blue_lotus13: (frida)
[personal profile] blue_lotus13
Every time I go to get waxed, I think about writing a post about waxing. It's finally time to do it.
Let's go to the background. My mother is nearly hairless. I blame this on good genes and her ethnic makeup, as people of Asian descent tend to have very little body hair. My father, on the other hand, is mostly French German with a fair amount of body hair. The genetic mixture of them has resulted in yours truly, a rather hirsute person with dark skin and dark hair. As a child, I was teased about my hairy arms, and even refused to wear short sleeves for many years. In high school, I even shaved my stomach and my arms in an attempt to become less hairy. I don't do any of these things now, but I'm still a little self conscious.

At the age of 13, I had my first brow wax and I've been a practitioner ever since. It's embarassing to think about how many thousands of dollars have gone into taming my unruly brows. I was so terrified during my first wax that I nearly cried. Now, I almost fall asleep while they're doing it.

I have had many strange things happen to me while being waxed. At one salon, they ripped my skin which gave me bizarre slash marks above my eyes. Another time, the wax became too sticky and the poor esthetician had to practically scrape a piece of wax off the inside of my leg when it became stuck. This was a pretty humiliating experience, but I think it was worse for my waxer.

While I lived in Montreal, I had my first "too close" bikini wax. This was when the Brazilian was just catching on. Suffice it to say that I got the airplane runway, instead of the neat triangle. I've never had a Brazilian and plan never to have one as several people I know tell me that it is extremely painful.

In Indonesia, I attended a wonderful "all woman spa". Due to Muslim custom, men were not even allowed in the spa. Rooms were divided by bamboo and everyone got to walk around in beautiful batik sarongs. It is there that I experienced threading, which is one of the most painful procedures I have ever encountered. It felt like they were scraping hair from my eyebrows with a knife. I thought I was going to die. Never again. In this salon, I also had to fight not to have a Brazilian, which was difficult with my limited skills in Indonesian and the esthetician's limited English skills.

In Mongolia, I could not find anywhere that did eyebrow waxing. Instead, the brow was tamed with a little razor. At one place, a woman tried to buzz the sides of my hairline with this little razor and I had to practically fight her off.

Oh, the pains of beauty. Sometimes I wish I could just give up and do the Frida Kahlo, but I can't handle it. I can't even stop shaving my legs or pits. I've accepted that this is part of my routine and self pampering, and part of who I am.

Date: 2005-08-24 07:50 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] sarcasma.livejournal.com
This was totally fascinating. Thank you! I wish I had time for a more interesting reply. All I've got is: you would think that "wax this bit -- DO NOT wax this bit" or "wax from here out, and ONLY from here out" would be fairly easy to communicate without a common language. How scary to be in a situation where it wasn't!

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