Waxing! OMG

[meowbunny]

Waxing . . . . My night began as any other normal weeknight. Come home, fix dinner, play with the kids. I then had the thought that would ring painfully in my mind for the next few hours:

'Maybe I should pull the waxing kit out of the medicine cabinet.'

So I headed to the site of my demise: the bathroom. It was one of those 'cold wax' kits. No melting a clump of hot wax, you just rub the strips together in your hand, they get warm and you peel them apart and press them to your leg (or wherever else) and you pull the hair right off.

No muss, no fuss. How hard can it be? I mean, I'm not a genius, but I am mechanically inclined enough to figure this out.

(YA THINK!?!)

So I pull one of the thin strips out. Its two strips facing each other stuck together. Instead of rubbing them together, my genius kicks in so I get out the hair dryer and heat it to 1000 degrees.

('Cold wax, yeah...right!') I lay the strip across my thigh. Hold the skin around it tight and pull. It works!

OK, so it wasn't the best feeling, but it wasn't too bad. I can do this!

Hair removal no longer eludes me! I am She-rah, fighter of all wayward body hair and maker of smooth skin extraordinaire.

With my next wax strip I move north. After checking on the kids, I sneak back into the bathroom, for the ultimate hair fighting championship. I drop my panties and place one foot on the toilet. Using the same procedure, I apply the wax strip across the right side of my bikini line, covering the right half of my hoo-ha and stretching down to the inside of my butt cheek (it was a long strip) I inhale deeply and brace myself....RRRRIIIPPP!!!!

I'm blind!!! Blinded from pain!!!!.....OH MY GAWD!!!!!!!!!

Vision returning, I notice that I've only managed to pull off half the strip. ****! Another deep breath and RIPP! Everything is spinning and spotted. I think I may pass out...must stay conscious...must stay conscious. Do I hear crashing drums??? Breathe, breathe...OK,back to normal.

I want to see my trophy - a wax covered strip, the one that has caused me so much pain, with my hairy pelt sticking to it. I want to revel in the glory that is my triumph over body hair. I hold up the strip!

There's no hair on it.

Where is the hair??? WHERE IS THE WAX???

Slowly I ease my head down, foot still perched on the toilet. I see the hair. The hair that should be on the strip...it's not! I touch.

I am touching wax.

I run my fingers over the most sensitive part of my body, which is now covered in cold wax and matted hair. Then I make the next BIG mistake...remember my foot is still propped up on the toilet?

I know I need to do something. So I put my foot down.

SEALED SHUT!!!!

MY BUTT IS SEALED SHUT!

SEALED SHUT!!!!

I penguin walk around the bathroom trying to figure out what to do and think to myself 'Please don't let me get the urge to poop. My head may pop off!'

What can I do to melt the wax?

Hot water!! Hot water melts wax!! I'll run the hottest water I can stand into the bathtub, get in, immerse the wax-covered bits and the wax should melt and I can gently wipe it off, right???

WRONG!!!!!!!******

I get in the tub - the water is slightly hotter than that used to torture prisoners of war or sterilize surgical equipment - I sit.

Now, the only thing worse than having your nether regions glued together, is having them glued together and then glued to the
bottom of the tub...in scalding hot water.

Which, by the way, doesn't melt cold wax.

So, now I'm stuck to the bottom of the tub as though I had cemented myself to the porcelain!! God bless the man who had convinced me a few months ago to have a phone put in the bathroom!!!!!

I call my friend, thinking surely she has waxed before and has some secret of how to get me undone. It's a very good conversation starter......

'So, my butt and hoo-ha are glued together to the bottom of the tub!'

There is a slight pause. She doesn't know any secret tricks for removal but she does try to hide her laughter from me. She wants to know exactly where the wax is located, 'Are we talking cheeks or hole or hoo-ha?'

She's laughing out loud by now...I can hear her. I give her the rundown and she suggests I call the number on the side of the box.

YEAH!!!!! Right!!

I should be the joke of someone else's night.

While we go through various solutions. I resort to trying to scrape the wax off with a razor

Nothing feels better than to have your girlie goodies covered in hot wax, glued shut, stuck to the tub in super hot water and then dry-shaving the sticky wax off!!

By now the brain is not working, dignity has taken a major hike and I'm pretty sure I'm going to need Post-Traumatic Stress counseling for this event.

My friend is still talking with me when I finally see my saving grace....the lotion they give you to remove the excess wax.

What do I really have to lose at this point? I rub some on and.

OH MY GOD!!!!!!!

The scream probably woke the kids and scared the dickens out of my friend. Its sooo painful, but I really don't care.

'IT WORKS!! It works!!' I get a hearty congratulation from my friend and she hangs up.

I successfully remove the remainder of the wax and then notice to my grief and despair....

THE HAIR IS STILL THERE.......ALL OF IT!

So I recklessly shave it off. Heck, I'm numb by now. Nothing hurts. I could have amputated my own leg at this point.

Next week I'm going to try hair color...

 

[KTMom91]

Are you able to sit down comfortably? I'm sorry your evening was so traumatic...and so glad that wasn't me!

