A Guide To... Hair Removal

ASK many women what they would do if they were granted three wishes and somewhere between world peace and a double lottery rollover win would be the fervent wish to wake up one day and find their body hair had disappeared.

To hair removal evangelists, the epilator is a thing of wonder, offering the convenience of shaving with the results of waxing and the noise of a piece of industrial farming equipment.

I might as well say right now that if you’re the sort of woman who has barely perceptible body hair, the kind of hair that just blows off in the wind, this column is not for you. Stop reading and go enjoy those hundreds of hours you save while the rest of us are defuzzing by playing Frisbee in a thong. Go on. We don’t hate you. We might skin you and use you as a body suit, but we don’t hate you.

Anyway. Hair removal. Let us talk through the options.

There are razors of course, which are wonderful, simply wonderful, if you don’t mind someone running their hand tenderly along your thigh the wrong way and having the sensation of caressing barbed wire.

Depilatory cream is a step up from shaving and ideal if you prefer to smell like you’ve just been embalmed. Useful for small areas, like bikini line, upper lip, and that small patch of furry mould behind the bathroom door.

Waxing is good. If you’ve never been waxed before and are even slightly sensitive you’ll think you’ve entered the seventh circle of hell afresh with every single strip. But, once the raised, red nubbins of hysterical follicle have calmed down and you view the silky-smooth results, you’ll feel just heavenly. What to do in between waxes, though?  This is a perennial problem. Cover up by the pool? Shun all intimate encounters? Or, my personal favourite, affix a bumper sticker with the motto: ‘my other body’s a smoothie.’

Even better than waxing are epilators. If you’ve never used an epilator before (and even if you have) these are small electrical machines with rotating tweezers, which pluck out the hairs, a few at a time.

To sane eyes, the epilator is less beauty product, more prop from one of the Saw movies. But to hair-removal evangelists, the epilator is a thing of wonder, offering the convenience of shaving with the results of waxing and the noise of a piece of industrial farming equipment. And, of course, the pain of individually plucking out your leg hairs.

Less excruciating for those whose follicles have been beaten into submission by repeated waxing, epilators, either way, are well worth the agony. Pour a large glass of red wine, take two paracetamol, put the subtitles on your favourite TV show (I wasn’t joking about the noise) and get epilating, you big wuss. Afterwards, you’ll be light headed with pain, but who the hell cares when you’re as smooth as a beach ball?

The latest hair removing products are the home laser/light kits and these are for the serious enthusiast. Costing in the hundreds, they remove only a postage-sized patch of hair at a time, and the process requires several repetitions to catch the hairs in the right stage of their growth cycle. Apparently, they do remove hair effectively, possibly even for good, though by the time you’ve found enough leisure time to really make use of such machines you’ll be 101 and they’ll have invented a pill that can give you a Brazilian.

Julia Roberts' famous pit hairBut hang on a minute, I hear you cry. All this pain. All this expense. Surely the whole hair removal market is just preying on the false expectations of the feminine? Societal demands of beauty are riding roughshod over the natural state of women’s bodies and nurturing insecurity and fear.

If we stopped hair removing, we could save astonishing amounts of time and money and pain, and no matter that we haven’t seen our bodies in their natural state since we were 14 and have a secret suspicion that, unplucked and untendered, we’ll look like Captain Caveman (but with hairier legs). 

Come on, let’s throw away the razors and wax and start a natural revolution!

You first.