Columnist
‘Do you know why blondes have more fun? Because brunettes are too busy waxing and shaving’
With astronomical heating bills this winter, to help keep warm I’ve grown out all my body hair. It’s given a lot of amusement to my aqua aerobics pals. ‘The last time I saw anything that hairy, I was being chased by a herd of wildebeest in the Serengeti!’ laughed one. ‘Your unwaxed pudendum looks like William Shatner’s hairpiece,’ cackled another. ‘You’ll have every Trekkie in town chasing you!’
I promised to get back to the waxing salon in the spring, but now the time has come I’m seriously put off by the thought of enduring all that pain. The first time I went for a Brazilian wax way back in the 90s, I sobbed and hollered… And that was just in the waiting room. I couldn’t believe I was about to lie naked, spread-eagled, as boiling hot wax was agonisingly wrenched from a part of my body primarily reserved for giving birth.
The torture was even more medieval than I’d feared. But even worse was the itchy regrowth. Two weeks later, my nether regions resembled a sea creature disturbed in a rock pool and preparing to attack. It certainly gave ‘bad hair day’ a whole new meaning.
Over the winter, I’ve quite enjoyed having pubic hair again; I like to think of it as a welcome mat. Now the days are warming up, must I once again become as hairless as a lab rat?
Well, the good news is that I don’t! Fads, like pop songs, go in one era and out the other, and latest polls reveal that society’s obsession with bikini waxing is waning. Yes, the Brazilian wax, first made popular in the late 80s, has basically become, well, too popular. Once championed by Hollywood royalty such as Gwyneth Paltrow and Samantha from Sex and the City, ‘ladyscaping’ – along with fake tans, vajazzles and silicone breasts – has come to be associated with pole dancers, a twerking pop princess, a reality TV star or some other humans deemed to have the IQ of a houseplant.
That waxing is now considered déclassé is deliciously ironic because back in 1915, when Gil
