Footballers do it, male models do it. So what's to stop all men treating themselves to the thrill of a full body wax? Jay Rayner signs up for the £120 Galaxy
Jay Rayner
I am rather attached to my pubic hair. Or, to be more exact, it is rather attached to me. It's been attached to me since I was in my early teens, a welcome marker of masculinity. The hormonal rush of adolescence can be delayed in fat boys and I was certainly one of those, so I was forced to wait longer than my cohort for the riot and crash of puberty to begin. Having been so relieved to see it finally make an appearance it had never once occurred to me to get rid of it. Despite the beard and the moustache and the chaos of the mop on my head - all acquired as I rammed into my 40-something midlife crisis - I am not a particularly hairy man. I am not the kind of chap with a pelt to which babies could cling. My back never needs combing and I have always regarded my soft hairless hands as looking like something that might belong to a male-to-female transsexual, once the hormones have kicked in.
All of which makes my presence at The Refinery, the top male grooming spa, located opposite Claridge's hotel in Mayfair, all the more odd. For The Refinery has a speciality, something it apparently does with more panache, style and bravura than almost anywhere else, and it has been decided that the world would be a far, far better place if I were to experience it. Put most simply, the 10 skilled therapists here are currently working their fingers to the bone using hot wax to rip pubic hair off men who think the boy-zilian is simply the way to go.
There are no reliable figures on how many men are doing this - it's not like you can spot them on the high street, is it? - but beauty salons and spas across the country who offer the treatment say they are not short of business. With the likes of Arsenal midfielder Cesc FÃ bregas admitting to laser
hair removal and dear David Beckham languidly displaying himself on billboards in a manner which suggests he's been depilated to within an inch of his life, male waxing is no longer a no go.
Here at The Refinery there are many options: from a mere bikini wax for £45; through to the Mercury wax, described as 'crack and buttocks or testicles', for £85; all the way up to the big daddy of waxes, the championship option, the king of the baby smooth hill, the Galaxy. Or the 'back, sack and crack', as they like to call it, delightfully. For £120 they'll take everything off. Naturally, as well as a manicure, pedicure and facial I am booked in for the Galaxy. It is part and parcel of the curious world of male waxing that anything other than the removal of every last follicle that marks me out as a fully grown man might well be considered unmanly. I don't want to be a wimp.
In preparation I phone my friend Zoe Margolis whose sex blog, Girl with a One Track Mind, and subsequent book of the same name, contained many sage thoughts on men and their nether regions. Why, I ask her, should men pay attention to the state of their pubic hair? 'Well,' she says. 'Nobody likes to floss while they're eating, do they?' And she laughs uproariously. Anything else, dear? 'The area is cleaner and fresher with less hair, therefore making it more enjoyable for anyone who is getting up close, although that applies to both sexes. For men specifically waxing makes your bits look larger. And the area is full of sensitive nerve endings so having it hairless makes it all the more sensitive.' In short, male waxing equals good.
Or, if you are other female friends of mine, waxing equals bloody hilarious. They are delighted that I am going to do it, relishing what they tell me will be an excruciatingly painful experience. One wants me to know that a waxing left her with blisters. Two others tell me with glee that I should neck some painkillers beforehand. As far as they are concerned I am finally going to understand what it's like to be a woman, as if I personally have been herding them all through the doors of beauty salons across Britain demanding they get themselves a Brazilian (everything bar a little landing strip) or the Hollywood (the whole lot).
Even though I am sure they are just trying to psyche me out, I do take a few pills, and try to steady myself, with little success. It doesn't help that the first thing I see on a shelf behind the immaculate reception desk at The Refinery - a cool very GQ sort of space full of leather armchairs and flat-screen TVs and moody lighting - is a battered tube of E45 anti-itch cream. My attention is drawn back to the sleek woman on reception who nods at her computer and says, 'Ah, I see you are here for an intimate wax,' with more enthusiasm than can ever be strictly necessary. I begin to wonder whether for the women working here the job is less vocation, more act of revenge. She smiles sweetly and directs me down to the changing room. I am told to shower, put on a towelling dressing gown and then wait in the lounge with daily papers, the fruit bowl and two other men (we do not make small talk) to await my therapist.
Who is a woman. Why hadn't I expected this? The Refinery is a male-only beauty spa, so I had assumed... but no. Simran, who is a pretty and solidly built Asian woman with arms made for wrestling bears, tells me that nine of the 10 therapists here are women. 'Men find the idea of another man doing an intimate wax...' she hesitates, as if searching for the right word, 'embarrassing.' Which I take to be code for: makes them uneasy about their sexuality. If they don't feel uncomfortable with another man fiddling with their bits they get anxious that they might be gay. And if they do feel uncomfortable with another man doing it, the whole experience is merely traumatic. Better, apparently, to have a woman you have never met before do it because, hey, that just makes it all so much easier. Of course it does.
