Who remembers short-lived, salon-based reality show Celebrity Scissorhands? It had celebrities working in a salon? Mid-Noughties era? OK, nobody, fine – it changed my life regardless of its relative obscurity. One contestant, Sabrina Washington from R&B girl group Mis-Teeq, was challenged to wax the most armpits in five minutes and a mate lulled me into being one of the waxees. To maximise Sabrina’s chances, producers put the fairest, blondest, most pluckable volunteers at the front. They put me dead last. With 45 seconds left, they shoved me in, a knackered Sabrina applied a waxy spatula to my pit and then… the buzzer went. Fair play to her: she kindly completed the process once the stunt had ended – and I’ve been grateful to Sabrina from Mis-Teeq ever since, because it acted as the gateway to the world of waxing I’d always secretly wanted.
I am in the (roughly) half of the population of men who feel like they’re too hairy. I have an Iranian mum and a dad whose hair miraculously didn’t fall out during chemotherapy. I come from hairy stock, in other words. None of this is a sin, yet since my early thirties, I’ve felt my smattering of body hair to be utterly shameful. Why wouldn’t I? After all, one survey of women between 18 and 44 suggested that 90 per cent found a hairy back unattractive, while another said 61 per cent of men think the same. Even though it’s a naturally occurring phenomenon, wherein multiple dark strands comprising a cuticle, core and medulla sprout out of my body, it still made me anxious as hell. So I did something about it. Emboldened by my youthful experience of a celebrity armpit wax, I started sporadically waxing other bits of my body in my thirties. It’s only in my forties that I’ve stopped to wonder what the hell it was all for.
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