The One Beauty Ritual I’ll Never Give Up

In midlife, our writer has embraced an androgynous look, sworn off Botox, and doesn’t dye her hair, but there is one thing she just won’t quit.

A beautician in a crisp white uniform beckons me to a back room, and I obediently follow. Hoisting myself onto the crinkly sheet of paper covering the table, I watch as she dips a wooden tongue depressor into a vat of heated wax, then twirls the sticky substance over her cupped palm like a spider spinning a web. My lower torso trembles.

“Primeira vez?” she asks, sensing my apprehension. Yes, I nod. First time. 

If you’ve ever felt trepidation the moment a stylist points you toward her swivel chair, shears at the ready, and asks what kind of cut you have in mind, then you can imagine the fear factor rising tenfold when the hair in question lies between your legs. 

It was 2005, I was 35 years old, and I was visiting Brazil for the first time since my family moved from my birth country back to the U.S. when I was nearly three. Between private Portuguese lessons and samba dance classes, I spent my free time sunbathing on tropical beaches. My language instructor pointed out the women of all sizes (and ages) who wore thongs—called fio dental, or “dental floss”—and suggested I swap my granny panty-esque bottoms for something skimpier. 

In my new string bikini, my buttocks burst forth like a ripening peach yearning for sunshine—but I had a lot more than peach fuzz peeking out. Wiry hairs cascaded down my thighs like Niagara Falls.  

A few years before, I’d visited a friend while she casually set up a home waxing kit in her bathroom. “Doesn’t it hurt?” I asked, not even trying to hide my revulsion. Like an older sister, she (literally) took me under her wing, lifting an arm to reveal her armpit hair, which was sparse and wispy. She explained that waxing slowed and thinned hair growth, and claimed it was more hygienic than shaving, which scrapes the skin, making it more prone to infection. 

It was true that whenever I shaved, a rash of angry red bumps appeared. Occasionally, I sliced off a sliver of skin—and the stubble grew back faster than a Chia Pet, chafing like sandpaper. I’d had enough, I decided, and now here I was, cowering half-naked under a towel at a neighborhood salon in Bahia.

Much to my relief, I relaxed in the esthetician’s capable hands while she butterflied my limbs into Kama Sutra–style positions usually reserved for lovers. Spreading the golden gunk on my tender inner thigh like honey on fresh bread, she pressed a wide muslin strip onto my flesh, then quickly tore it off, ripping the hair from its roots. 

Despite the stinging sensation and some mild embarrassment, I found the ease with which she maneuvered my body oddly comforting. After a careful pubic trim with teeny scissors, snipping away at my bush like a bonsai master, she performed a final inspection, searching for any pesky strays to pluck. My initiation was complete. 

Since then, I’ve patronized plenty of salons, from cheap to chic. My gold-star waxer owns one of the many Vietnamese-run venues in San Francisco, charging half the price of any upscale establishment in the wine country where I live. No matter that there’s only a semi-private space behind a flimsy curtain, so anyone waiting can surely hear the Band-Aid sound of each waxing strip being torn off. 

I once had the misfortune of going to someone who sheared away my bikini zone until what remained wasn’t much more than a crooked landing strip—similar to Sex and the City‘s Carrie Bradshaw when she discovered, to her dismay, that she’d been fully defleeced. Depending on the season (or the bathing suit), I opt for a basic or extended bikini wax rather than the “Brazilian,” which strips the labia bare. The Brazilian wax’s popularity is attributed to Janea Padilha and her seven siblings from Bahia, who introduced the grooming regimen to uppercrust New Yorkers at their J Sisters salon in Manhattan in 1990. 

While many people mistakenly equate hair removal with cleanliness, pubic hair is not unhygienic. In fact, according to the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology, it traps sweat and bacteria while warming and moisturizing the vulva. There’s no medical reason to remove it. My own incentive is mainly cosmetic, and although I do it, I still have misgivings about perpetuating society’s contempt for women and the policing of our bodies.

