'This won't hurt a bit...'

2008-02-22 08:18

Colleen Figg

I don't know. Do you wax your intimate areas? Or any areas?

I'll tell you, I don't. Once I let my sister demonstrate this waxing business on my legs (many years ago now).

We bought those home jobbies - wax strips which you warmed up and shoved onto your legs and then once they had set, tore off to the accompaniment of yelps and shrieks on the part of the, dare we say it, tearee?

Of course as this was a first experience for me I was assured by my sister's assertion that "this will not hurt". I should immediately have been on full alert the moment I heard those words - variations of them have sounded upon my eardrums for years.

"I promise you this will hurt me more than it will you - that was the doctor, prior to injecting anaesthetic into an open wound on my face, aged ten. (Me, that is, not the doctor.)

He was at least thirty four and a damnable liar with me because I explored new boundaries in the art of levitation the moment the needle went in.

"This won't hurt" - this time the X-Ray person shifting my broken ankle around to get the best view. Her words were drowned out by my unashamed caterwauling nanoseconds later as she grabbed said foot and manipulated it roughly into place, bone grating on bone and capturing the nerve between.

So it's clear to the reader, I should think, that the gap between what others consider to be painful and what yours truly experiences is wide and maybe unbreachable.

But I digress

Back to the waxing. In all my amiable naïveté, I simply believed my sister, all past experiences having flown right out of the window, clearly taking my memory with them!

I looked on peacefully as the wax was warmed and laid on my legs, which were quite hairy at this time. We chatted happily as the wax set.

But once it had set my sister turned into an unrecognisable sadist. She joyfully grabbed the wax and r-r-r-r-r-rippped it off me with nary a word of warning.

While I lifted five inches from the ground yowling and howling, she went for the other leg and did the same. My torment knew no bounds, folks. No bounds...

I seriously think she missed a career as a beautician, for she would have enjoyed plucking, waxing, and generally mauling the people who came to her studio, of that I am very certain.

She went into accounting in the end. I suppose it's not a far cry from waxing, really, when you think of it - stripping people of large wads of cash for the Receiver, with no prior warning, can be said to be form of financial waxing, no?

Suffice it to say I never let her or anyone else near the pins, never mind the more "cough, splutter" sensitive areas with wax again.

A few years later she offered to demonstrate this new electronic device which "painlessly" pulls hairs out of your legs - Epilady or some such, I think.

I ran a bleeding mile!

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