 

[meowbunny]

Glad it wasn't me, either! But I thought it was hysterical when I read it. I'm an old-fashioned kinda gal: a razor or hair. I don't do pain.

 

[witzend]

My eyes are weeping, my nose is running and husband is laughing over my shoulder! He says "Can you like, send that to me?" You know how to pick em, girl!

 

[DammitJanet]

OMG....I was LMBO! You really had me going there.

 

[susiestar]

OMG!!!!!!!

this reminds me of when my mom tried to wax her legs. She had me help, as I was in high school and "of course" knowledgeabe about beauty stuff. I wasNOT!! Mom did ONE strip - put the wax on, then the fabric strip, then tried to pull it off. Not only did the strip not come off, it HURT!!! Dad came running to see what the screaming was all about, then fell over laughing. Then my bro and ONE OF HIS FRIENDS came in!!!!

We then heated the strip with a hair dryer and used needle nosed pliers to get a grip on the fabric (she had used the wax to cement ALL of the strip down). She continued to scream as my dad pulled on the strip and my bro held onto my mom..

It looked like a tug of war, no kidding!!!!!!!

This has convinced me to NEVER wax things.

I am sorry it hurt so bad.

 

[Hound dog]

MB

You need a warning on this post.

*May keel over due to oxygen deprivation from laughing so hard you forget to enhale*

easy child attempted to wax once. Enough said.

 

[gcvmom]

You're a natural, ya know that?

You need to get a job writing scripts for comedians... seriously!

 

[Abbey]

MB....

Thanks for making me a sucker. I THOUGHT IT WAS YOU!!! (Someone sell me some swamp land in Florida.)

That was flipping hysterical. Half a peanut butter sandwhich just went on my monitor.

You have this motion picture going on in your mind as you read. Fortunately, I have little or no body hair so don't have to deal with this, but I can only imagine. I savor what I have left on my head.

Damn that made me laugh.

Abbey

 

[Marguerite]

Oh dear.

As someone who has never been to a salon but has used just about every hair removal method except electrolysis, I can sympathise. And while we laugh now, it's not funny at the time!

I had to promise my mother that I would never, ever shave my legs. And I never have. I HAVE shaved my bikini line and I used to shave under my arms, but when I found i was getting small infections which my doctor said were due to tiny shaving nicks, I had to stop shaving entirely.

However, I had no desire to suddenly appear simian, so I needed to do something.

I talked to my sisters (who somehow escaped having to promise our mother; or, alternatively, have less problem breaking such promises). One sister told me in graphic terms to avoid hot wax. She described an experience similar to yours, only it was underarms. She made the mistake of spreading the wax on with a spatula, to BOTH underarms at the same time. She ripped the first one off, and the pain was as you describe - there was no way she could go through that again. But wait a minute - the other underarm still has wax on it! Oh, no - it's gone cold and hard!

She said she had to go to the emergency room to get it chipped off.

OK, that finished me with the stovetop hot wax kits. I really didn't relish the idea anyway, of melting it all out again and sieving out the hairs from the previous session.

So I bought a tube of depilatory cream, but found it all grew back prickly, as if I'd shaved my legs. It grew back dark as well. So I bought some blonding cream and bleached the hairs on my legs. It looked better, but I still had hairy legs.

Then I saw a hot wax kit that was one of those expensive roller thingies - the wax is in a rectangular plastic dispenser which has a roller on the top, so as you run it across your skin a very thin layer of warm wax is spread evenly. There are three different widths of these, a wide one for legs, a narrower one for bikini line and slightly more awkward areas and a narrow one for faces. You buy a small box which heats the wax dispensers to just the right heat. It sounded good - thermostatically controlled so you couldn't burn yourself, no chance of applying too much, the wax kept at the right temperature while you dealt with each strip one at a time.

So I gave it a go - ouch! But I did find, it hurts a lot more if you don't pull it off properly. If you get it wrong and the hair gets left behind, it hurts far more than if you successfully removed the hair. If you get it wrong, what still happens is each hair gets pulled just enough to really hurt, but not enough to remove it. It's the difference between ripping a bandaid off quickly, or pulling it slowly and gently and having it hurt far more. It took me a while to get the technique right.

What sounds like went wrong in your case - because you used the hair dryer, you heated the wax more than is usual. This means that it would also have taken longer to cool down enough to properly grip the hair, and would have also loosened its grip on the strip the wax came attached to. Probably if you'd waited longer, it would have been just right (like the three bears' porridge).

I strongly recommend anyone who is trying waxing for the first time, to NOT go for the bikini line first. Or armpits. Instead, do an area more socially acceptable in case you get it wrong. Like legs.

The first time I used my new hot wax kit on my eyebrows, I still managed to burn my skin. I no longer use it, because I have a permanent red mark between my eyebrows which is from the wax STILL being too hot, despite being 'thermostatically controlled'. Mind you, it did do a good job under my eyebrows.