To be fair to Simran she is a model of professionalism and skill; funny, charming, frank and completely unshockable. At which point it's worth issuing a health warning. Because there is absolutely no point me now lurching into euphemism in describing my lovely day out, and if you are at all of a nervous disposition you might want to look away now. Let's be clear: any discomfort you might be about to experience on reading this is as nothing as compared to the discomfort I went through undergoing it.
We are in a small treatment room, with a massage bench, a sink and a heated bowl of something dark, hot and sticky. Naturally whale calls and panpipe music play on the iPod, because that is exactly what you need to calm you when a complete stranger is preparing to rip out your hair from the follicle. Simran gets me to disrobe and lie flat while she snaps on the latex gloves. She assures me that she will first be treating the area with a little oil, which should stop the wax sticking to the skin. That done she sets to work, painting a wide strip of wax on to the top of my pubic region, and tapping it gently to see if it has hardened before taking hold and tearing away.
Jesus-H-Christ-in-a-bloody-handcart-mother-of-screaming-God-make-it-stop! If this is what it's like with the oil what would it have been like without? It isn't just the pain, which is intense and deep, but the bizarre feeling that lots of me might be about to come away with the hair. Never have my genitalia felt more like some appendage, an afterthought tacked on to the body, which could quite easily be pulled off if only somebody showed enough commitment.
And for this men pay £120? Surely the money should be flowing in the other direction, in the form of a fine? Or perhaps she should get a custodial sentence as a warning to others. Then again, it occurs to me that Simran might be under-charging, depending on the client. If Max Mosley was willing to pay thousands for a good spanking, what might someone like him be willing to pay for this?
I do not howl or cry for Mummy but I do make a low hissing sound, akin to air escaping from a bicycle tyre. Simran asks me sweetly if I really want the lot off, or whether she should leave something behind. She is regularly asked for heart shapes, she says, particularly around Valentine's Day, and can even do initials. I wonder about asking for SOS but instead I tell her to press on. I am a fearless reporter and I must know the truth. She reassures me that the top of the pubic area is the most painful. I tell her I'm trying to work out why some parts might be more sensitive than others. 'Well I'll let you carry on thinking about that as a way of distracting yourself,' she says, and she heads into the bikini region.
Simran seems happy in her work, contented even. She can perform all the beauty treatments on offer at The Refinery but she makes no secret of the fact that she does enjoy a good waxing. 'It's one of my favourites. I like seeing the skin all clean and you do get real results don't you?' I look down, and gaze upon something I have not seen for nearly 30 years: a growing expanse of Barbie pink. It immediately makes me consider the vocabulary. All the terms men tend to use for their genitalia - round words that speak onomatopoeically of size, like cock and dong and knob - seem ludicrous in these circumstances. With such an expanse of skin on show I feel reduced back to tiny, infantilised words like winkle and willy or the anatomically correct but unwittingly condescending, penis.
I ask if anybody ever bottles it. 'Oh yes,' Simran says. 'But they always come back about two weeks later.' Now she needs my help with what she sweetly calls 'a few stretches'. This is in my interests. The wax comes away quicker from taut skin, so when she tells me to pull my penis to one side by taking hold of the tip I do as I am told. On goes the wax. Off comes the hair. Now over to the other side. She tells me to do the same with my scrotum, and I manhandle myself in a manner I don't recall since childhood when, like all small boys, I wanted to see if it was possible to make my genitals completely disappear. Right now I wish I had succeeded back then. After the full waxing of each area, she returns with a lighter wax strip to catch any hairs she has missed, like a builder following a snag list. I feel examined and explored, but not as a human body. I feel more like a knackered sash window in need of restoration.
It's time to turn over. 'This bit will really make you hoot with laughter,' she says. I quickly understand that this too is code for something else, namely: laughter is all you have, my friend, because if you think too deeply about what I'm about to do, you will start crying and screaming and will doubtless make a dash for the door, unless your idea of a good time is having a woman you've never met before paint hot molten wax onto your arsehole. In which case you deserve all you get.
She tells me there are two ways in which this can be done and I am thrilled that I have options. Either I can get on all fours, or I can lie flat and perform another stretch which will give her greater ease of access. I opt for the latter. Curiously this seems more dignified than the all fours option though clearly, by now, these things are entirely relative. 'Oh, and try not to clench your buttocks or they can get glued together by the wax, which can be unfortunate.' Simran has a lovely way with understatement. I bury my face in the towel-covered bench and wait for it to be over. When she is done she anoints me with a few lotions which, she says, will help the swelling and rash to subside - my skin really is very pink and mottled - and then hesitates as she spots a stray hair that somehow escaped the deforestation. 'I do hate to miss the little ones,' she says. But she senses that I have had enough.
