When I was much younger, I decided to get a wax. Rather, I decided to give myself a wax. I went to a beauty supply store & the most convenient (& cheap) thing I could find was a box of those clear strips with some sort of glue-type of adhesive on one side. I got home & went straight to the bathroom, excited to use my new product, housed in a beautiful box optimistically promising me “easy & painless hair removal.”
Although I have never waxed before, & although this is technically not wax at all, I decided to “jump in” & “wax” my bikini area-I mean, just do it. I have a high tolerance for pain, this is nothing compared to getting tattooed, right? Wrong! I stuck the strip onto my hair & what ensued was neither easy nor painless. It hurt so bad that after several ill-fated attempts I just had to give up, sending me into a panic (“how am I going to get this off?!!”). My then-boyfriend came home & noticed that I was hiding in the bathroom, crying & pants-less. When I explained, he retorted with, “you’re being such a baby, it can’t be that bad. Here, watch, I’ll do one on my chest,” followed by blood-curdling screams & a chest full of hair with a plastic glue strip stuck down the middle of it (his rationale was “just put it on vertically & pull it off, like how you do your zipper”-ugh).
So now we both have these glue strips stuck to our various body parts & the only thing we could think of to remove them was to melt them off with scalding hot water from the shower. It did not work. We finally found in the care instructions that baby oil can remove the strips but, being that we were 20 years old & childless, we had no baby oil in the house so we had to use olive oil (it was totally canola oil, I wasn’t about to be spending $6 on a thing of olive oil in my broke-ass early 20’s). We used up all the hot water trying to melt the strips off earlier, so we were left to shower our freshly canola-oiled bodies in freezing cold water, sliding all over the place but finally removing the strips.
Today, I leave the hair removal to the experts (or at the very least, I buy actual wax or sugar!). Now tell us, dear readers…what was your worst hair removal experience?