So today I got a bikini wax.

I had no burning reason to get one, mind you, I don’t swim and have no immediate plans for anybody to be viewing said area.  Still, there I was at the salon getting my hair color touched up, and I hadn’t brought a book, so I had time to kill while the color set. What the hell, I thought. Never had it done before. Let’s give it a try.

I tell ya, my scientific curiousity gets me in more trouble than my heart and my hormones combined.

Now, I expected it would hurt. And this didn’t particularly worry me. I have a mental image of myself as a dreadful wuss, but I know rationally that it’s inaccurate, the proof of which is tattooed around my bicep. You can’t get a tattoo that thick across the underarm without a fairly significant pain tolerance, and my survival of multiple root canals is also an argument for the defense. I may whine, I may bitch, I certainly twitch–okay, I squirm like a gaffed eel–but generally I’m tougher than I look. Or think I am.

Still, hot wax on the nethers. So I was all steeled up for unprecedented agony and…

…you know, it barely hurt.

“That’s it?”

“Well, it hurts more if you want a full Brazilian, but yeah.”

I was astonished. It wasn’t bad. Not nearly as painful as an eyebrow wax, hardly even as bad as a leg wax, and nothing like as bad as an underarm wax. The closer to the middle, the more nerve endings, for obvious reasons, but really not bad at all.

And then the wax got out of hand and started sticking to everything and not coming up. At all. There are things you prefer not to have happen to your southern climes, and lukewarm wax adhering with great tenacity to individual hairs is among them. I gazed at the ceiling and contemplated the madness that had led me here. I don’t even own a bikini, for god’s sake.

It still didn’t hurt much, it was just…messy. She kept apologizing. “It’s usually not this–come on–damnit–usually not this bad–oh, hell…” More wax. More wax not coming up. “Come ON! Really, I don’t know what’s wrong with the wax today…” I hung on tenaciously–if you keep the skin taut, removal is much less painful–and wondered vaguely whether not having to wield a razor around the delicate hinge of my thighs was really worth it.

“Look,” she said finally, having successfully dehaired the appropriate areas, “I’m just gonna put corn starch on it so it won’t stick to things, and it’ll all come off in the shower.”

“Right,” I said dubiously, eyeing the end result. On the one hand, my bikini line was as smooth as…well, as a badly plucked chicken, at the moment, granted all the aggravated hair follicles, but presumably those would settle down in a day or two.

On the other hand, it kinda looked like I’d been committing unnatural acts in a wax museum.

Oh, well. It did all come off in the shower, thankfully. We’ll see whether I am sufficiently amused by the novelty to risk the wrath of the House of Wax again…

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