Last week, a news story claimed women were suffering from a rise in bacterial infections due to the current mania for Brazilian and Hollywood bikini waxes.
The treatment can cause hundreds of tiny tears in the skin, making us more vulnerable to bacteria.
Add this to the risk of bugs caught from the waxing process itself (don’t stand for therapists ‘double-dipping’ the lollipop stick used to apply the product back into the cauldron of warm wax; it’s a germ magnet) and a practice billed by many spas as ‘hygienic’ may well be the exact opposite.
This latest health scare has reignited the whole debate about whether women should feel the need to be as bare as a billiard ball in their nether regions.
Never mind the expense — I’ve just calculated I’ve spent £157,115 on waxing in my lifetime — and the time it takes to attend appointments every two or three weeks.
Why should women feel compelled to replicate the private parts of a pre-adolescent?
Looking at a 1982 copy of Vogue, I am amazed to see not only how womanly the models appear, but how hirsute.
In an advertisement for tights, you can clearly see the model’s thick, dark line of pubic hair.
Indeed, when I first came to London as a student, in 1977 and started the lifetime commitment that is ‘waxing’, the norm then was a half leg and a bikini wax — just the few stray hairs left exposed by a pair of knickers.
And it never really works, all this waxing. Not really. Hairs never give up the ghost, the tenacious blighters.
You can exfoliate all you like, but waxing weakens the hair shaft, meaning when it regrows it is more likely to grow crooked under the skin, resulting in unsightly ingrown hairs.
But once you embark on the slippery slope that is waxing, you don’t know when to stop.
Most women I know have two good weeks, when they can wear short skirts, have sex with a man and sit on a beach, followed by two weeks of famine, when we have to remain on lock-down, given we are frantically trying to grow enough hair to make the next session of costly waxing as effective as possible.
It does make you wonder, what on earth is the point?
The treatment can cause hundreds of tiny tears in the skin, making us more vulnerable to bacteria.
Add this to the risk of bugs caught from the waxing process itself (don’t stand for therapists ‘double-dipping’ the lollipop stick used to apply the product back into the cauldron of warm wax; it’s a germ magnet) and a practice billed by many spas as ‘hygienic’ may well be the exact opposite.
This latest health scare has reignited the whole debate about whether women should feel the need to be as bare as a billiard ball in their nether regions.
Never mind the expense — I’ve just calculated I’ve spent £157,115 on waxing in my lifetime — and the time it takes to attend appointments every two or three weeks.
Why should women feel compelled to replicate the private parts of a pre-adolescent?
Looking at a 1982 copy of Vogue, I am amazed to see not only how womanly the models appear, but how hirsute.
In an advertisement for tights, you can clearly see the model’s thick, dark line of pubic hair.
Indeed, when I first came to London as a student, in 1977 and started the lifetime commitment that is ‘waxing’, the norm then was a half leg and a bikini wax — just the few stray hairs left exposed by a pair of knickers.
And it never really works, all this waxing. Not really. Hairs never give up the ghost, the tenacious blighters.
You can exfoliate all you like, but waxing weakens the hair shaft, meaning when it regrows it is more likely to grow crooked under the skin, resulting in unsightly ingrown hairs.
But once you embark on the slippery slope that is waxing, you don’t know when to stop.
Most women I know have two good weeks, when they can wear short skirts, have sex with a man and sit on a beach, followed by two weeks of famine, when we have to remain on lock-down, given we are frantically trying to grow enough hair to make the next session of costly waxing as effective as possible.
It does make you wonder, what on earth is the point?
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