Beauty is a Steaming Hot Layer of Wax
3 generations of women fighting the never-ending battle against body hair
At the age of 11, my armpits received a new inhabitant: a soft, black cloud of hair. I’m finally becoming a real woman! I thought. I proudly wore my favorite pale blue spaghetti strap top to school. However, instead of compliments, I got disapproving stares, whispers, and giggles from all the clear-underarm girls. I felt my body sink into a pit of teenage shame.
“Mom,” I yelled from the door as I arrived home from school. “Can you help me get rid of my armpit hair?”
“You’re too young,” she said.
“But mo-ooom…”
My mother’s worldview was marked by growing up with the hippie and feminist movements of the 60s and 70s. To her, body hair was natural and beautiful. But in the 90s, when I was growing up, Portuguese society and pop culture had shifted backward (as she put it). Women’s body hair was now disgusting, something that should remain hidden and removed behind closed doors.
So my mother succumbed to societal pressure and became a winter hippie. In the cold months, she’d let it all grow freely until a magnificent carpet covered her legs. Then, at the beginning of Spring, before the short skirt weather, she’d get out her gray electric wax warmer. She’d methodically cover her body in thick layers of hot wax and then rip it all off with stoic calm.
After I threatened never to show my armpits in public again, my mom agreed to give me money to go to the neighborhood hair salon. There, the esthetician guided me to the white room at the back and asked me to take my shirt off. Hospital vibes and the scent of molten wax filled the air. I laid on the adjustable bed and waited for a few minutes, but the suspense of what I was about to experience made it feel like an eternity. After the beep from the wax machine, I stretched my arm up, and the esthetician spread the pink goo on my underarm with a wooden spatula. I flinched as the scorching fluid hit my skin and merged with my hairs.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “It feels like it’s burning your skin, but it’s not really.”
She blew on the wax, tested the edge to see if it had hardened, and then went, “One, two,” I squeezed my eyes shut, “Three.”
Rip.
A tear rolled down my face.
“Are you OK?” the esthetician asked.
“Mm-hmm,” I nodded, biting my bottom lip.
She repeated the procedure until most of my armpit hair was gone and plucked out the last few standing strands using a magnifying glass and tweezers.
The pain quickly faded (that’s the magic of waxing). I left the hair salon feeling excited, free to show my armpits to whoever I wanted without fear of disapproval. I was ready to come back once the tiny bastards started growing again.
About a year later, my mother died. At the time, I remember that one of the main things that preoccupied my pubescent mind was, Now that my mother is gone, how will I take care of my body hair?
My weekly allowance wasn’t enough for me to pay for the hair salon myself, especially now that I was also starting to get hair on my legs. And if I asked my dad, he wouldn’t understand. He’d call it a waste of money. I imagined becoming my school’s hairy monster, doomed to endless teasing.
In the following months, which were luckily winter months, I got several different hair removal recommendations from my aunts. My mother’s sister Bita swore by cold wax strips from the supermarket, assuring me they were pain-free. Yet, a quick demonstration at her home showed equal pain levels, and I didn’t dare to do it on myself. Nanda, her other sister, gave me a pink razor and told me to use it in the shower. This resulted in a pool of blood as I burst two mosquito bites I had on my legs. My father’s sister Margarida gifted me with a hair bleaching kit. After I applied it, my body hair remained dark and very visible, even after letting the product burn on my skin for way longer than recommended on the box.
Then, my paternal grandmother, Lurdes, came to the rescue. She was the only woman in the family who lived in the city of Coimbra, like me, and she started taking me to her esthetician. I jumped at the opportunity to get back to my trusty hot wax, professionally applied.
“When I was your age, in the 40s, we didn’t have the luxury of waxing,” she’d tell me as we sat in the waiting room. “My cousins and I used to remove the hair on our legs by burning it with candles, one strand at a time. It took very long, and sometimes we’d burn ourselves.”
She’d chuckle, as one does when remembering a horrible experience that is sufficiently tucked away in the past.
“Did grandfather also remove his beard hair with candles?”
“Don’t be silly, Lara.”
I developed a special bond of trust with my grandmother Lurdes, one that can only be formed when enduring hair removal together. I knew that whenever I needed to go, she’d take me, no questions asked. She had my back — even if I started growing hair on it.
At 18, I moved out of Coimbra, and I had to start paying for my hair removal myself. My tight student budget meant that the luxury of a monthly visit to the esthetician was no longer on the table. So I experimented with all sorts of cost-efficient methods I could do by myself, from hair removal creams to epilator devices. Unfortunately, I found that there was always a direct correlation between the pain level inflicted by the process and how long it kept the hair from growing. Of course, the painful methods come with the promise of thinner hairs and less pain the more you do them, but I must be exceptional because, to me, none of this happened.
Hot wax remained my preferred hair-removal method, even though I absolutely hated it. It felt like I was choosing the type of abusive husband with whom I’d prefer to spend the rest of my life. So, just like my mother, I only waxed in the warm months of the year.
And then, at 28, I was presented with something I couldn’t ignore in the winter. On top of my classic Portuguese mustache, I started growing a beard. All of a sudden, a dark peach fuzz covered my chin. Nobody said anything, but whenever I spoke to someone up close, I imagined their mind going, Oh my god! Is that a beard? Yuck! And for the rest of the conversation, I’d become a talking ball of fur to them.
I decided it was finally time to try laser therapy. It was the latest tech in hair removal methods: more expensive and longer-lasting. After 6–10 treatments, costing me an entire month of rent, I would (probably) be beard-free for months. It was a price I was willing to pay.
As I lay on the adjustable bed for my first laser treatment, wincing as the laser beams fried my facial hair follicles, the smell of burnt hair reached my nostrils. I had a vision of my grandmother removing her hair with candles.
After seventy years of social and technological change, I found myself in the same situation as my teenage grandmother: burning off my body hair just to feel accepted.
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