The first time I got my eyebrows waxed was for my fifth grade graduation. My mom said she was my age when she first got her eyebrows done, so it felt like a familial rite of passage.
As I lay on the waxing table, anxiously anticipating how it would feel to remove the center of my thick dark unibrow, I thought to myself Beauty is pain, a phrase I heard constantly growing up. When I made my freshly waxed appearance at school, it was the first time I received praise for my looks. I had never gotten so much attention from my classmates ― let alone hear them call me “pretty.”
As a kid, I was chubby and curly-haired, and I always wanted to be the center of attention. I never considered myself beautiful. When I started getting compliments on my appearance, it reenforced an idea that our culture puts in girls’ minds: You must be hairless to be attractive.
I continued to wax, pluck and thread my eyebrows. Soon I found myself spending significant amounts of money on the latest body hair removal product, desperately trying to find one that wouldn’t irritate my skin and could handle my coarse hair. The hair on my legs and the backs of my thighs, in particular, was a huge insecurity, and making sure I didn’t miss any spots was a tedious and time-consuming process. Eventually I realized I would rather spend my time doing something other than worrying about my hair, a naturally occurring part of my body. I was sick of feeling embarrassed and overly aware of my thick dark hair, and I started to question why I felt the need to remove it.
I realized I had spent my whole life as a target ― and eventually a product ― of the marketing campaigns and beauty standards that corporations have imposed upon women. Let’s face it: The so-called “beauty industry” profits off of our insecurities by setting impossible standards. Models and entertainers are placed on pedestals as unachievable examples of what we are told we should strive to be.
The more insecure we are about our bodies ― for example, the hair on them ― the more we will spend trying to alter them. In the case of hair, this means using razors, tweezers, shaving cream, threading, waxing and laser hair removal. Hair removal is a multibillion-dollar industry, and a lot of time and money is spent making sure that we’re continuously removing our hair and buying products and services to do so.
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