7 Places Your Mum Never Warned You Hair Would Sprout From!
As ladies, we can all remember that day as a teenager when we found our first ‘stray hair’ down there. Were you scared or happy? Me? I was scared shitless. I remember looking down and for a split second thinking “Arrrghhh a spider”. My mother, of course, found it hilarious and bought me a single red rose because I was now ‘blossoming into a young women’. I was not impressed. Since when did excess hair make you more of a woman?!
Anyway, somewhere in all the fuss and confusion, between ‘girl talks’ and new hygiene routines being taught, my mother must have simply forgotten to warn me about the other 7 places I would at some point find hair sprouting from! I don’t blame her really, because had she told me I think I would have wanted to give up being a ‘lady’ right there and then.
So, despite being traumatised over the years, I have now grown accustomed to the odd sprouting hair and have recently discovered that I am not ‘abnormal’. In fact, most women have hair in the same places, we simply all take the same ‘hair today gone tomorrow’ advice and get rid of these unwanted visitors as soon as possible, vowing to never speak again of their appearance. Well, I am here to blow the lid off the secrecy box and ‘out’ these nasty buggers for what they are, in the hope that I can reassure women who, like me, were not pre-warned.
1: The Chin Hair
Oh my God, did I cry when I first found this stray bugger. Mostly because I had seen my gran plucking them from her chin when I was a child and remember her saying ‘oh don’t worry, darling, this only happens when you are really old.’ Really OLD?! Since when was 25 really old?! The prickly black bastard reared its head not long after my 25th birthday – in exactly the same place my gran used to pluck out hers. I had assumed for years that it was some awful hereditary disease that only I had inherited. For years I carried around a tiny mirror and pair of tweezers and checked every day, paranoid that my then boyfriend would see it before me and label me a witch, a freak or worse. Nowadays, it can be there for a whole week before I find the time to get rid of it. I know it’s there, I can feel it, and I’m pretty sure that my husband has spotted it too – but I’m less worried about its immediate retrieval. Mostly because now I know it’s normal, and secondly because – if I’m honest – it’s going grey! So each time I pluck the little bugger out I get a little more depressed, because now I really am old!
2: The Moustache
As kids we laughed and joked about moustaches. We would drink deeply from our glasses of milk then giggle over the fact that we were old and had ‘milk moustaches,’ before wiping them away with the back of our sleeves. Oh, how I wish for those days again. Twenty years later and the damn things are real and as much as I wish they would wipe away with the back of my sleeve, it doesn’t work that way anymore. Instead I have spent years going though different creams, bleaches and even (shock horror) once shaved it (I’d noticed one night, while looking in the mirror, how dark it was getting and with no hair removal cream left, and a date to go to, I just thought ‘fuck it’… big mistake!). My mother never warned me about this – she never showed me what to do or how to get rid of it… instead I found myself staring at the shelves in Boots’ beauty aisle wondering if I was about to burn my face off with chemicals!
3: Knuckle Dusters
Holy shit, I remember sitting in my maths class as a child and genuinely being fearful for my life as Mr. Milne put his hand on my desk and my imagination ran away with me. I saw his hairy hands and knuckles sprouting more hair – the hands of a werewolf! I shit you not… I was petrified of that guy’s gorilla hands. Which makes it even worse when you hit an age when you look down at your hands and realize that yes, even women get hairs on their knuckles. It doesn’t make you a werewolf or even a man – it’s just a fact of life. I’m lucky, they are the finest, lightest hairs on my entire body, so I leave them be, but I know that there are women who struggle. Don’t panic ladies; it’s normal. It can be removed.
4: Peek-a-boo Toes
Yep – ok, I have to admit here that I did know about this one growing up – although I really hoped it would be an affliction I wouldn’t have to deal with. My mother has hairy toes, my dad even used to make fun of her for it. It’s normal, apparently. You just shave the tops of your toes at the same time as you shave your legs. This is one thing I vow to pass on to my girls, because let’s face it, a pair of gorgeous peep-toe shoes just won’t look the same with hairy digits!
5: Follow the Yellow Brick Road
Belly hairs; also known as ‘The happy trail.’ Yes, yes… I know. This generally applies to men; but here’s a heads up ladies, it happens to us women too. (Gasp!) The trail is a little line of stray hairs that lead from the belly button all the way down to the pubic bone, just like the yellow brick road winding its way to the emerald castle! This is meant to be like a cute little arrow pointing the way to the forbidden land. Only it’s not attractive for us women. Not in my opinion, anyway. Those tiny little stray hairs, the ones that act like a breadcrumb path for all those men that might get lost or disorientated, can simply piss off. This is where my trusty tweezers come into a world of their own yet again. No razors for me, not here, just a tiny wee pluck and poof they are gone. Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow. Men will just have to figure out another way of finding the secret garden, because there will be no happy trail leading them to it!
6: Boobs
It’s not only men that get hairs on their chest – women do too. It’s one of the secrets I was most unhappy about my mother keeping from me because for years I thought I was totally abnormal when I found a long black hair sprouting from the side of my nipple. They seem to come from nowhere and catch you unaware! I’m not so sure about everyone else, because I have to admit it wasn’t until I Googled to see if I was some kind of mutant that I realized it was a normal occurrence, but I pluck these little buggers out as soon as they sprout. Despite Dr Google telling me this is totally okay, I would still hide my face in shame if my husband were to find one of these little blighters.
7: Bum Fluff
God damn it, even writing this one makes me cringe – but it’s for a good cause, right?! Yes, the Brazilian Wax was invented for a reason. Not all ladies manage to get through their entire adult life looking as well groomed as a porn star. Despite what men would like to believe, we are not all silky smooth from head to toe, and if we are, it’s taken a lot of time and pain to get there… and the butt crack is no exception. As fine as they are, we all know they are there. So if you have the balls and the pain threshold… just get rid!
So ladies – I have explored 7 areas of our wondrous bodies that we were never warned we would be sprouting hair from; it is normal, it is human and it does not mean we are werewolves. It just means we may need to book a few more trips to the beauty salon. Are there any others that I have missed?