Other options - cold wax. This stuff has the consistency of honey but won't burn. It also washes off in warm water. However, I have very oily skin and needed to thoroughly de-grease my face (and legs) before trying it. I found too often that it hurt a great deal and didn't remove a single hair (which is how I learned that it hurts a lot more when it 'misses'). With practice it wasn't too bad, certainly I never burnt myself with it. However, it was getting to be too much trouble to do large areas, so I tended to just use it for eyebrows.

Then I bought one of those epilator things. The first one I tried was the rotating coil thing. Ouch! It hurt awfully and wasn't too good at getting all the hair. I think it hurt so much because it was so BAD at getting the hair - it gripped it just enough to hurt, then slipped off it again.

So I got the one with the rotating head with lots of little tweezers on it. That was much better. it still hurt, but at least it did a good job. Then I found that when it's got a fully charged battery it not only does a great job, it doesn't hurt so much. But it can't do eyebrows, unless you take the whole lot off.

So current strategy - I use the tweezer epilator thing (Emjoi) on legs, bikini line, under arms and (now I'm menopausal) under my chin. I did it by feel under the chin, because I've found that the thing doesn't hurt, if there's no hair to grab. If it hurts, then it's doing its job.

I recently bought the newer depilatory creams, the ones with the growth inhibitors in them. It burned! I had used it on my (now increasingly dark and hairy) moustache and the area turned angry red, blistered, raw, with black speckles where the individual hairs had broken off. Not good. I gave it to a friend (one who had more resilient skin).

But there's one more product, which I use for my eyebrows - NADS. It's an Aussie product (although I suspect it's been made to one of those old family recipes that gets handed down). There's no wax in it; instead, it's based on sugar or honey. You use it cold (like cold wax) only I think it works better. It also washes off easily in warm water. You DO need to have your skin de-greased, but I'm happy with how it does my eyebrows. The name of the product is an acronym, based on the initials of the four daughters this woman has. They look Middle-eastern, they have said that they really needed something like this because of the family hairiness.

I had been doing my legs with hot wax for some time before I tried bikini line. NOT a good idea, in my opinion. I found out that the hair roots go in a lot deeper, in the bikini area - so deep, that the first time I actually drew blood from each hair follicle. Not a good look - we were going to the beach, I wanted to try something that would look tidier than a shave - but when you have a red area with lots of little bleeding spots, it definitely gets attention!

These days I have discovered that the Emjoi does armpits and bikini line very well indeed. After having done it so much, I no longer draw blood. But you DO have to hold the skin taut, or it gets snagged in those little tweezers. And since I've lost so much weight now that my skin is sagging like a shar-pei puppy, I REALLY have to be careful!

I'm far less hairy than I used to be - and I have managed to keep my promise to my mother - I have never, ever, shaved my legs!

Marg

 

[meowbunny]

Um, Marguerite --- IT WAS A JOKE! Please see Post #3 to this thread. Sometimes it helps to read everything before replying.

 

[Star*]

OMG PENGUIN WALKING - THE VISUAL ON THAT MADE ME HAVE TO SHUT MY OFFICE DOOR -

Now I'm in my office, door shut, laughing like I'm off the reservation......

THANK YOU FOR THAT....

 

[Marguerite]

Um, Marguerite --- IT WAS A JOKE! Please see Post #3 to this thread. Sometimes it helps to read everything before replying.

I did read everything. I thought it may have been. However, I've heard stories similar to this (not quite so exaggerated, but close) FOR REAL. I've seen some hilarious things. A lot of them looked like dead rats on the edge of the bathroom sink...

My sister really did have to go to the emergency room to get the wax off her second armpit. I really wish I'd been a fly on the wall.

And with the benefit of years of painful effort and some unofficial research, I have firmly come to the conclusion that hair removal methods should only be for people who are NOT hairy!

Somewhere in my ancestry is a Mediterranean mamma who I suspect had a dalliance with a gorilla...

The trouble with hair removal, when you're already so hairy - you rip off the first wax strip, and you're gone. It leaves a border, and you KNOW you're going to have to go over your entire body, or somewhere there will always be a hairy edge. Like, why do your bikini line, when you have really hairy thighs? You can see the edge, poking below your swimsuit. Why do just the lower legs, when... hey, you get the picture. A very fuzzy one.
And I have even hairier friends.

I don't think we evolved at all. I think when they wanted to populate Australia, they went to some jungle somewhere and just shook the trees. Artificially boosted the convict numbers to account for those that died on the voyage over.

Maybe that's why were all so tough?

Marg

 

[witzend]

This is why I pay someone to wax my brows and lip.

 

[Marguerite]

I just couldn't do that, Witz. I HAVE to know when it's going to happen, and to have some control over it.

Marg

 

[witzend]

I just couldn't do that, Witz. I HAVE to know when it's going to happen, and to have some control over it.

Marg

I know when they're going to do it, Marg! Right as she says "OK..." and grabs the cloth!

Besides, you have to remember that I keep trying to pluck my wrinkles because with my far-sightedness they look like stray hairs! Ouch!

 

[everywoman]

Thanks for the laugh.

 

[Abbey]

Witz...send me some of your brows. I'm down to about 10 hairs on each side. For years I've tried to pencil them in, but now it's looking like the 'old lady' look. Wait...I guess I am an old lady.

Abbey