Beauty
uncomfortable experiences
when you get a Brazilian wax
Like millions of other women, I voluntarily subject myself to pain every month. In fact: I pay a lot of money for it. Every four to five weeks, I hop on my bike to the wax salon, to walk out half an hour later all neat and tidy. You can have all sorts of feminist objections to that, but I want to skip over that for now. The first time I went was about 7 years ago, and in the years that followed, I always returned to the same lady. I saw her more regularly than my best friends, we discussed life and work, knew everything about each other's love lives because, well, you're lying there with your legs wide open, you can't get much more exposed than that. But due to various circumstances, I've been having it done at a large popular wax salon that has branches in Amsterdam among other places for about a year now. I make an appointment through their website and can usually get in the next day. The waxing process there is quick and almost painless. Or well, I’ve just gotten used to it by now, of course.
“You never really get used to lying in a frog position with spread flaps under a big operating lamp.”
The big downside of that new salon is that I have a different lady between my legs every time. Now, I generally don't mind that too much; we all have a vagina and if you’re going to act overly panicked about it, you shouldn’t get waxed at all. But no matter how accustomed I am to the pain, you never really get used to lying in a frog position with spread flaps under a big operating lamp. And then ‘the backside’, you have to lie on your stomach and hold your buttocks yourself so that the lady can, um, well, do her job properly, let’s say. One way or another: it’s always a bit uncomfortable.
Usually when I’m lying ready on the treatment table, the lady comes in and it’s a quick "hey-hello-everything-good-yes-me-too". A bit of small talk about the weather, a bit of complaining about wanting a vacation, and all that lasts no longer than 5 minutes. Then she gets to work, I refresh Instagram once more looking for distraction, and not much later I’m back outside. Fine.
But yesterday. I went again. And yesterday it went a bit differently. The lady who took care of me this time was just a bit too interested in what I do. “Do you have a day off today? Or do you work from home? As a freelancer or something?” Um, I stammered something about “yeah well, sort of, cough cough wow, it’s cold today, huh?” In no time she had turned the conversation back to what I did, so when I said: “I sometimes write a piece, it’s not much, I do more projects”, she was hooked. “Oh, so you write! How nice. About fashion and stuff? For magazines? Or blogs? And do you travel a lot for your work? Do you go to Fashion Week and stuff? And do you also do Instagram sometimes?”
Call me paranoid, but I swear to you that she either follows me on Instagram or that she reads along on the site sometimes, her questions were all just a bit too directed and a bit too precise. And I find that terrible. Look, that you study my kitty more thoroughly than many men ever have is one thing, but please do it in complete anonymity without knowing who I am or what I do. I just pretended to be doing “concept development”, you can’t get much vaguer than that, I thought. Of course, that’s no use, but it was a panic reaction and I didn’t know what to do.
As always, it was all done fairly quickly down there, and I went outside feeling slightly embarrassed again. Lady from the wax salon, if you’re reading along; hi. So I don’t do concept development and I actually write pieces quite often. But let’s keep everything just between us okay? And if I ever end up on your table again, just pretend your nose is bleeding and ask me again about my weekend plans and if I think it’s cold that day. Thank you kindly.
