Brazilian Wax. The distinctiveness of this practice only dawned on me after leaving my home country. In Brazil, wax is simply wax—just as there, I am a citizen, not a Latina, a South American, or an immigrant.
Seeing the name of my homeland advertised on chalkboards outside gringo beauty salons sparked my curiosity. A quick Google search led me to the European Wax Centre’s definition of a Brazilian wax: “a waxing service that completely removes pubic hair from the front, upper thighs, and butt.” You should see the depths of my wince.
Yep, I have firsthand experience with Brazilian waxing. From the age of nineteen, I subjected myself to this practice—and I have a few things to share about it. Things that we should be talking about but are not.
Let’s get inside a waxing salon in the suburbs of São Paulo.
The waiting area is damp and mushy. The hot and somnolent air carries particles of sweat, hair oil and melted wax. I look around for a window, but there is none. It’s a place to be hidden from the outside world.
The waxing room door opens and my heartbeats pulse inside my ears.
“Please come in.” Claudia, the beautician, is in her early forties. The first thing you notice on her is the eyebrows, made petrol dark by henna, which gives her the airs of a panda.
“Please come in, dear,” Claudia repeats with a hint of impatience. I watch my legs moving.
The whiteness of the walls inside does nothing to brighten the dimness of the room. What an aromatic cacophony. A mixture of hair chemicals, fake honey, passion fruit, and mosquito repellent. In front of me, on the wall, hangs a picture of a white dove carrying a piece of paper that reads, ‘The Lord is my refuge and my fortress.’ Below it, a white table is cluttered with an assortment of round and cylindrical objects: a wax warmer caked in yellow wax, bottles of skin products, popsicle sticks, scissors, tweezers, and strips of paper. In the center of the room lies a white bed, its surface covered by a thin plastic mattress. It resembles a gynecologist’s exam table, only without the stirrups for your feet. Maybe I won’t have to spread my legs wide open after all. Maybe this won’t be as humiliating as I imagined.
“You can take your clothes off, put them on that chair, and lie down on the bed, dear.” Routine sculpted Claudia’s voice with emptiness.
“Can I keep my panties on?”
“For now, yes. We’ll do the legs first then.” Claudia’s back turned, and her arms moved fast above the crowded desk.
I lay down and gaze at the ceiling. A few mosquitos wait for the night to go singing by people’s ears.
“Wow, dear, we’ll have some work to do here. How long have you not depilated?”
Blood rushes to my face. Yes, I have an awful amount of body hair. I’m trying to solve that by coming to this damn salon, aren’t I?
“Yep, I have lots of hair,” I say, stupidly. “I don’t shave a lot because it just makes it worse.”
I sacrificed a month’s salary as a cook assistant to afford the procedure. I even put my wish list of new books on hold because going to the beach with visible body hair was simply not an option.
Claudia warms the wax, spreads it on my skin like butter on bread, presses it against a squared piece of paper. She pulls it out. “Aaaa!” But the pain becomes bearable when compared to the comments that come along in its wake.
“You have a boyfriend?” Claudia asks.
“Uh. Not really. We broke up.”
“He didn’t complain about this much body hair?”
The burning of my legs climbs up to my cheeks. I’m young, oppressed, and unprepared for this. I scratch my scalp and stare at the mosquitos.
My shin inflamed, then the knees and the thighs. Aaa!
“Can you turn over, dear?”
Much better this way. Belly down, I can hide my face inside my arms.
Claudia’s hands turn sweaty and squishy. They move with monotonous movements. The floor collects the wax strips with my dark hair glued on them. A sense of relief sears through me. All those hairs out. The pain becomes almost worth it.
“Now it’s time for the intimate part, dear. Turn around and take off your panties.” Take off your panties. The words carry the sharpness of a razor.
“Can’t I just keep my panties on, and move them to the sides?”
“No, dear, it’s much more difficult that way.”
I undress from the waist down, gazing at the white dove on the wall. My feet and hands are icy cold despite the heat.
“Open your legs, dear, don’t be shy. We’re all women here.”
I wish she would stop calling me “dear”. I follow her command and a lump surfaces in my throat. Claudia has a view that I haven’t dared to look at myself.
What force led me to expose my most private self to a stranger?
Keeping my shaking knees up and apart requires an extraordinary effort.
Then comes Claudia with the yellow wax clinging to a popsicle stick. “Oouch!” Sticky lava burns regions of me that I had no connection with before.
“Sorry, dear.” Claudia fans the burning skin with her hand. It solves nothing. “I’ll wait for the next parts, but this piece of wax has to stay on for a few seconds.”
“It really hurts, oh Lord.”
“Don’t touch it! I’ll pull it now. One, two, three.”
Aaaawk! My neck follows the pulling of the wax. A tree of pain grows through my abdomen.
“Oh, God, I don’t know if I can take this another time.”
“You have to, dear. It hurts more because you have too much hair. Next time, don’t wait so long.”
With each pull, my chin points up at the mosquitos. I nearly puke at them. The pain is unlike anything I’ve ever felt before as if every part of my body is overheating.
The room acquires the smell of train tracks as Claudia’s agile fingers continue ripping the hairs out. My fists held the sides of the bed.
“There is some blood in here, but it’s because it is your first time.”
And I thought that just once would my body cry tears of blood after its laceration. A tear slides down and finds refuge inside my ear.
“What is it, dear? We’re almost there, stay strong.”
I swallow bitter saliva.
“Beauty hurts, you know. But you will see, it’ll be worth it.” Claudia cracks her neck from one side and spreads more wax. “Your hair is too thick. The force I have to apply to pull out all the hair cuts the skin. I can’t help it.”
Another pull. Aargh! I wish I had brought a pillow to put between my teeth.
In the half minute, Claudia stops for more wax, I close my eyes and try to go to my happy place. Mum’s polenta waiting for me after school on a rainy day. Sharp pain drags me back. My lips go cold, my forehead bathes in cold sweat.
“Finished, dear. Have a look.”
My elbows support my aching torso. Looking down at my body, I hold back a shout of horror. The redness of my skin reaches tons of purple. A thin trickle of blood seeps from a few pores. The sight is alien and painful to my eyes. There is no more visceral exposure of myself—if I wanted to reveal more, I’d have to be turned inside out. Yet it’s Claudia who gets to see and assess it first.
“Oh, dear, I know. It looks a bit dark,” she says, rubbing her hands with wax remover. “Maybe someday you can have a whitening treatment here. I intend to bring this treatment to my salon someday.”
A volcano erupts when my legs attempt to assume their normal position back together. There is no time to recover – I need to get out of here. Where the hell is my underwear? Ah, there it is, tucked under my armpit. But damn, it feels like it’s made of pins. Having my legs fully closed is not an option.
“It’s 180.50, dear.”
Two days later, at the beach, the contact of the sea salt with my skin feels like being inside of a bag of needles. The Brazilian Wax has ruined one of the best moments of my life – the first trip to the sea. I don’t dare to sunbathe or stroll around showing my new bikini. I’m hairless, but the entirety of my lower body is red and inflamed and diseased-looking.
You would think that the effects of the wax lessen over time. They don’t. At least not for me, and not for many women I know. Skin is made for caresses, not aggression.
The Brazilian Wax stole a lot from me. My meager money, my gynecological health, my privacy. My dignity.
No matter how many times I see it in gringo billboards, Brazilian Wax always makes me wince and wonder – why are we, after so many feminist victories, still doing this to ourselves?
Photo by freestocks on Unsplash
