Hair and there

So much has been said and written about beauty care these days, for both men and women. And the joke that men do indeed take much longer than women to get dressed and ready for an outing is so old and tired that it is not worth repeating (which I just did, nicely neatly!). But think about it – how long do you, man, woman or anything in between, actually take when you are preparing for a day or night out?

Actually, the process starts long before the going out is thought of. In India particularly, beauty requires a certain hairlessness. Us Indian women cannot go forth without clean, smooth underarms, arms and legs, unlike the Europeans, who have enough sangfroid to carry even extensive growth off with casual chutzpah. And now even the men are self-conscious enough to want to be silky-skinned, without even pretending to need to be aerodynamically more efficient. So we go waxing, threading, depilating, epilating and otherwise defuzzing, never mind the cost and, more importantly, the pain involved.

I was at the beauty salon some time ago and found that the ratio of men to women was almost even. As I squeaked and winced and cringed my incredibly painful way through the process that threaded my eyebrows into their most-wanted shape, I watched the person in the chair next to mine with a certain furtive fascination. He – it was male, large and very hairy – was getting tiny hairs on the top of his chest pulled off, one by excruciating one, by a uniformed beautician with waxed thread held between her fingers. It hurt just to watch, even with my eyes watering copiously from my own pain. Once my own personal beautifier was done torturing me, I turned and blatantly looked at the man next door. He was, to my aching soul, a valiant warrior, braving nameless horrors in the timeless search for that elusive holy grail: beauty.

We all go through it at various times in our lives. The first time I had my legs waxed, many years ago, was decidedly memorable. I lay flat on a hospital-green sheet over a very hard mattress, wearing a fabulously ugly sack-like ‘frock’ that covered me from bosom to bottom, my legs bare, hairy and vulnerable. Using what felt amazingly like a steak-knife, serrations and all, a constantly-chatty lady with pencilled in bow-shaped eyebrows spread a sticky brown goo over my extended calves, pressed down a strip of cloth against it and yanked. I sat bolt upright, a scream starting to form somewhere deep inside me, my eyes tearing immediately, intensely. The pain was something I never imagined feeling, every pore of the skin on my legs awakened and alert, wary at the prospect of more. But the ‘more’ wasn’t too bad – the first pull had numbed every possible sense in my lower limb – until we did the first yank on the other leg, after which I had to be woken out of my rigour to go home.

Threading is another practical aspect of beauty that the mean-gods have invented just to punish us frail humans. Using a piece of dampened, twisted cotton, the threader pulls out one hair at a time from wherever – eyebrows, underarms, upper lip….shudder! – the threadee needs it. As each hair is tugged tortuously from its anchoring root, the stress that the threadee feels is palpable. There is a wince, a silent shudder, an occasional yelp as a little skin gets caught in the damp thread. Of course, there are alternatives – depilatories, for one, are less painful, but could cause allergies (if I were using them, they would, almost inevitably), epilators, which allow you to suffer pain in the privacy of your own home and lasers, which are more kind, at least on the nerves if not on the wallet. But that trend of thought goes into the logistics of beauty care, which is not the point, is it?

Beauty is not an easy business. As a doctor I one knew liked saying, “No pain, no gain.” He probably wasn’t talking about hair removal, stiletto heels or tattoos, but the basic truth still applies.