High Cost of Beauty

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Being a female is not for the faint of heart. I’ve been one all my life and I can speak from hard earned experience. From the time we’re born, we’re adorned with cute bows in our hair and little undies with ruffles going across our backside. Some of us have our ears pierced before we even know we have ears.

When girls reach toddler age, we have all kinds of fun toys to introduce us to the world of hair and makeup. Little Tikes has a purse full of curlers, toy lipstick and nail polish, and even a little compact. There’s little feather boas and hats, and little glittery high heels. Our toddlers can dress up like a blind drag queens while they push their baby dolls in the stroller.

Hitting that awkward “tween” age when you’re not yet a teenager and you don’t feel like a kid anymore introduces you to a whole new world of makeup, nail and hair options. There’s pony tails with the hair already in them. Childhood friends like Tinkerbell and Hannah Montana want you to buy their bubble bath and artificial nails. Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen have their own line of cosmetics. Even if you’re a tween on a small allowance, you can go to the local drug store and buy .88 cent nail polish and lip-gloss, granted they’re the size of oyster crackers, but they sell like crazy.

Being a teenager is always a difficult time, and when you’re a female teenager, it’s like entering a whole new level of hell. You have to start worrying about your complexion, your weight, your hair, your clothes, what everyone else thinks about your complexion, you weight, your hair, well you get the picture.

You also have to start the life long drama of hair removal. For me this was a slow form of torture. I come from a family where the women get five o’clock shadows on their legs. That always makes hair removal a challenge when your hair is the texture and thickness of steel wool.

I started out shaving, and this worked fine, I’m so glad my blood clots quick or I never would’ve made it out of my 15th year. I saw a commercial for Nads, the pretty lady with the nice Australian accent, smoothing the green goo over some guy who looked like Chewbacca’s stunt double, and then ripping it off clean as can be. I got it home and tried it, all I could think of was they must’ve had that hairy guy sedated, because I felt like I was going to swallow my tongue when I ripped that first bit of goo off. It was so painful I was only able to do one knee cap. I went back to my old stand by shaving.

I then saw this ad for a wondrous new machine that looked like a electric razor but had a metal coil instead. The overly cheerful lady promised that my hair would be “whisked away” quick and painlessly. I rushed right out and laid out my 39.95. I turned it on and pressed it to my ankle. I think this device was originally invented for the Nazi camps. Because if I had any war secrets, I would’ve been spilling them right then. The coil actually yanked my hair out of the follicles, leaving little tiny bloody holes. I could only do my ankle. I couldn’t get the courage up to use it again. I walked around with little pimples on my ankle for two weeks while my skin healed. I brought it back to the store for a refund and the customer service clerk informed me that everyone of the epi machines that were sold have come back. Evidentially it wasn’t just my low pain tolerance, other women couldn’t stand it either.

Sometimes men see women as fragile, dainty creatures. I’d love to put a man up to the epi lady challenge, or a session of waxing and see how fragile he thinks women are after that. We put ourselves through hair removal, constant makeup trends, uncomfortable shoes, tight clothes, coloring our hair with chemicals so strong it peels the paint off the bathroom wall. And why do we do it? To get a few compliments from our men? Not really, I enjoy looking good for myself. And of course the occasional wolf call from a construction site never hurt either.

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