Secrets to Pain-Free Methods for Hair Removal

So you want to get rid of some unsightly body hair? And you want to do it without pain? No problem. For generations the women of my family have passed down pain-free secrets to hair removal. Someday I will share these secrets with my daughter. But now, in a blockbuster moment, I will share them with you.

Before we start – just to cover my hair-free rear end – I have to tell you to consult your doctor (preferably a psychiatrist) before attempting any of my suggestions at home.

The need to remove body hair is not really a personal choice. It’s a cultural one. The American culture is particularly anti-body hair, perpetuated no doubt by our great system of capitalism where you can sell any product if you can only create the need for it. I’m pretty sure no one in America worried about shaving before razors were invented. But they were and now all facial hair, including my Aunt Martha’s mustache, is frowned upon.

As a side note, I have often wondered why the men of our culture don’t unite and start shaving their heads as soon as they reach puberty. If all men were bald, then bald men wouldn’t worry about being bald, would they?

Thus we have the Hidden in Plain Sight Method. Whatever body hair you’re thinking of removing is bound to be fashionable somewhere in the world. For example, my Aunt Martha lived in a colony of barbershop quartetlets for a while when she got tired of waxing her upper lip on a daily basis. She sang alto too, which worked out nicely.

My Uncle Jim was blessed with an abundance of sleek, black hair on his back, which actually worked out quite well when he was filming the Jungle King movie. He blended right in with the wolf pack and got some amazing footage.

I have recently started growing long black hairs out of my chin, which are rather annoying. They won’t get long enough to braid, so I can’t join a Hassidic group. They resemble cat whiskers, so I’m working on my hunting skills and searching for a cat clowder that is accepting new members.

If you have lots of disposable income, you can go places where they hook you up to an IV and knock you out while they remove all the offending hair by the roots. You’ll need to go in for this treatment every three or four weeks, so you won’t have lots of disposable income for long.

The poor man’s anesthetic is probably more fun anyway. You will need a Designated Waxer (someone who won’t be anesthetized to perform the hair removal once you are out), a home waxing kit and a pair of tweezers to get the thousands of hairs the wax will leave behind.

Mix up one of the following recipes:

Crocodile Piss

2 - 750mL bottles of Bacardi Limon
1 bottle of Midori honeydew melon liqueur
1 liter of Sierra Mist

Carpal Tunnel Ecstasy

1 liter of Captain Morgan
1 liter of Absolute
1 liter of Southern Comfort
1 liter of Yukon Jack
2 liters orange juice
2 liters pineapple juice
1/2 liter grenadine

Liquid Cocaine

1 liter Jagermeister
1 liter Rumplemintz
1 liter Rum

Whichever concoction you chose, drink an 8-oz glass of it every 15 minutes until gone. At this point your Designated Waxer will be able to remove any or all of your hair without you feeling a thing (except maybe sick).

Do be sure your Designated Waxer is someone you trust, as you will be vulnerable. A less mature DW, for example, might remove your eyebrows while he’s at it.

There are a variety of ways to make the surface of your skin numb enough to not feel the hair coming out. You might also try combining these with the above method of total anesthesia.

Ice is nice! Freezing yourself definitely induces numbness. You can stick your hairy body part in the freezer or in a bathtub full of ice, or just go live in northern Minnesota for one winter. Be wary of exposing your private parts though, in preparation for a Brazilian wax job. A couple counties in Minnesota have laws against this. Check local statutes.

Clove oil (eugenol) is sold in drugstores as a toothache remedy, and is a great topical anesthetic. DO NOT drink it. It’s also, when combined with vodka, a humane way to euthanize fish.

 No Scream Cream. I just love the name of this product. It’s a high concentration of benzocaine (20%), which you can get as a generic toothache paste for a quarter of the price. But then you won’t have any No Scream Cream in your medicine cabinet, to make you laugh every time you peek inside.

You can get a prescription for EMLA cream, which is a combination of Lidocaine and Prilocaine, and costs about $50 for a 30-gram tube. It does numb the skin very nicely. Ask your doctor.