The day is not done. However, after the waxing session, everything else feels like an afterthought and I realise my responses are out of kilter. She starts on a pedicure and suddenly, despite the fact that she's just spent an hour on my genitalia, I feel the need to commiserate with her because of the gnarled nature of what she has to deal with. Really! When they were handing out feet I was in the queue marked fish. They are broad and flat and most of the smaller toes go nowhere near the ground, clawed back by over-tight tendons which have refused to succumb even to surgery. As a result calluses build up on the balls of my feet. Simran doesn't appear to care, filing away at the nails, applying cuticle dissolver and smearing them in green, gooey paste which, I decide, makes them rather more attractive than less. Granted, this isn't difficult.
She turns her attention to my hands. This is not unfamiliar territory to me, for I have had a manicure before. That said, the last one, performed just outside Washington DC, was in curious circumstances. The manicurist was Lorena Bobbitt, the woman who had become famous for chopping off her husband's penis. Many of my male friends thought I was foolhardy to allow a woman who had proved herself so agile with a blade to go near me with a pair of stainless-steel clippers, but I was made of sterner stuff. I let Lorena range far and wide across my hands and she did a lovely job, preparing me for the job interview as a political lobbyist I had claimed I was in town for. I didn't want to tell her I was a journalist trying to get up close and personal in case the clippers drifted lower. I needn't have worried. She was charming, even as she applied the clear varnish.
Even so it had left me with an uneasy relationship with manicures. This is not helped when Simran lifts her nailfile, looks at my nails and says, 'Well, there's nothing I can do with those, is there?' I realise I am blushing. I got through the whole knotty business of stretching my scrotum this way and that for her, and giving her access to my bottom without once going red about the cheeks at either end. But her discovery that I am a chronic nail biter - hell, I sometimes make myself bleed - makes me want to die. This male grooming business is, I decide, fraught with social complications.
We move on to the facial - steam treatments, face packs, eye gels, blackhead removal - and slowly I start to drift away. She pummels and pampers me, performs a face, head and shoulder massage, and for a while I even forget the trauma I have been through. But all too quickly it is over, and Simran is giving me aftercare tips and we are groinally obsessed once more: no heavy exercise for 24-48 hours because excessive sweating is a bad idea. And no shagging either. This, she admits, has distressed some of her clients who have come in early in the day for a waxing with the intention of surprising their loved ones later, only to be told sex is a no-no. If anything defines the bizarre nature of the treatment, it is that something which can surely only be designed to make you more intriguing sexually should also require you to avoid it for a while.
Over the next few days I tell friends what I have done, partly because I enjoy the look of intrigue that passes across the faces of my female friends, and the look of pain that crosses the faces of my male friends. I phone my mother, and end up telling her what I've had done. 'You've been waxed? Where, exactly?' I tell her proudly, 'Mayfair.' I can practically hear her eyes rolling in her head. She says, as if talking to an idiot: 'Where on your body.' Aha! Of course. 'Between my knees and my navel.' There is a moment's silence and then she says, 'Having been through various procedures in my time that required the removal of hair and knowing exactly the agony of the itching when it grows back you deserve absolutely everything you bloody well get.' There are some conversations you should never have with your 77-year-old mother. Even mine.
Anyway, the issue of regrowth is not one I have to deal with yet. The sight of the waxing still takes me by surprise when I prepare for bed or get up in the morning. It looks like me and not like me. I have become unfamiliar to myself. One friend opines that waxing is wrong because it is essentially buying into the aesthetic of porno. I consider myself in the mirror but conclude that any porno involving someone who looked like me would be for a very niche market indeed and that I really didn't need to worry about that.
I also decide that what really matters, given that I'm the one who is experiencing it most of the time, is how it feels to me. And the answer is tidier, neater. It also occurs to me that however squeamish some people are about it, any notion that it is somehow wrong, is completely perverse. After all, every morning I choose to shave my cheeks and my neck but not the hair on my chin or beneath my nose, simply because I like the way I look. We make decisions about what to keep of our hair and what to lose all the time. So why should pubic hair be any different?
Not that you care about any of this. What you all want to know, what you are dying to be told, is what my wife thought of it. Well you can carry on wondering. I may be a truly modern male. I may not flinch from manicures and pedicures and the rest.
But I refuse to invade my own privacy.
Source
Hair removal is not for women, but it is also for men.
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