While a thick forest of chest hair may no longer be the heteronormative standard for manliness, anything beyond the tresses descending from a woman’s head—preferably blonde and glossy—is still considered shameful. (Once I slept with a man who actually made plucking motions over my areolas to indicate his distaste for the hairs there.)

Admittedly, I don’t love the midlife proliferation of my tummy trail, nor the thatch of hair growing past my ass crack, but I grew up long before hairless vulvas were lauded as the pinnacle of femininity. I always detested those hair-removal commercials that suggested smooth skin was most desirable. Rather than acknowledge our body hair growth as normal, often brought on by hormonal changes, the beauty industry reinforces a prepubescent state as ideal.

With each era, my own relationship to hair removal has shifted. In 1980, when my mother liberated herself from her marriage by way of a month-long stay in Rome, including a dalliance with an older man at his villa on the Riviera, she returned with an untamed tangle under her pits that rivaled Gilda Radner’s SNL impersonation of Patti Smith. It was merely an affectation, like changing her middle name from Frances to Francesca, but I thought her hair growth was, like, gag-me-with-a-spoon gross. 

Nonetheless, I was a lazy shaver. That is, until a mean girl named Missy (one of three in my high school) caught sight of my underarm stubble in the locker room after gym class and actually did gag. Following that humiliation, I was careful to conform, ridding myself of body hair rather than face ridicule from my peers. 

Fast-forward a few more years, and I’d transformed into a quasi-hippie feminist with hairy extremities, joining forces with other women’s studies majors at UC Santa Cruz. Freeing my prolific pelt was a political statement, in defiance of the Patriarchy. (This time, when my mother caught sight of my caterpillar pits, she wrinkled her nose in distaste.)

Over time, my stance softened (although I still occasionally went au naturel, such as the summer I camped at a commune in a redwood grove with a hollowed-out tree stump as my composting toilet), and after my trip to Brazil, waxing became an integral part of my beauty routine.

Nearing menopause, I adopted a more androgynous look. I stopped wearing earrings after the pierced holes closed up, and rarely polished my nails or wore lipstick. I’ve always sworn off Botox and breast augmentation, and have no desire to dye my dark hair, now shorn and sprinkled with silver. Yet aside from daily moisturizing (and sunscreen!), the one grooming ritual I refuse to renounce is waxing. Maybe I’ve succumbed to societal pressure, but after practicing epilation for nearly two decades, I’ve developed a preference for smooth legs, a bikini line, and armpits. To put it simply: I just don’t care for a hairy look.

During the pandemic shutdown, I did return to my laissez-faire ways like a bear in hibernation. My wife had no complaints: I’m the sensitive one who bristles if her post-shave prickly legs brush against mine. With the health club closed, except for an outdoor lap pool where I swam before sunrise, there weren’t any Missys whom I might offend.

Eventually, I resorted to at-home hair removal, using a Nad’s Natural Sugar Wax Kit rather than labor over my limbs with a razor. Fairly easy to apply and far less expensive than a salon, it (mostly) got the job done. Yet I didn’t feel so savvy stripping my tender nether regions, which are more prone to bruising or ingrown hairs—not to mention the pretzel twisting required to reach those, ahem, more delicate places.

When businesses reopened, I returned to my tried-and-true salon. Up the rickety stairs I went, sporting a thong reserved for waxing appointments only. I flipped onto my belly and pointed to my behind. “Could you get this, too?”

She pulled each cheek apart to clear the aisles, unabashed. When she was done, she waved the once-white cotton like a victory flag. A mess of dark fur, it resembled a mouse caught on a glue trap. “All clean!”

Lifting each side of my panties, she peered at her handiwork to ensure her pruning was even. “I got it all! Even the hair on your butt!” she announced, loudly enough for the ladies getting mani-pedis downstairs to hear. Shoving aside my modesty, I descended, reveling in my newly smooth skin. It was worth it.

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