My mother, bless her heart, stumbled on a way to get rid of all body hair quite by accident. Chemotherapy is amazing stuff. Not only do you lose the hair on your head, but all the rest of your body hair as well, even pubic hair. And when the chemotherapy is done, your head hair grows back, but in my mother’s case, she never had to shave her legs or underarms again! Us daughters were all jealous. Fortunately, cancer runs in my family, so I check my breasts regularly for lumps, anxious for the day when my insurance will pay to have all my unsightly body hair removed.

My mother, by the way, passed away in 2004 and it was her sense of humor that got us all through her illness. She invited us all to help her preplan the funeral. As we sat around discussing visitation and wakes with the funeral director, we couldn’t figure out if we wanted to have a procession from the funeral home to the cemetery or just have everyone come to the cemetery.

My sister thought it would be too disorganized to just have everyone meet at the cemetery. What if people were late? What if they couldn’t find the gravesite? How was the funeral home going to convey the casket to the funeral if not in a procession? Would they arrive at the gravesite before or after the guests had all arrived? She fretted and jittered until my mother took her hand.

“Don’t worry, Little Bit,” she said. “The funeral won’t start until I get there, I promise.”

As my great-aunt Mistress Nikki always said: Bad girls get a spanking, good girls get waxed.

Is it really pain if you enjoy it? Of course not! You can train your brain to perceive pain as pleasure. It works like this: When your brain realizes you are experiencing pain, it produces endorphins to counter the pain. Endorphins make you feel good. To get more endorphins, you incur more pain. Eventually, you start looking forward to pain because of the endorphin high you’ll get. When you reach that level, your brain dumps the endorphins and starts producing epinephrine. These two chemicals put you in a very pleasant trance-like state. So you’ll accomplish two things in one fell swoop: hair-free body parts and a great night’s sleep.

You’ll need a Dominatrix (or the male equivalent) to help you get to that level, and hopefully she won’t mind you being hairy while you get there. Otherwise she’s likely to pull out all your body hair, slowly, one hair at a time, using red-hot tweezers.

My dad’s family disowned him when he married my mother. Why? Because she had body hair. That’s right. My father’s family was breeding for no body hair. For generations, they had been carefully marrying other people who had less body hair than they did. As a result, my father has almost none. None visible anyway. Try to imagine how difficult it was for him to find a woman with even less than no body hair, and you’ll see why he gave up and married my mother. Of course she was carefully removing all of her hair regularly using our secret family methods, so in all fairness, I don’t think he realized she was hairy until their wedding night.

Unfortunately, I did not inherit his hairlessness. I usually use the Crocodile Piss anesthetic combined with benzocaine to get rid of my mustache.  

When all else fails, reach for the belt sander. Couple buffs with that baby and the hair will be gone, as will most of that unsightly skin. If the electricity is out, you can try some of the gizmos they advertise on TV (which you needed to watch before the power went out).

Smooth Away is one such product. It’s a piece of fine-grade sanding paper that sticks onto a pretty pink palm-sized doohickey. You slowly and sensuously rub the sandpaper around in circles to effortlessly remove hair with no pain. Four hours and a bunch of irritated skin later, you’ll be throwing that in the trash. Or giving it to the lady down the street who always wins the neighborhood chili cook-off, like my Cousin Violet did the year she won.

Nair, and all the other creams that dissolve the hair away are very smelly. If you don’t have sensitive skin, they aren’t too bad, I guess. Just don’t keep the bottle in your shower. My grandmother kept her depilating lotion in the shower for some reason, but without her glasses on she thought it was the shampoo. On the plus side, she could change her hairstyle by simply changing her wig, which was a lot of fun.

My favorite hair removal cream was the Veet stuff. For those of you who just can’t bear to give up the discomforts of shaving, they gave you a blade-less razor to wipe the junk off with. So it was like shaving…but not. Huh.

It is possible to painlessly remove hair, or at least learn to enjoy the pain. It’s even easier to go live with the monkeys, where I’m told that long armpit hair is considered a highly desirable trait for mating. Having thumbs ought to be highly prized as well. My train for the Amazon leaves in one hour and I’m all packed. Got my bedroll, toothbrush and comb. No razors allowed.