Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow

or
Wax On, Wax Off

I am not a hirsute man. I will never make the centerfold of Bear Magazine (btw, possibly NSFW, ymmv), but as I grow older, past the point where the phrase “middle-aged” is unavoidable, issues with hair seem to be growing. Or not growing, as the case may be. For the better part of a decade I had been in plausible denial about the widening bald spot on the back of my head. My hairdresser knew better than to show me the trim in the back and I just avoided looking into parallel mirrors. Unfortunately, I recently changed to a less discrete stylist and a recent rash of candid group photos with me facing away from the lens have made the scales fall from eyes. That salad bowl sized display of cranial skin will never get smaller. I can live with that. I wear ball caps in the summer and hoodies in cold weather. I refuse to go the combover route and just take comfort knowing that I still have more hair than my celebrity doppelganger, Ron Howard.

It’s hair in other areas that is my concern. Years ago I was in a meeting next to a goblinesque-looking man with ear hair so long that it could have been braided into a pony tail. I vowed never to become That Guy. After a few painful lessons in the difficulty of plucking nasal hair, I learned that personal hair trimmers are reasonably priced and can be purchased discretely at most BigBoxOfChineseCrap stores. I even find the soft buzz of the spinning blades relaxing.

Unlike Stephen Carrell in The 40-Year-Old Virgin, I’m actually fairly proud of my soft dewy mane of chest hair that took several decades to fill in. But a few weeks ago my wife questioned if I would be interested in going to her nail salon to have my back waxed. An inquiry like that is similar to being offered a breath mint. You really shouldn’t refuse even if you don’t think you need it. I made some vague affirmative answer and let it go.

I attributed at least part of her interest in having my back shorn to the marketing skills of the nail tech industry. A decade ago, nobody went to a separate nail salon, but a generation of industrious semi-skilled Vietnamese immigrants have made the stand-alone nail salon as ubiquitous in strip malls as the dry cleaner and the tanning booth place. My wife has latched onto these places as a weekly social activity where she can be pampered and discretely brush up her rusty Vietnamese. As an aside, when the techs at these salons speak in their native tongue and start tittering, they are laughing AT you, not with you, so tip well and don’t be too annoying.

New Years Eve afternoon I was in my man-cave watching the alma mater getting thrashed on the Blue Field of Boise, writing my year end Best Of blogpost, and engaging in other nominally masculine behavior when the phone rang. My wife was at her latest salon (she skips around every few months) and said that there was no waiting for the waxing room. I put my testicles in escrow and went down to join her. Sure enough, the place was nearly empty. My wife was sitting in some sort enormous captains chair that looked it had been lifted from the Hello Kitty themed cockpit of an H. R. Giger spaceship. She had her toes up on blocks getting pedicured and was holding court with the bored techs.

I was led back to the closet sized waxing room by a woman who was a matronly cross between Linda Hunt and Dr. Ruth. She had me take off my shirt and sit in a rolling office chair backwards. The wax was heated nearly to point of scalding and the actually ripping of the wax was done quickly and relatively painlessly. The Velcro separating sound got louder the further down my back she went. I got briefly nervous just how far south she was expected to get me smooth, but to my relief she stopped at the small of my back.

The whole process took just a few minutes. My wife invited me to stick around for more girl talk, but I begged off explaining that I had the second half of an ass-kicking on DVR to get through at home. Truthfully, in my newly denuded state I was just a little self-conscious about hanging around and getting asked to show it off.

My only concern with crossing the hair removal Rubicon is just how quickly and uncomfortably the back fuzz is going to grow back in. I’m hoping to limit the procedure to a semi-annual event like a good dental cleaning. However, I must confess that I find the thought of sitting in a giant barcalounger while young women caress and fondle my feet slightly exciting. Maybe in the spring I’ll go in for a much needed pedicure and get my toes painted a nice manly shade of black or dark green.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: Share your personal grooming tale. Go ahead, it’s just us.

Update 1/6/08: The comic strip Zits takes this topic to another level.