Adventures in Hair Removal

As anyone who knows me could tell you, I am one hairy chick. When I was little, my classmates teased me by calling me Hairy Carrie. Yeah, rhyming is fun. I was so famous throughout my school district that even older kids that I'd never met would shout, "Hairy Carrie" at me from across the mall then laugh to the point of wetting themselves when I turned around and gave them the old stink-eye. I've always had enough hair on my forearms to make it look like I'm permanently wearing long sleeves, and I can grow a mustache that would make most sixteen-year-old boys jealous. Well, no more. And for my Spanish speaking friends, no mas.

I remember a conversation I had as a little girl. "Mom, when will I stop having all this hair?"

"When you're older," she said, leaving me with the impression that sometime during my adolescence, I was going to wake up to discover that all of my body hair had magically fallen out. I wish some teacher would have taken me aside and taught me the importance of follow-up questions, but since none ever did, I just took my mom's response at face value. At the ripe old age of twenty-seven, I found myself still waiting for the shit to fall out, all the while growing more and more self-conscious about my looks.

The one bright spot in my adult life (if being humiliated can ever be considered a bright spot) was one time when a friend and I went out for Chinese. This was one of our favorite restaurants in Dayton, and we'd had this one tiny little Asian waitress at least a dozen times before, but for some reason on this one night she decided that she had to pay me a "compliment." When she brought our check, she started stroking the hair on my right arm and said, "Oooh, so sexy." My friend had to immediately excuse herself from the table. I could hear her crying with laughter as she walked away. Sure, it's a funny story now, but at the time I was mortified. I thought only little kids and retarded people were allowed to get away with commenting on people's physical shortcomings like that. I know. I know. What she said was theoretically nice. How was she to know she was pointing out the thing about which I was most self-conscious?

A few years later, I was working at a bookstore when another Asian lady caught my attention and motioned for me to come join her in the children's section. In a rather broken accent she told me, "I used have hair like you. I know where you can get fixed."

"What?" I asked, not quite sure I'd understood her.

"Hair. Your arms. Can fix."

"Thanks. I'm good."

I wasn't good though. I was again embarrassed by the cards the Geneticist in the Sky had dealt me. And what was it with these Asian people? Seriously, is there some sort of cultural propensity toward inappropriate frankness that I didn't learn about in school?

So jump to yesterday. Yesterday I woke up feeling like shit. I felt unattractive for the 3876th day in a row, and, frankly, I was over it. Carrie, you can't go to job interviews looking like this, I told myself. Looks do matter, no matter what your mother tells you. This hair would have to go. I thought the best place to shop for hair removal products would be with other classically unattractive people, so I drove to Wal-Mart. You would think that in all the places in all the world, Wal-Mart would be the place to take care of all your hair removal needs. I mean, look at the people who work and shop there. I know I'm sounding like a real a-hole, but seriously. Wal-Mart isn't exactly a bastion of trendiness and good grooming. Sadly though, my choices were limited. There were creams. I had tried these when I was 8 and I already had hair under my arms. I think my mother felt that 8 was too young to wield a razor. In the end, she had to entrust me with a Lady Bic, because these hair removal creams, turns out, are total bullshit. So creams were out. There were waxes that needed to be heated up and applied with wands. This seemed like a disaster waiting to happen. I mean, how do you get hot wax out of your eyeball? Or what about 2nd degree burns? I don't need that sort of mayonnaise in my life. Then I glanced the bottom shelf. Nads. I'd seen Nads on tv. I'd seen the Australian woman who created the product rip the hair off her beast-like daughter's arm with three easy motions. The daughter, she didn't even wince. I mean, Nads has kava in it, for Christ's sake. Who else is going to offer me all this in in one ready-made-wax-preapplied strip? No one. That's who. I bought the face kit as well as the full-size strips and went about my business.

When I went home, I waxed my lip. I'm not going into great detail about it, because I owned that shit, which makes it not that interesting and not at all funny. So I'm moving on.

Later that night, all the optimism about life and the feeling less hideous had already worn off. There was still the matter of the arms. How could anyone ever love me with these arms. Did I say love? I meant hire. Is there a difference really? It was 1:00 a.m. and I was as unattractive as when I woke up that morning. For a moment I thought, Carrie, is this really something you want to get into in the middle of the night? I thought, this is one of those mistakes that you know you're making even as you're making it. Like asking a friend for a cigarette or driving to Canada to marry a drug addict. The hair will still be there in the morning, I assured myself as I walked into the bathroom and took out the full-size strips. Well, here's the thing about applying a waxing strip to some part of your body--there's really only one way to get it off, and, whether you mean to or not, you're taking some hair with you. What I'm saying is, once you've got the strip on, you're fucked, so you might as well go for it. I stood there for a moment, looking down at the 3x6 inch strip pasted to my left arm. You're a fucking idiot, I thought. There's a reason people pay to have this shit professionally tended to. Deep breath. Yank. Stars. I saw stars. My eyes teared. I looked down. There was a perfect patch of perfectly smooth skin that I'd never seen in its full, hairless glory now exposed on my left arm. Fuck, I thought. I can't walk around like this. This is the thing you don't think about. Once you start the process, you have to see it through. An hour and a half later, after several breaks to stop the cold sweats and the shaking, I had two bare arms. Well, mostly bare. I spent half of the next day meticulously plucking any extra-fortified follicles which had been strong enough or sneaky enough to thwart the kava-infused wax.

I'm told that the hair will not come back all black and brillo-paddy. I'm told that someday, the hair will recognize its own futile need to grow and I'll hardly ever have to wax at all. I'm told that looks don't matter, and now that I feel a little less like a wereperson, I'm sort of inclined to agree.