I Don - Ministry of Waxing

Polly Vernon – wax junkie | The Times 

Polly Vernon – wax junkie 

Polly Vernon Mark Harrison 

Polly Vernon 

April 30 2011 11:13AM 

‘I don’t dress for men, I don’t play dumb for men, so 

why do I depilate for men?’ 

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/magazine/article2998891.ece 

03/05/2011 21:29 

Since it opened, in August 2009, the Ministry of Waxing on South Molton Street in 

Central London has become a destination for fashionable women in need of a depilatory 

procedure or three. The small salon with its subterranean warren of sterilised candlescented 

wax caves and legion of upbeat, white-coated, deft-handed staff is a hotspot, as 

routinely invoked as the It boutiques and destination brunch venues that surround it. 

It gets name-checked in Vogue. If you get your hair dip-dyed at Charles Worthington, 

your eggs poached at the Wolseley, and your Martinis mixed at the American Bar of the 

Savoy, it’s a fair guess that you also get your body hair removed at the Ministry of Waxing. 

I’m booked in for what the MoW calls a Triple XXX, and what the rest of us know as a 

Page 1 of 8


03/05/2011 21:29 

Brazilian bikini wax (the one where almost everything but a small strip is removed; MoW 

has coded it Triple XXX so that women can book one from their desks without terrifying 

their male co-workers). It costs 40 quid and will take about 25 minutes. I’ve been getting 

Brazilians for 14 years, since a journalistic assignment won me an early visit to Otylia 

Roberts, the woman credited with bringing the extreme wax to the UK in the first place. 

The Brazilian holds no fear or embarrassment for me any more: I strip off completely; I 

adopt the porny positions that allow the waxer the best possible access; I barely flinch in 

pain (my follicles and nerve endings have adjusted over time) and certainly not in the 

shame of close-up scrutiny of my body. Brazilian waxes are no big shakes to me. 

What is intriguing, however, is the other hair-removal procedure I’ve signed up for today: 

the nostril wax. It’s a relatively new addition to the modern woman’s repertoire of hair 

removal. 

I am a devoted depilator. I have spent the past 27 years (!) of my life engaged in some 

kind of hair-removal process: shaving, epilating, tweezing and waxing. My pursuit of 

hairlessness has consumed hours, days and weeks of my time and has cost me tens of 

thousands of pounds. Those costs are spiralling as I get older and hairier and as new hairremoval 

possibilities enter the market. 

Depilation is practically a hobby for me. The nostril wax, therefore, is now part of my 

routine. Jasmine rolls a globule of hot wax around the tip of an orange stick and pops it up 

my left nostril, where I feel it ooze and settle, the wax bonding with the hairs inside my 

nose. I tense in thrilled anticipation of the imminent yanking and then… Jasmine yanks. 

Where are you currently in your cycle of hair removal? What’s freshly done, borderline 

not-done-enough, as wild and overgrown and luxuriant as a spring meadow? What’s OK 

if you don’t look too closely, fine if you’re out of direct sunlight, get-away-able-with 

because your body is under wraps? What’s acceptable in the confines of a long-term 

relationship, but absolutely not if you’re still in the early stages? 

Me? Well: you know about my nostrils and my bikini line already. My eyebrows, top lip 

and suspicions of sideburns (or what one friend refers to as “lady burns”) are OK; it is 

eight days since their last extensive threading, so they’re not optimal in terms of 

hairlessness, but nor are they desperately in need of treatment. I tend to go a fortnight 

between facial threadings. I’ve been tweezing the strays with my light pink slant-edge 

Tweezerman razors since the day before yesterday. The light mornings make conditions in 

my bathroom completely ideal for the locating and removing of fine-hair sproutage. 

My armpits are troubling. I shave them every morning, but they have nooks and crannies I 

can’t ever properly get at. I shave them while studying them in the mirror, stretching the 

skin this way and that, often nicking them with the razor in the process. 

My shins are dreadful, as you can see from these pictures. Under normal circs, I would 

never have allowed them to get into this condition. I would razor the entire expanse of 

them with a Gillette Mach3 every morning and again in the evening if I’m going out and 




03/05/2011 21:29 

want to feel especially smooth. I have to use a men’s reusable razor on them; women’s 

razors aren’t even nearly up to the job, what with their highly cloggable safety-bar systems 

(clearly, women can’t be trusted with an inch and a half of naked steel blade), and I object 

to the Barbie-fied pinkness of their branding. I am not 3. If I were, I presumably wouldn’t 

be in the target market for razors anyway. As for disposable razors, I might as well tickle 

the skin on my calves with snowflakes, for all the depilating good they do. 

