Making It Up As I Go Along (5 page)

Bad hair days. And I’m not talking about my
head, I’m talking about my shins. Bad, oh yes, bad. How bad? Well, the fact of the hirsute
matter is that if I’d been born in a warm country, like Australia, I’d have had to
emigrate at the first opportunity. How could I survive in a country where people have to wear
shorts on a regular basis? If I couldn’t wear opaque tights, thereby covering the shame
– yes,
shame
– of my hairy legs, I wouldn’t be able to leave the
house. I am so fortunate to have been born in a cold, rainy country.

But sometimes – like if it’s the two
days that constitute the Irish summer, or if I have the misfortune to be going away to a balmy
clime – I’m forced to engage with my hairiness.

Which brings me to waxing. Yes. Wonderful stuff.
It hurts but it’s wonderful. Whenever I have it done, I return home with a skip in my
step, feeling light and liberated and prone to twirling in circles, a joyous look on my face.

But a conspiracy of misinformation surrounds
waxing. Ask
anyone
how long it lasts and they’ll assure you that you’re
looking at six glorious weeks of super-smooth legs. But this is a blatant lie! It doesn’t
last six weeks. Not on me. From the moment I get it done, I watch my legs like a hawk, I
actually
patrol
them, and I’m lucky if I get a week out of it before the pesky
little blighters start poking their hairy heads up again. Sometimes I swear I can actually
see
them growing – like that cute moment when the chicken breaks his shell. And
then what can I do? I’m
semi-hairy
. Enough
hairs to have to
return to the opaque tights, but not enough hairs to make another waxing worthwhile.

And while we’re at it, here’s another
lie: the hairs get weaker and softer the more you get waxed. On no, they don’t. Not on me.
I’ve been having it done for twenty years and my leg hairs are as hardy and lush now as
they were the first time I had it done.

And shaving? Strictly forbidden! Shaving undoes
all the ‘good work’ of waxing, and there are beauty therapists out there
who’ll say it’s no wonder my hairs never get weaker if I alternate waxing with
shaving. But at times I’ve had no choice! I’ve wanted to be waxed – indeed
pleaded to be – but was told that my hairs were ‘too short’ and was turned
out, mildly hairy, on to the street. What could I do?

However, even when I have a close, close shave,
my shins look like a sexy man’s jaw … sort of blue … the stubble lurking
beneath the skin just waiting for their chance. Which begins approximately half an hour later.
Nasty black little bristles start poking their pushy way out into the world, like something from
a horror film, penetrating through the tight-knit shield of my opaque tights. At times, with
lower deniers, even laddering them …

A close friend (she agreed to speak to me only on
the condition that she not be identified) had her leg hairs lasered. ‘Lasered’ is a
nice word. It sounds modern and clean and sort of
Star Trek
ky. But what it really means
is
burnt
, and by all accounts is more excruciating than childbirth.

My anonymous friend said she nearly puked from
the pain, despite having managed to lay her hands on some anaesthetic cream. Not only that but
they lasered her knee with such enthusiasm that it left a permanent scar, which then had to be
microdermabrasioned away.

Lasering is also very expensive. And
time-consuming: they
pretend you only need one session (liars, liars,
they’re all liars!), but it’s like therapy, you’ve to make a commitment for
months and months and months and months.

Now, what if I was to admit that I was worried
about more than the hair on my legs? What if I were to … let’s see … admit I
was worried about, ooh … the hair on the small of my back? For example. Just
theoretically. Would other women be grateful? Would they say, ‘Thank you for articulating
our secret shame, Hairy-Backed Girl’?

But even if they did, would they mean it? I
suspect it would be like Tom Cruise in
Jerry Maguire
when he wrote his manifesto
slagging off his job. Yes, everyone applauded him and said, ‘Nice one, mate! Thanks for
saying the unsayable.’ But then what happens? Yes! Next day he gets the sack.

The thing is that girls aren’t meant to be
hairy – apart, of course, from the hairs on our heads and eyes, which are meant to be long
and lustrous and luscious. We are meant to be
very
hairy in these departments, but
otherwise entirely bald (a concession can be made for eyebrows, so long as they are well behaved
and know their place).

Why? Why is hair good in one place and very, very
bad in another? (Because upkeep on both keeps women exhausted and demoralized and without energy
to get promoted? Do men expend time and money and anxiety combatting bad hair days? Just a
thought …)

Wouldn’t it be great if we didn’t
have to worry about any of this? If we all decided that we were going to stride forth together,
hairy and proud? Look at all the time we’d save. And money. And energy. And worry.
Wouldn’t it be great?

First published in
Marie Claire
, August
2006.

I had my hairy legs lasered and it was a
resounding success! Previous to this I have had the hairiest legs in Christendom. Loads of times
I’ve met people and they’ve said, ‘Oh no, I bet my legs are hairier than
yours, mine are REALLY hairy,’ then I unveil my furry limbs and they usually swallow hard
and step back and say, ‘Riiiight, I see what you mean …’

I’ve had them waxed for decades, but the
upkeep has always been a full-time job – about twenty minutes after I’ve had them
waxed, they start to grow back.

