Every Tuesday was the day of the appointment. A tiny salon off a busy business street, the type with a small waiting area and a laminated price list taped to the front desk—four weeks without fail. Lying on a paper-covered table in a room with a subtle disinfectant and warm sugar odor, I watched the ceiling and braced myself for the next strip. Throughout the entire process, a question that was never fully considered kept coming up beneath the excitement and mild fear: why exactly is this non-negotiable?
Waxing isn’t really a choice in the traditional sense for many women. The appointment is ongoing. A line item that appears frequently. Something that is scheduled similarly to dentist appointments, but no one asks if you truly want to go. Over the past century, the grooming industry has accomplished something subtly remarkable: it has made body hair removal seem like routine maintenance rather than a conscious choice. By the time most women are scheduling their first Brazilian in their early twenties, a magazine, a well-meaning aunt, or a PE changing room has already given them the answer to the question of whether or not to wax by the time they are twelve.
The figures show a sincere financial commitment. Depending on location and frequency, regular waxing of the legs, underarms, bikini line, and upper lip can cost anywhere from $500 to well over $1,000 per year. That’s before accounting for the less obvious expense: the two to four weeks of forced hair growth before each session, during which time many women report avoiding intimacy, swimming, or even specific clothing because the transitional period feels inappropriate. It’s a cycle that seldom gets examined as such because it requires both money and a low level of self-consciousness to sustain.
The pandemic may have been the first time that many women actually challenged that cycle—not voluntarily, but by necessity. Appointments were canceled, salons closed, and an intriguing development occurred: the world did not end. Women’s stories about dealing with lockdown body hair were gathered in a 2020 Refinery29 article with a kind of bewildered candor. Some became frightened. Sugaring was discovered at home by some. One woman casually observed that the length of her leg hair had surpassed the coronavirus beard of a man. Another claimed to be living her best life after lasering everything years ago. However, a few spoke of something more subdued: a slow relaxation of the sense of urgency, a realization that the sky was still there and the hair had been there all along.
When the appointments end, there’s a sense that something is just waiting to make a comeback. Checking in on regrowth with the same critical gaze that the beauty industry spent years training into muscle memory gives the first few weeks a unique texture. It doesn’t go away overnight. However, for many women, something changes after six weeks. The frequency of the monitoring decreases. Instead of being a project that requires constant intervention, the body simply becomes the body once more.
The return time is something that no one can adequately prepare you for. Not just the hour spent in the salon, but also the mental burden of scheduling, tracking, planning for growth phases, and the subtle guilt of missing an appointment. It turns out that body hair has nothing to do with permanently canceling wax appointments. Reclaiming a specific type of attention that was subtly leased to a standard that most women never consciously accepted is the goal. The moment the choice becomes truly free, the entire exercise takes on a different character, regardless of whether the person decides to wax, shave, laser, or just leave things as they are. That could be the unexpected aspect, more than the savings or the smoothness.
