How I’m making peace with my facial hair: From plucking to waxing, tweezing to bleaching, Christa D’Souza has spent a lifetime secretly removing unwanted whiskers. Now, at 63, she’s embracing her hirsutism
- Female facial hirsutism develops in women around menopause
- READ MORE: This £23 hair removal stone is GENIUS for painless hair removal – shoppers say their ‘legs have never been so smooth’ (and it’s on sale)
The window seat of an aeroplane. How many times have I sat in one on the way back from holiday and wished I could get out a mirror and a pair of tweezers?
If, like me, the hairs on your chin sprout even more lustily when you are away on holiday (with no decent bathroom lighting), you will know what I mean. If I had my own private plane, I’d almost look forward to this very moment.
Facial hair, honestly. It’s really not fair. The way, once we hit menopause, the hair on our heads (and in my case my legs) seemingly migrates to our chins.
And it’s not just my, um, ‘beard’ I am talking about here. What about how awol my eyebrows have gone ever since I hit 60?
I’m thinking of one particularly purposeful rogue hair that I’ll prune with a pair of nail scissors of a morning… and by the next day, I swear, will have corkscrewed back to its original length.
Christa D’Souza enjoys the primal thrill of plucking a big hair right out of its root with a brand-new pair of Tweezermans
Then (though I hesitate to draw attention to them) there are my sideburns. The really galling thing is that now I’m in my seventh decade they grow white. Sigh.
A bristly chin, Carlos Menem sideburns and, if this is the trajectory, a comb-over… as Nora Ephron once so famously said, and I’ll paraphrase here, when you get to a certain age, you’re only ever eight hours away from looking like a bag lady.
Female facial hirsutism may just be a fact of life. Caused by an excess of androgen hormones surging around the body, it often develops in women around menopause when our bodies are depleted of oestrogen and the male hormone testosterone dominates.
For this reason, HRT can often prevent it, but what of those, like me, who cannot or do not want to take HRT?
Not that it all happened when I hit middle age. I’ve always been hairy. I come from hairy stock. I started waxing my legs when I was 12 and having electrolysis on my chin when I was 15.
Jolen Creme Bleach was my teenage friend. I can still remember its smell and the way that, inevitably – because I was never patient enough to keep it on for long enough – it turned the hair above my lip orange.
I also remember once, at college in the US, a cute male flatmate walking in on me while I was applying it. ‘What the hell are you doing?’ I remember him whooping. ‘Shaving?’
I learned over the years to manage the problem (and childbirth for some reason helped a bit on the hormone front). Polonecks in between electrolysis, tweezers in my purse at all times, Nair Men (for one’s legs), and so forth.
A good friend or loyal sister helps too, to discreetly point out any strays before the big date or the important meeting.
Unlike the colleague who watched me interview the dishy Spanish actor Benicio Del Toro on some magazine shoot and then told me about the great big hair on my chin glistening provocatively in the camera light.
Latterly I tried laser hair removal, sugaring, threading, you name it – none of which ever had a lasting effect. All that electrolysis in the 80s and 90s proved a waste of money. All that pain – and they came back as quickly as if they’d been shaved.
Now I’m 63 I don’t care as much as I did. Not that I’m saying I let it all hang out – of course not – but it’s something I can joke about with contemporaries.
I don’t mind my partner catching me in the act of tweezering. Besides, the action of hair plucking is quite meditative and satisfying, a bit like needlepoint.
Did you know that Princess Luciana Pignatelli, the 60s and 70s socialite, used to pluck the hairs out of her legs just for the pleasure of it growing back? This will only sound weird to those of you out there who are blissfully hairless.
As I think about the prohibitively expensive back-lit magnifying mirror I’ve just had installed in our new bathroom in Greece for this very purpose – and the primal thrill of plucking a big juicy hair right out of its root with a brand-new pair of Tweezermans – I can’t help pitying anyone you can’t relate.
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