So I went to have them
lasered, and in all fairness they did warn me that one go wouldn’t cure me, but even after
one go there has been a DRAMATIC lessening, a great deforestation. I can’t tell you just
how astonished I was, because NOTHING works for me, not fake tan, not Restylane, not even
automatic doors. (I often have to jump around on the pad in front of the door for some time
before it finally notices me.)

But this worked. Christ, though, the PAIN. I
admit I’m a whinger, but I’ve never found leg waxing to be painful – in fact I
find it quite relaxing, and I really unsettle beauticians, who say I’m an oddball, which I
am, but not in the way they mean. So I was feeling quite cocky before my laser patch test
– and within moments I was beaten. It was incredibly unpleasant, like being burnt over and
over again, and I was trembly and nauseous for ages after it ended.

So I went on the interwebs, oh yes I did, and
found a dodgy site willing to sell me Emla (local-anaesthetic cream) without a prescription. I
put in my details and gave them my credit card number and wondered if I’d just been
royally swizzed.

Then maybe ten days later, this massive box, a
veritable CRATE, amigos, arrived, laden with jumbo-sized tubes of Emla, and joy abounded.

Except for Himself. Joy didn’t abound for
him, because he is naturally cautious. ‘Tubes, I grant you,’ he said. ‘Big
ones, yes, I admit they’re big ones, and lots of them, and they DO say Emla on the
outside, but it mightn’t be Emla on the inside, it might be some useless stuff that does
nothing.’

But I had faith. Also, a little bit of
trepidation. Because there’s a reason Emla’s only given on prescription.
Caitríona, who is a nurse, told me that people have DIED from overdosing on Emla, because
it shuts down blood circulation.

But anyway! I was willing to take the risk, to
walk on the wild side a little, and when the day of my second go of lasering dawned, I closeted
myself in my bedroom, with a new tube of cling film, and started glooping the Emla on to my legs
and it went fecking everywhere, on to the carpet and then – disaster! – I was
squeezing the last bit out of a tube and a big lump shot straight into my right eye and started
stinging like bejaysis, which is very wrong when you think about it, because it’s meant to
ANAESTHETIZE me, not sting me.

I rushed to the bathroom, trying not to spill any
more of the cream off my leg, and started splashing cold water like mad into my eye, and I was
worried because later that day I was going to London, for a big photo shoot the following day,
with hair and make-up and stylists and art directors, and what if my right eye was like a
tomato? I’d have to incorporate a wink into my look. And,
mes amies
, I am NOT a
winker.

I splashed cold water into my
eye and splashed cold water into my eye and wondered which saint was the one you prayed to, to
banish bloodshot eyes. Mam would know, but I couldn’t get hold of her, so I went back to
glooping the gear on my legs, then – and this was tremendously satisfying – wound
loads and loads of cling film around my legs, thus sealing the cream and letting it take full
effect.

For about two hours I crinkled around the house,
then I had to try to get my jeans on over the cling film without dislodging it, which was harder
than it sounds; then, after splashing one last handful of water at my eye, I went to the
lasering place.

Well, it was FECKEN FANTASTIC. I felt NOTHING
– compared to the last time, which had been utter torture. Then I went straight to the
airport, and Himself accused me of behaving oddly and he was right, I WAS feeling somewhat
spacey, and then we realized that the Emla must have entered my bloodstream, because, addict
that I am, I’m extremely sensitive to any kind of drug, and things that wouldn’t
bother the normal person at all have a profound effect on me. Like, I get high from the
local-anaesthetic injections you get at the dentist, that’s how bad I am.

So there I was, wandering around Dublin airport,
with a bloodshot eye, banging into things and knocking over displays of Butlers chocolates and
making people stare hard at me, and poor Himself was trying to reconstruct pyramids of boxes and
chocolates and generally keep a lid on things.

When we got on the plane I sort of went to sleep,
but it was better than sleep, I was utterly EUPHORIC. I felt warm and whole and at peace, but a
wonderful euphoric kind of at peace, not a boring kind of at peace. It was probably the happiest
I’ve ever been in my whole life, and when the pilot said, ‘Twenty minutes to
landing,’ I felt a great sense of loss because I knew I had
only
twenty more minutes of this lovely bliss and then it would all be over, and I wondered if
I’d become addicted to Emla cream.

Anyway, the plane landed and the euphoria abated
and my eye cleared up and the photo shoot went grand and I haven’t been tempted to smear
myself with Emla cream since, so I think I’m in the clear. (Please don’t do as I
did. Please! I got told off by concerned medical types that what I’d done was very
dangerous and that I was lucky to be alive.)

