax attached to my groin like plaster. Think panic.
I thought about calling the 800 number on the box, but I decided that regardless of my predicament, it was far too embarrassing. Instead, I started to pick at the wax like old finger nail polish, an equally futile practice that yielded little if any real results.
I thought about running really hot water over my crotch, but the temperature required to melt the wax would’ve undoubtedly caused serious burns to an already tortured region, so I scratched that idea. Last resort? I pulled my Lady Gillette off the side of the tub and started shaving. Not an easy job, I promise you. The Lady Gillette razor was never meant to shave hardened wax off the skin, just hair. But after thirty odd minutes, and six blade changes, the majority of the wax was gone. Unfortunately, a good amount of wax residue remained, like the gummy leftovers from a sticker that had accidentally gone through the wash still attached to a t-shirt. For over a week, every time I bent over, I stuck to myself. And I wasn’t the only thing sticking to me. The insides of my clothes left a nice little lint trail behind. The blue fuzz from the insides of my jeans was particularly colorful.
I can honestly say—and I mean this as a stern warning to anyone who has ever cruised the feminine hygiene aisle at the grocery store and contemplated buying a home waxing kit—the worst possible mistake a woman can make is to attempt her own bikini wax without previous experience. I only wish someone had warned me about what thereafter would forever be known as, “the bikini wax disaster.”
bare today…hair tomorrow
Fashion is a fickle friend. Whether we’re talking miniskirts, skinny jeans, or platform shoes…long hair on men, short hair on women, or the question of whether or not to shave.
And I’m not just talking about beards here. Well…maybe I am.
I’ve done a lot of crazy things. I would be the first to admit it. Not only did I attempt to wax my own bikini area, and with disastrous results I might add, but I went ahead and wrote it down for all the world to see. Or rather read. So why not take it a step further. Why not discuss the other popular options?
I spent the better part of last night chatting with a bunch of women about that very thing.
It would seem I’m not the only one with a disastrous waxing tale. Apparently horrible things can go wrong even when a professional is in control of the hot wax. Especially when talking about a Brazilian wax. I don’t know about you, but sending a strange Brazilian into my nether regions with boiling hot wax is NOT something I will be adding to my bucket list. I burned my mouth on a barbeque chicken sandwich the other day and walked around sucking on ice chips all day…my tongue still hurts. That is not something I want to experience anywhere in the vicinity of my crotch.
So yeah, hot wax is out. But laser hair removal treatments might just be in.
It was brought up in the conversation last night, and I remembered it was an option at my doctor’s office. I mean, I’ve been known to remove my pants at the doctor’s office for medical reasons, right? It’s a yearly thing, in fact. So how much of a stretch would it be to put my legs into stirrups for fashion? Well…fashion, hygene…hey, in some circumstances it could actually mean going down a size in undergarments, and let’s face it, ladies…any opportunity to go down a size should be seized!
But the more I thought about this whole, permanent hair removal thing, the more I started thinking about fashion and her fickle moods. How many times have styles changed in the course of my life? Eyebrows have gone from pencil thin to thick and bushy and back to groomed again. Skirts have gone from long to short to even shorter in the blink of an eye. How can I be sure bare down there will always be in style? I mean, I remember the seventies and the popular back to nature bush-fro of the era. Sure, it was a little National Geographic, but you just never know when I might feel the urge to go all retro and sport a vintage look…it could happen.
Besides, who knows what all the grannies in the nursing home will be wearing. Sure, that’s a very long way off, but one has to be prepared for anything that may come up. I certainly don’t want to be the only one who isn’t up with the current trends. I’m nothing if not trendy.
So I guess for now I’ll be sticking with the expensive five blade shavers they keep behind lock and key at the grocery store…even they know the value of fashion…that is until someone comes up with something a little less dangerous, or the tide turns again and the retro bush-fro comes back in style.
I won’t be holding my breath.
Until the next time…I’ll be lathering up!
I waxed the pole at pole waxer's university
I hit the snooze bar on my alarm clock a record eleven times this morning. I was exhausted. I had tossed and turned most of the night due to a lethal combination of caffeine and nerves. I stared at the time on my Blackberry before pulling the blankets back over my head for just a few more minutes. I wasn’t looking forward to getting out of bed this morning, and not just because I had to go to work. Today was the day that I had agreed—against my better judgment—to go to a stripper pole aerobics class with two of my best girl friends. I had tried to put it off twice already without much success, and after all…a promise is a promise, no matter how dangerous it might be to one’s health.
