While it’s increasingly un-pc to want to remove body hair, some of us – particularly with the new-gen lasers now available – still want to be bare naked ladies
This might hurt a little,’ said the therapist ahead of my first session of laser hair removal back in the early 2000s (in the same way that childbirth can feel mildly uncomfortable, it turns out.) I left the session with blister-like bumps over every inch of my legs, from upper thigh to ankle, and breathing in the smell of singed hair, but also with a feeling of complete euphoria at my new state of hairlessness. Let me explain…
As an early millennial, I grew up on a diet of dubious body goals that included (but were not limited to) Kate Moss’s legs, Britney’s abs, J.Lo’s bum, Jennifer Aniston’s, well, everything. And something all these women had in common (as well as their wretchedly unattainable figures) was their lack of body hair. Each and every one of them was blissfully bald from the neck down. Women, we were being told, do not have body hair. The Brazilian wax had a moment, then was hotly succeeded by the Hollywood. A whole generation of boys grew up with FHM covers as their yardstick by which to measure female hairiness, or lack thereof. To parade a pube in public was akin to dropping the c-bomb, while sightings of female armpit hair literally made front-page news: Julia Roberts at the Notting Hill premiere being a case in point.
The 1990s and 2000s were not, unfortunately for me, decades for the hirsute. Half of my heritage is Italian, so, along with the bonus of slightly olive skin, I took a hit by being, on the whole, hairier than average. Such is life; such are genetics. And as much as I grew up wanting to be all European and casual about my body hair – particularly as my parents championed such an attitude – I was not.
I wanted to be the girls on the FHM covers, who, I presumed, could lark around in a bikini without a second thought about pre-swimwear de-fuzzing. Somewhere in my genome sequencing, however, I was gifted the really-hairy gene and, for laughs, it was combined with the very-sensitive-skin gene. This made pre-swimwear hair removal a military operation. Hours were devoted to it, because in a world where body hair was not okay, I became obsessed with ridding myself of it.
At age 12, I was shaving with Bic razors borrowed from my dad and soap (soap!). This evolved to Veet cold wax strips (at 14, no one was paying for me to get the job done professionally at a salon). I became pretty handy with the strips, the necessary contortions, the aftercare. But the sensitivity of my skin meant that, before long, my ingrowing hairs were becoming so bad they were leaving scars that wouldn’t fade.
Then followed many years of misery and shame; finding excus
