Just as I was starting to get irritated, a woman came up to me and said "I'll be doing your wax now, and then Jenny will be here to do your hair." I looked at her, confused, and said "I don’t have a wax appointment?" I intentionally never wax my face, for 2 reasons: The first is that my skin is really sensitive. When I wax, it turns red for days. It just isn't worth it to me when there are tweezers and Nair readily available. The second is that when I was 18 I spent the summer before I went away to college working as a receptionist at a hair salon. On a slow day, one of the girls (who was training as an esthetician) asked if she could practice on me. I had seen her wax all the other women at the salon, and they had all turned out fine, so I said "Sure". She proceeded to wax off half of my left eyebrow. It took 6 months to fully grow back.
So, I knew for a fact that I hadn't made a waxing appointment. She looked at me critically for a second, and then said "Hmmm. Must have been a mistake." And started to walk away. Suddenly, I was insecure. "Wait" I said, "Do you think I need a wax?" This is where she swooped in, like an eagle ready to pounce on her pray. "Well" she said "it couldn't hurt." And I was done for. I followed her to a chair to get my wax. And here's why:
I am blond, my hair is fine, and I have no more facial hair than any other woman (I’m going to go ahead and take a leap here and say that I probably have even less than your average woman). Still, I have always been self conscious about it. I think part of it stems from the fact that my mother is a lesbian. Now, if there are any lesbians out there reading, please don't take offense! I have known some beautiful, facial hair free lesbians in my life! But, my mother was not what you would call a lipstick lesbian. We are talking about a woman who insisted upon giving me a mullet:
(wasn’t my little brother the most stinking adorable kid you’ve ever seen?) and dressed me in flannel:
There was a lot of teasing that went on around the playground about my mom, and me growing up to be just like her. I’m ashamed to admit it, but when I hit my teens I began living in fear of anyone seeing me as less than feminine. In high school I made a rule that I would always wear a dress to school at least once a week (and it was typically a revealing dress… had to make sure everyone knew I had boobs!), and I stuck to it. As I’ve aged, I have become more of a jeans and t-shirt girl who wears minimal make-up and sometimes lets herself go, but there are certain feminine traits which I have always been concerned about maintaining (OK, there was that one unfortunate haircut when I was 19, where I foolishly thought I could pull off a Kate Gosslin-esque doo [although, it wasn’t the Kate Gosslin cut back then of course] and wound up looking worse than Rosie O’Donnell with her Flock of Seagulls cut, but other than that my hair has always been long, and my face has always been smooth!) My other fear of facial hair is that I have met women with full on mustaches who just don't seem to realize what they've got going on. Kind of like those people who have bad breath and get right in your face to talk to you? These are the things I worry about: Having chronic halitosis or really noticeable facial hair, and no one who cares about me enough to tell me that the situation has gotten out of hand.
So, once a week since I was 13, I have Naired my upper lip and been lethal with the tweezers. I never wanted anything to grow astray that might give someone the reason to think of me as "hairy". Then, I started on the Lupron and my fears tripled. After all, it stands to reason that if my lady hormones are shut off, I could feasibly start growing more facial hair, right? I don't know if it's just my head messing with me or if the hormones really are causing me to grow more hair in awkward places, but I have become exceedingly more aware of my facial hair. I spend more time examining my face in the mirror, and more effort brandishing my trusty tweezers. I am seriously terrified of the Lupron turning me into a man. But, I manage to convince myself most nights that I'm just being crazy. After all, if I did start growing excessive facial hair, someone would surely tell me… right?
But in that moment, with her examining me as though I were a woolly mammoth, all confidence faded and I become convinced that I was precisely as hairy as I had feared. I let her do her worst, and when I left I made an appointment for 2 weeks from now. I even tipped her 30%, because I was so glad that someone had finally had the nerve to let me know I needed help.
I came back to work and immediately marched into a coworker’s office. This coworker is really the only person in the office I ever talk to about personal issues, and he happens to be a he (a married with 3 children he, so don't go getting your hopes up my lovely readers!) I shut the door and turned to him, with my tomato red upper lip and equally swollen eyebrows. "How could you?" I said. He looked at me confused and finally asked "How could I what?" He could tell I was upset, so he didn't mention my awkwardly raw face. "How could you not tell me I was getting HAIRY?" I practically burst into tears. That's when he started laughing; loudly and obnoxiously. This just made me angrier. "I'm serious!" I shouted, "I depend on you to tell me when I start looking like a troll! How am I ever going to find a baby daddy with all this extra hair?" He finally stopped laughing long enough to say "You have lost your mind. If you were growing extra facial hair, you can bet I would have said something to you. In fact, I would have taken pictures and used them to torment you for months after you fixed it. You have not gotten hairier. Some woman duped you into getting waxed so she could make her commission."
“Oh.” I thought. “I'm an idiot.” I had allowed this woman to play on my silly insecurities. She had totally used me, both to pad her wallet and to keep me occupied until my stylist was ready. Bitch. And now, I was at work (red and swollen) and had just fed my one buddy harassment material that could last him at least the next year. It's going to take me months to come up with something equally humiliating to pin on him. I immediately called and canceled my next appointment.
And when I got home, I went straight to my medicine cabinet and ensured that I wasn’t running low on the Nair.
