When I went to Spain for my year abroad as a college junior, I got my legs waxed while being strapped vertically to a wall with a leather belt. I felt a bit vulnerable, but I didn’t question it as long as the wax did its job.
I went to India in 2003, the year I finished undergrad, to work at a newspaper, and got my entire face threaded. I said I wanted only the upper lip and eyebrows done, but Smita just kept going. She touched my cheeks and said, “Face?” I shrugged. She took that as a signal to wind up her thread and tear out all the fuzz from my cheeks, chin, and jowls.
Paid professionals were always trying to get rid of more and more of my hair. It happened again when I went to a bikini-waxing joint in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, a few years later. I just wanted a little off the sides, as the bush had been growing out for quite a while. When the waxer saw me—saw that part of me—she looked into my eyes with a fortune-teller’s boldness and shook her finger back and forth.
“The man does not like dis,” she said. She put her fingers toward her tongue, pretending to pinch out hairs. “Plaaaa plaaaa,” she said. Then she got all dramatic and faked a male choking episode. She slathered on the hot wax and said calmly, “Very good dat you are here.”
When we were done, she unzipped her pants to show me her bald pussy. “Look at it,” she said. “Look. No hair.” Then she tried to convince me to sign up for laser. “Plaa plaa,” she explained again as she zipped up her pants. “They do not like dat.”
The only thing I really came to enjoy about hair removal was the inevitable ingrown. There is nothing—and I mean it, nothing—more fundamentally satisfying than extracting a hair that’s been growing in the wrong direction. Period. Call it my nurturing side.
Little did I know the worst was yet to come. What happened next made me yearn for the days when a blond mustache was my only problem.
I was twenty-three. I was about to start a one-year journalism master’s program at Columbia and was getting a facial at Mario Badescu Skin Care salon on East Fifty-second Street in Manhattan. Everything was going well until the buxom Russian woman examining my face with a bright light rubbed my chin.
“You zchuld git reed of dis,” she said.
How did she see them? I thought I was the only person who knew.
She busted my years of self-denial. Toppled them. Crushed them into tiny shards. It’s like when you have a big red volcanic pimple and you just convince yourself that you’re making it out to be a much bigger deal than it actually is and most likely no one notices it, but then some friend says, “Ouch, that looks like it must hurt.” And they are pointing at your big red volcanic pimple that no one is actually supposed to be able to see, so you say, “What must hurt?” and they say, “Your big red volcanic pimple.” And you cover your face with one hand and say, “Oh, you can see that?” And they say, “Well, it is a big red volcanic pimple.”
So it was true. I had chin hairs that people could actually see. They were real. Like, actually there.
Hairs growing out of my chin!
I mean, I knew about them, of course, but I also didn’t. I believe my inability to recognize them as an entity—as a growing, living, real part of my body—stemmed from my self-preservation instinct. I’d even plucked them before, but I’d managed to convince myself immediately afterward that I hadn’t. My chin was smooth, dammit!
But now the jig was up. I started scanning my chin every morning for one of those evil hairs to reappear. I began carrying tweezers and a mirror in my purse.
I told no one of this new calamity. At least when I discovered my upper-lip hair, I knew that other women shared my shame. Upper-lip waxes were offered at salons. I’d never seen a chin wax mentioned anywhere, and I didn’t want to ask anyone about it, in case they told me they’d never heard of such a heinous thing.
I started having these disturbing fantasies that totally freaked me out: I have a mental break and go to a loony bin, but there’s no one there to pluck me. When I envision Insane Mara, I’m more embarrassed about the stray hairs than I am about the fact that I’ve completely lost my mind and am trying to make love to a trash can.
Or what about when I’m old? Old Mara’s hands are going to be so shaky from all the meds and her eyesight will be deficient, so there’s no way she’s going to be able to pluck with any kind of proficiency.
Or maybe Old Mara has Alzheimer’s and her grandkids will come visit as she stares at a wall and thumbs the hem on her shirt. “Is Grandma a he or a she?” they’ll say. I’m more embarrassed for Alzheimer Mara’s hair than for the fact that she thinks her nephew is her husband.
Or I get run over by a car on some New York street and I’m in a coma. My family rushes to Coma Mara’s bedside and they look at one another in shock, not because of my medical status, but because they realize I’m different from what they thought I was. “Oh my!” Mom says. “Did any of you know Mara had a goatee?”
I knew that there were many more important issues going on in the world and that my worrying about such an insignificant bodily matter was selfish and maybe even bordering on narcissistic, but I couldn’t help my feelings. I was irrational. Global warming was spawning under my skin. Genocide was happening on my face.
I finally had to talk to someone about it, and it was during my winter break from Columbia that it finally burst forth.
“Mom, I’ve got chin hair!”
“But I don’t see it.”
“It’s there,” I said.
She came in closer.
“Don’t come too close!”
“Why not?”
“’Cause then you’ll see it!”
She blamed it on my dad’s side of the family and never spoke of it again.
I continued to pluck my way through my master’s program, and from then on kept my chin hairs to myself. But in the midst of all this, I began dating a guy. We were fooling around—nuzzling, hugging—one day in Central Park. Tenderly, he put his hand on my face. “I love the fuzz on your face,” he said. “It’s so soft.” He then made a downward stroking motion from my cheek all the way to my chin. That moment may have seemed romantic to him, but it was the closest I’d ever come to shitting myself besides that one time I had dysentery and was stuck on a twelve-hour bus ride from Dharamsala to Delhi. I turned in the other direction as quickly as possible and encouraged him to fondle my hoodie.
I would never put myself in that position again:
Natural sunlight.
Bare face.
Man at close range.
After attending grad school, I moved to Bangkok for a job as a features writer at a Thai newspaper.
In retrospect, not the best idea in the world for a hairy Western five-footer with budding self-esteem issues.
Thai people, as it turns out, aren’t hairy. They don’t have any hair except on their heads. They seemed like magical people to me with all their hairlessness, like they lived in some kind of fairy-tale world. I kept looking for hair, scanning crowds for it to reassure myself that I was normal. Maybe I was overreacting—at this point I’m pretty sure I had some form of body-hair dysmorphic disorder—but I often felt like if I stopped plucking, I’d be able to grow more impressive facial hair than most Thai men. That thought made me feel so unsexy that it’s hard to properly explain.
That’s when I decided to try “permanent reduction” methods for the first time. It was 2005 when I finally signed up for laser. Once a month, I would go to a Bangkok hospital called, I swear, Bumrungrad. I’d lie on