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NotJustAHatStand

People say life is the thing, but I prefer reading*
 

Tangoed

Friday, July 20, 2007

I have a typical Scottish complexion. For those of you who don't know, this means white. As in, milk bottle white. Pure incandescent white.

Now, my wedding dress is also white (actually it's ivory but, meh). The point is that my natural colouring means I blend in so well with the dress that you barely see me. So I went for a spray tan yesterday, as a practise run to see how I would look with a bronzed glow, in preparation for tomorrow when I get to collect The Dress, and prance around my mum's living room with it on.

So. I am instructed to remove all my makeup (gargh!) and am shown into a tiny room (really more of a cupboard) with a non slip floor, and a scary looking contraption with hoses and cylinders in one corner. The drop-dead gorgeous beauty therapist (why are they always supermodel material? Just to make you feel really inadequate?) tells me to remove all my clothes, gives me a plastic shower cap and a pair of paper pants to put on, then leaves the room. Why they feel the need to give you privacy when you're getting your kit off is beyond me - they're about to see you in all your glory anyway - but I'm sure they have their reasons.

So there I am, pretty much in the altogether, peely-wally in the bright glare of the spotlight directly above me, without the usual scaffolding and cosmetic enhancements of clothes and makeup, and all my wibbly bits and imperfections in plain view. Then Gorgeous Beauty Therapist comes back in looking, if it's possible, even more supermodelly. She fires up the contraption in the corner, and begins the process of turning me from pure brilliant white to healthily bronzed. She shouts various directions to me above the noise of the contraption - raise this arm, lift that leg, turn this way, turn that way, in, out, shake it all about. I feel like a Ford Fiesta in the garage getting a re-spray.

But by the end of it, I look more tanned than I have ever been in my life. When I go on holiday, I start off my natural white, then turn pinker and pinker as the week goes on. I then go ever so slightly brown, and by the time I've been home a week I'm white again. So it was a bit of a shock to see myself looking anything other than pasty white.

I got another fright this morning when I looked in the mirror. They advise you not to shower or wash until the next morning, so the actual tan, and the brown stuff they spray on you to make you tan, combined to make me look startlingly beige. Thankfully the colour calmed down a fair bit after my shower, so I don't look like I've been tangoed (hopefully). My colleagues didn't point and laugh when I came into the office this morning, so I'm taking that as a good sign.

I do have an amusing outline of pure white where the little paper pants were - I considered taking a picture of it, purely for comedy value, but I really don't think I can (or should) stoop to posting pictures of my arse on the internet.

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Wax on...

Thursday, February 22, 2007

I work in an office full of women. Today the topic of Britney Spears going back into rehab prompted a discussion of the shaved hoo-hoo that she decided to flash to the world a few months ago, specifically why she would want to do that. Shave it, I mean, not let people take pictures of it. I looked at those NSFW pictures of her undercarriage and it wasn't pretty - stubbly, lopsided, and with a lovely caesarian scar to top off the whole sorry mess. If she wanted to show off her area what was wrong with dying it pink or something?

So this brought us onto bikini waxing. Only three out of the seven women there had ever had a bikini wax, which I found quite surprising. And I was one of them.

It's a strange experience, being in a room with a near-stranger, clad in only your smalls. The woman I used to go to was a tiny blonde lady whose innocent appearance belied her sadistic streak. She seemed to enjoy inflicting pain on her clients and was completely unsympathetic to any pain you might be feeling. The good thing about her was that she would happily tell you about all the weird clients she had, in order to distract you from the hot wax she was slathering on your ladyparts and then ripping off with gay abandon. She told me once about a woman who lay there in just her bra and asked Sadistic Bitch for a hollywood.* She then apparently, ahem, enjoyed the pain that that causes. If you know what I mean.

*Which is, for those of you who don't know, the full monty. The bald eagle look.

ANYWAY, I don't go there anymore. I'm too skint to pay a small person to rip my body hair out by the roots on a regular basis so I wax my legs myself, which is actually quite easy to do. I think the nerve endings in my legs have been deadened by all the years of waxing by Sadistic Bitch, so it doesn't hurt too badly either. Unfortunately this doesn't extend to the bikini line. I tried once to wax that myself and it was Hell. On. Earth.

I used a hot wax kit. The wax was nice and warm, ready to be 'smoothly applied to the area' and I was standing by with the linen strip, ready to remove it 'in a swift and decisive motion'. But someone neglected to tell the marketing man at Veet that it is IMPOSSIBLE to remove a wax strip from your own sensitive area DECISIVELY. There's a REASON that waxers are sadistic bitches! I pulled that strip with all my strength, and it yanked HALF of the wax off my skin and NONE of the hair. Which left me in the awkward position of still having a (now very tender) hoo-hoo covered in wax, but without the strength of will to try another linen strip. I ended up having to sit in a nice warm, baby-oiled bath for a while to remove the wax. And by the end of it there were about three less hairs than there had been to begin with. Next time I need to be neat I'm going back to Sadistic Bitch.

Ladies, if you ever get it in your head that waxing your own bikini line is a good idea - my advice to you is don't do it. Step away from the Veet. It's not worth it, really. Go to the salon.

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*Logan Pearsall Smith



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