It was all my fault, really. I was the one going on and on about getting on a diet and exercise regimen to get a jump start on spring. I was the one complaining about my pants being too tight. I should have taken the initiative to plan something else. Instead, I left it all up to Vivian. And she’s such a good planner too.
Since we were going to be exercising the evening away, we decided we'd better get dinner first.
Two bowls of cheese dip, three baskets of chips, and one round of margaritas later, my fears were somewhat allayed. And the tip of my nose was somewhat numb. So we piled into Melissa’s SUV and set out on our little adventure.
The Pole Waxer’s University is located in one of the less than savory sections of town, and I don’t know why I found that surprising. It's sandwiched between a vacant lot and an auto body shop on a narrow alleyway near the highway. The ideal place for a small group of unarmed women to find themselves after dark.
We walked in and were immediately greeted by the older woman at the desk, who took our money and directed us to a room in the back to change. We stole looks at each other without saying a word. We were already dressed in what we were planning on wearing. Like the others in my group, I was wearing loose fitting yoga pants, a t-shirt, and sneakers—typically gym wear. No one told me that everyone else would be wearing their underwear and five inch platform heels. Oh, and one girl in underwear and thigh high shiny black spiked heel boots.
Right off the bat, the woman from the desk instructed us to grab a rag from the rack and wipe our poles down. That should have tipped me off right away that there may be some sort of residue on the pole that I might not want my body to come in contact with, and that little rag (lacking of any sort of disinfectant) was going to do very little to remedy the situation. But, no sooner had I polished the length of my neon pink fireman’s pole when the older woman flicked a switch and the room was bathed in nothing but the glow from several black lights, and hip hop blasted from the giant speakers in every corner. It was dark, and loud, and I was surrounded by strangers in their underwear, and now the music was shouting at me to pop my…what???
I gripped the pole with both hands and waited for further instructions.
It is absolutely no secret that I have a catastrophic lack of coordination, so it should've been no secret that I could not under any circumstances wrap my leg around a pole and use it to pull myself up off the ground, let alone do it in rapid succession. The names of the moves were suspiciously similar to the names of the sushi I'd eaten only days earlier. I was able to keep up with the body rolls—they didn’t require my feet to come off the floor—but the sun wheel, the bam, and the fireman fly were another story. The instructor—a woman who had obviously seen her share of stripper poles over the years—tried showing me how I was supposed to wrap my ankle here, and tuck my knee against there, and then using my arms on the pole above my head, I should be able to hoist myself up and spin around the pole using my crotch as the axis. I wanted to laugh out loud, but instead, I nodded politely until she turned away and proceeded to jump up and down in front of the pole as if I was actually attempting the move. I gripped it tightly with both hands and let my body spin around it like a maypole for the next exercise. I jumped and spun and leaned and rested and basically pretended to be an uncoordinated stripper for the better part of an hour until the class was finally over! Oh she tossed a few sit ups and push ups into the mix so I'll likely be a little sore in the morning. And she promised we'd have the symptoms of whiplash after spinning around the pole for an hour. And my arms just might hurt from my failed attempts to pull myself even slightly off the ground to wrap my legs around the pole—a feat I did not even come close to mastering. The girls in their underwear with the five inch heels continued to climb and spin on the poles long after the rest of us had stopped to marvel at the sheer absurdity of the situation. Who did we think we were, attempting to become junior strippers for an evening?
We had a nice ride back to our cars where were all promised to plan another outing in the very near future. One of our group even toyed with the idea of going back to the stripper academy. I was just in a hurry to get home so I could wash my hands in really hot water with lots and lots of antibacterial soap. Someone suggested perhaps next time we could go bungee jumping after a few margaritas. I think it would take a whole lot more than a few margaritas to get me on the edge of a bridge with a giant rubberband strapped to my ass. Maybe we could go rock climbing, or organize a dodgeball tournament. Something a little less life threatening. After all, suffering for one’s art is just an expression …not a challenge.
Until the next time…I’ll be giving up aerobics for Lent!