I am down with aging. I celebrate growing older. I have come to peace with my wrinkles, my grey roots (thank you to my hair therapist for eliminating them every five weeks) and my dramatically deflated bosom.
But there is one thing that I cannot abide, and it is something that most women experience but all are loathe to speak about: facial hair.
The feminine mystique can take a bit of a beating as we go through life.
Every day when I drop off my son at junior high, I see beautiful, young girls with their backpacks and their phones and their girl-posses trudging into school. These girls have no idea how beautiful they are. They see highly filtered Instagram and Snapchat posts beside their own human reflections, they see photoshopped beauties on TV (do they still watch TV?) and in movies. These girls, glowing with youth and flavoured lip gloss, probably are criticizing their thighs, their skin, their hair, and anything else that life makes them feel badly about.
Girls, embrace your beautiful youth, because one day you will look in the mirror and see a long, wiry black hair emerging from your chin.
I know! No one wants to talk about it. But the best way to not talk about it is to eliminate the problem, and in order to do that, I have some tips that you'll need after 35.
Did you know that tweezers can just stop working? It’s true. My old trusty pair gave up the ghost after a solid three decades of work. One day they worked, and the next day nary a hair could be grasped between their tiny pinchers. I did wonder if I was drunk/ hungover/ had too much coffee/ had developed some kind of weird hand-eye coordination issue, but no. They were dead.
Note to self: maybe next time splurge on a new pair of tweezers more than once every thirty years.
But when a door closes a window opens and in my local drugstore I found these.
What an age we live in. Tweezers with a built-in light to reveal all. Unfortunately, it was a bit of a Pandora’s box, because with a UV light on my face I realized what horrors lay there. My friend reassured me that no one noticed that I was actually the bearded lady because normal people do not walk around shining UV lights on their friend’s faces to criticize their facial hair.
But as we all know, at the bottom of Pandora’s box was hope, and these little tweezing miracles give me hope for a chin-hair-less future.
Years ago, someone told me that as we age, the hair on our heads becomes thinner, and so the hair on the upper lip wants to make up for the loss. Sadly, many of us are discovering our inner Magnum, PI as the years go by. And as much as I love my new tweezers, there are some jobs that call for more power.
Say hello to your new friend, wax strips! I love these babies because they are really, really easy to use. There is no heating-wax-on-the-stove-and-cleaning-up-after involved. There is just the rubbing of the wax strips between your hands to warm them, and then using them on your upper lip. Of course, if you have Reynaud’s syndrome like I do, this is easier said than done, but it is still easier than traditional waxes. I have very sensitive skin and these do not irritate. Well, I wouldn’t wax right before going out on the town, but that’s just common sense.
Again, it can be horrifying to see the hair on the wax strips in the harsh light of the bathroom, but just be glad they are on your wax strip and not your face.
Maybe DIY hair removal is not for you. Maybe you’re not a “rip the bandaid off” kind of person. That’s okay; there are lots of great professionals out there who will gladly do it for you. They can also shape your eyebrows, making upkeep a snap, and maybe even give you a scalp massage while they are at it. This isn’t something I have personally done, as shown by my experience of being eyebrow-shamed on the internet, but if you can find someone you trust to help you keep the hirsute face in check, then hang on to them for dear life.
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