Don't Try This at Home: An Exorcism by Waxing

It started with a familiar emergency: a manicure so grown out, I couldn’t focus on anything else. The tell-tale sign is when I do my hair and strands get caught in the space between my nail and where the manicure’s starting to lift. Just talking about it is sensory torture.

My usual tech was booked and busy, so I made an appointment with whoever the salon had available. That they have two crusty men on staff had simply missed my radar, because sure enough, I got stuck with one of them. His clothes were covered in stains, silver nametag caked in what appeared to be some kind of icing??? Energy drinks strewn about, *plus* a venti Starbucks order with a good four inches of whipped cream melting down like chemtrails. Reeked of cigs and he kept fucking SCRATCHING ME with his LONG, SHARP, YELLOW ASS NAILS.

Naturally he was sweet as pie. And his whole Pig-Pen vibe was comforting when he removed the hard gel from my right pointer nail to reveal a dark green fungus. :-D

I gasped. I did not know what I was looking at. Pig-Pen told me that sometimes moisture gets trapped between the hard gel and the nail and fungus grows. Said it was no big deal. So I listened to one of the more outwardly unhygienic people I’ve ever let touch me and continued getting my nails done over top of fungus. Clean girl aesthetic!

As far as “beauty bloggers” go, I sure am prone to wrecking my shit. That’s partially why I call Broke But Moisturized an alt-beauty publication: You will find more how-not-tos than how-tos. Lessons from the ancient void of my reflection that cannot translate into conventional “get ready with me” content, try as I may.

The following story is no exception…

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Does the word “tinkle” mean anything to you beyond, perhaps, a cute way to talk about peeing with someone under the age of four? I was once bewitched by medspa gobbledygook which stressed the importance of “dermaplaning,” i.e., shaving your face to improve product absorption. The Tinkle is a popular dermaplaning razor produced by Korean shaving giant, DORCO.

Stray Tinkles float around my beauty drawers; their plastic handles in pastel green, yellow, and peach sprout from under eye shadow palettes. The flora and fauna of Planet Gorgeous! I still reach for them when I start looking like somebody’s nonna.

I’d recently scraped a dull Tinkle against my upper lip and when I heard the stubble CRUNCH like ice on a windshield, I wondered, damn, do I really gotta live like this?

The truth is no one has to live like anything for longer than overnight shipping. I summoned my robot butler and had him order me the cheapest waxing kit with the highest reviews, and advised him not to tell me where it comes from because that’s none of my business.

The Tress Wellness waxing kit arrived a few days later. At just $37, I expected Temu vibes with broken parts, poorly translated instructions. The quality wasn’t bad, though, and the customer experience was well-accounted for in this melange of purple plastic. For example, they like, really, really want you to download their app, WaxPal; they have printed the WaxPal QR code on every available surface.

In retrospect, maybe Waxpal could have saved me from myself. But as an American I know I cannot undo past brutality. I can only make the same mistakes over and over and over.

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To set the scene, you should know that the only bathroom in our house is connected to the nursery where my sweet baby was snoozing away. Baby sleep. Delicate thing. Sure would be a shame if someone started shouting at the top of their lungs.

I put my husband on “do not disturb” and locked myself in the bathroom. Set the wax warmer up on the sink. Stripped down and got to work.

Wax comes in bead form, if you didn’t know. I sure didn’t. The Tress Wellness kit came with five bags of beads in lavender, eucalyptus, lemon, peppermint, and tea tree. Aren’t three of those pretty much the same thing? The sharpness of eucalyptus, peppermint, and tea tree sounded activating, like smoking a menthol cigarette with my vagina. Lemon risked smelling like a freshly mopped floor. Calming lavender was the only option.

I sat naked waiting for the wax to melt for a long time. Shivering. Cranked the thermostat to 73 from my phone so that I didn’t have to leave the bathroom and make my husband think he could come off DND or that my nakedness was an invitation.

To pass the time, I filed my nails on the edge of the tub like a girl in a movie. Eventually the temperature on the wax warmer read 130 degrees, and the beads turned to thick glue. All systems a-go!

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Our reliance on search engines, forums, and large language models to navigate new experiences is an objectively pathetic norm from which we cannot extricate ourselves. He who rolls the dice is often regarded as an idiot or insane. So much for “you can just do things.”

Now, I’ve written about my risk aversion ad nauseam. Any time I try something without consulting the existing literature is pure oversight. This experiment was particularly wild of me to approach blindly because I’ve never even been waxed professionally before. Not even my eyebrows. I am an idiot and I am insane.

After I successfully patch-tested my forearm, I spread the wax like it was no big deal—mayo on a sandwich!—directly under my c-section scar. This tender part of my body that I need to lift my fat to access. Yeah, you read that right.

I let the wax harden for 30 seconds and when I went to pull it off, it became clear that I did something… many things… very fucking wrong. It was gonna require a pickaxe and a man in overalls to remove. So I did what anyone with a low pain tolerance would do and pulled it off in slow, excruciating increments causing 100x the pain of just ripping it off in one go, yelping and hyperventilating like “HOO HOOO HOO OW OW OW OW HOO HOO OW” with every tug.

Laying on the floor in a cartoon bubble of red, stinging pain, spread before an LED makeup mirror, I frantically Googled “how to make waxing hurt less.” Here’s what I gathered and where I messed up:

1. Take ibuprofen an hour beforehand to reduce inflammation. Limit or forego caffeine or alcohol. Half the time I don’t even take anything for a raging headache, so obviously I wouldn’t think to pop some anticipatory ibuprofen. I had my fourth coffee of the day an hour prior, a decision I’m not sure this information would have influenced.

2. Hold the skin very taut. Is it possible to have done the opposite of this? Like, hunched forward, skin folding into itself all loose and squishy?

3. Wax in the direction the hair grows. You know, I’ve been advised to do things “in the direction the hair grows” throughout my life and never once has it been clear to me what direction the hair is growing. Sounds like a me thing.

4. Don’t pull up vertically; pull back parallel to the skin like you’re trying to skim across the surface. Interesting.

5. Working slowly hurts significantly worse than ripping the strip off in one go. VERY INTERESTING.

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Ok then, I thought, now I have enough information to wax like a pro!

I started waxing other areas to moderate success. Easy stuff, inner thighs. My confidence was building, and I knew I had to finish the job.

Consider this: At the end of the world, you will come face-to-face with the manifestation of all good and evil in the form of your unshaven labia, asking you to choose the red pill or the blue. Might I suggest keeping your bush?

There are certain parts of the body that are immune to best practices. I checked every box above and when I went to pull the wax off, it felt harder and more affixed than ever. The tiniest tug and I was SCREAMING bloody murder. And then the baby was screaming bloody murder and the whole house broke into cacophony and still, purple wax was fusing to my vagina, and I did not know what to do.

Google said oil loosens hard wax. The Tress Wellness kit comes with an oil-based after-care spray to soothe the skin and remove any residue. This helped loosen things, but it was still fully stuck, and I was still screaming. What kind of evil is assigned to female body hair that we engage in such acts of self-mutilation to exorcise its spirit? At this point, I seriously considered dialing 9-1-1 and giving some EMT the story of a lifetime. I would have put makeup on and everything.

Oiling away, I could see the wax lifting from my skin, now mostly glued to the hair. I thought about my disgusting manicure and the space between body and artifice where we make decisions about the kind of people we want to be. With my last dying breath, I had Andrew get these tiny nail scissors from my makeup drawer. I wedged the blades under the wax where it was starting to lift and snipped the hair. I was free.

Out of curiosity, I scanned the WaxPal QR code. Only I can save me from myself, after all.