However – baldy legs! I mean, they’ll
grow back, the hairs, lots of them will, Rome wasn’t built in a day and when you’ve
legs as hairy as mine, you’re in it for the long haul, but for the moment I’m
slippery and smooth and yes! Baldy!

The only drawback is that I no longer get
ingrowing hairs, which I’ve always thought was Mother Nature’s consolation prize for
the hairy-legged woman. The HOURS of fun I’ve had, equipped with just a pair of simple
tweezers. All gone now.

mariankeyes.com
,
September 2007.

You know Christmas is on its way when the mad
perfume ads start. A five-second flash of spooky, long-limbed beauties running through a
black-and-white forest while a voiceover whispers nonsense like, ‘I am flat-footed …
I am prone to colds. I am …
Incorrigible.
’

Perfume is funny stuff and lives in a peculiar
place in our consciousness. It’s ‘glamorous’, it’s a way of connecting
with a luxury brand – we might not be able to afford a couture coat, but we can afford a
little bottle of fragrant water. Which is why it’s the default purchase of every unwashed
boyfriend lurching through the duty-free before his flight home from a stag weekend, having
spent the previous forty-eight hours drinking heavily, and realizing, almost too late, that his
girlfriend will be expecting a gift in exchange for letting him go, and having the presence of
mind to appreciate that a Toblerone just might not cut it.

In recent times, we show the love for our
celebrity of choice by buying their perfume. I had a recent entanglement with a gang of
adolescent girls, and I don’t know whether they were Directioners or Beliebers, but they
were drenched in some bouquet of chemicals that caught me in the back of the throat and was so
sweet, my teeth felt loose in my gums. I extricated myself from the encounter, feeling deeply
unhappy. One of the ingredients in the perfume – who knows what it was? – had
conjured up the awful confusion of being twelve years of age. For me – for most
people, it seems – the sense of smell is linked inextricably with
memories, and one whiff of something can kick off a cascade of complex recollections.

Which means no matter how well you think you know
someone, you can’t predict what fragrance they’ll like. You can’t even depend
on a classic, as I discovered last year on my birthday. Suzanne always gets me a present that I
really want – because I take the precaution of hinting heavily. (She does the same to me.
Her birthday is a day after mine, and as she says, ‘Why waste the money on crap that we
don’t want?’) But last year she decided to freestyle and clearly she thought
she’d done pretty well, because she was all smiles as I tore off the paper. ‘You
can’t go wrong,’ she said, ‘with Chanel No 5.’

I have news: you
can
go wrong with
Chanel No 5. To millions of people it smells of timeless glamour, but to me it smelt of
suffocation, as though my head was trapped inside a musty, talc-filled polo neck.

Although that is
nothing
compared to the
effect some aftershaves have on me. There are a few whose names I can’t even utter because
they trigger such an avalanche of awful memories, of certain men and bad times. These nameless
man-colognes are filed in a locked room in my brain under ‘TERRIBLE MISTAKES’ and I
never go there.

But there’s a positive side to being a
person who can be poleaxed by a perfume: I dot nice smells throughout my life, especially at the
trickier junctures. I find mornings particularly difficult, but it felt wrong to ask Himself to
come into the bedroom and stick an oar under me and oust me on to the floor. Surely there was a
more dignified way of getting out of bed? So I embraced alluring shower gels.

In fact, I now have a … well, a sort of
library
of shower gels.
Yes, decadent as it sounds, I have an
array
. To match my mood. Like, there are days when the bracing smell of ginger is what
I need. But on other mornings ginger seems like a drill sergeant and I gravitate to something
pink and sappy, like rose, or something sunny and cheerful, like orange.

I’m partial to a French brand called Roger
& Gallet. They do lots of pretty smells and they’re not too spendy. You used to be
able to buy them only in France, so whenever I visited I’d ferry home several shower gels
and swank around, feeling like the owner of rare and exotic beasts.

Then the chemist up in Stillorgan started selling
them and I was
quite put out
.

I’m fonder still of the shower gels from
Espa – do you know the brand? Oh God, it’s lovely! It uses essential oils and
natural, sustainable ingredients but it’s not REMOTELY earnest or Goop-y. They do an
Energizing Shower Gel, but because the price tag is fairly hefty I use it only on the mornings I
need the heavy guns. But a little goes a long way and it changes my mood for the better and
makes the whole house smell lovely.

Then I grapple with the vexed area of body
lotion. Sometimes it’s one job too many, but when I do manage to throw some on I’m
always glad, because throughout the day I catch an occasional hint of fragrance and it’s
like a little present to myself.

However, I’m not a fan of perfume itself
– I find it too concentrated and ‘sudden’. It’s a bit like being hit on
the head with a mallet. Nevertheless, I get endless enjoyment from the ads and pass many a happy
hour ‘doing’ my own versions. Indeed, it is a game that could be played by all the
family. ‘
I am hirsute … I am verboten … I am certifiable.
Certifiable.
The new perfume from Marian Keyes.
’

First published in
Daily Mail Plus
, October
2013.