But, in the interests of researching this article, I’ve left my legs alone for a fortnight, which 

has been difficult. I’ve felt itchy, grubby, defeminised, ugly and embarrassed. I’ve raged 

against my editor for asking me to do it. 

I’m glad she said I could focus on growing out the leg hairs, however, because there are 

other bits; bits that I can’t quite bear to admit to depilating. I pluck stray hairs from my 

(whisper it) chin, my (yikes!) nipples and my lower stomach almost unconsciously, 

because I am kind of horrified by the fact of them. How am I hairy there? What does it 

mean about me? About my age and how attractive I am and my fundamental femaleness? 

I know I shouldn’t feel like this. I know I should be at peace with my body hair, every last 

strand of it. I believe that the politics of hair removal are as tightly interwoven with the 

feminist cause as reproductive rights, wolf-whistling scaffolders, curious gender-related 

discrepancies in pay, and so on and so forth. I know that current feminist thinking on 

depilation notes that, as women have progressed up through society’s ranks, as we’ve 

become increasingly powerful and significant in every respect, so the pressure on us to 

remove more and more body hair has increased, a stealth tax perhaps on our status, a 

surreptitious way to keep us in check. I know all this and I think it’s probably true. And 

yet instinctively, viscerally, I hate my body hair. And I want it gone. 

In short: I have an intense, complicated and costly relationship with my body hair. But 

then who doesn’t? 

An estimated 90 per cent of women in Britain remove at least some of their body hair. The 

UK depilation industry is worth £280 million or thereabouts, and it seems to be 

recession-proof. The market in home depilation – shaving, epilating with ferocious 

whirly-bladed tools you can buy at Boots from about £60 a pop, DIY waxing, and the 

newer, somewhat terrifying territory of home IPL and laser treatments – grew by 3 per 

cent in 2009 to reach £145 million. The salons seem to be ticking over just fine in the face 

of austerity. 

The Ministry of Waxing, with outlets in Singapore, New York, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, 

Manila and Bangkok as well as London, opened a second shop in Covent Garden last year, 

and both it and the South Molton Street location are oversubscribed. You have to book in 

advance for a Triple XXX and Jasmine tells me that she is as busy as she has ever been. 

“You can do a manicure at home,” she points out. “But you can’t do your own Brazilian.” 

Hair removal has been building into big business for nearly a century. According to a 1982 

article by Christine Hope in The Journal of American Culture, the female compulsion to 

depilate was kick-started by cosmetic companies keen to sell razor blades to an entirely 




untapped market of women. 


03/05/2011 21:29 

The campaign began in earnest in 1915 when Harper’s Bazaar ran an advert featuring an 

image of a young woman in a sleeveless dress, whose arms were arched above her head, 

revealing hairless armpits. The strapline ran: “Summer dress and modern dancing 

combine to make necessary the removal of objectionable hair.” 

Hygiene was invoked as a secondary reason for getting shot of underarm hair, although 

campaigns relied mainly on the ancient impetus to be cool. “The woman of fashion says 

the underarm must be as smooth as the face,” ran another ad. By 1922, women both in the 

US and in the UK seemed to have accepted the idea that they should shave their armpits. 

Advertising campaigns no longer focused on selling the idea of hairlessness itself, but had 

shifted to distinguishing between the merits of different processes and products. 

Convincing women to shave their legs took longer; but by the Forties, when rationing 

meant that skirts were shorter and stockings sheerer (if they existed at all), and Betty 

Grable’s hair-free legs had become a saucy visual shorthand for patriotism, the idea of 

depilating the lower half of the body began to resonate. Bikini waxing didn’t become 

popular until the late Eighties, as anyone who has ever enjoyed the hairily illustrated 

images of the Seventies classic The Joy of Sex will testify. Extreme bikini waxing gained 

currency in the mid-Nineties when New York’s J. Sisters started treating quote-happy 

celebrities, after which Roberts brought it to London. 

And now, yes, it seems that we are all depilating. When I ask the female faction on Twitter 

how they feel about their body hair, several hundred rush to tweet back about their 

depilatory habits. While they vary dramatically, every last one of them is at least doing 

something. 

But of course we are. We’re surrounded by a hairless female aesthetic. The bodies of the 

celebrity women and anonymous models on whom notions of prettiness are founded are 

waxed and tweezered, IPL-treated and photoshopped into perfectly depilated visions of 

egg-smooth gorgeousness. Pornography is popularly assumed to hold increasing sway over 

what we wax and how often. As porn gets more available through the internet, so the 

average woman’s perceived obligation to wax further and higher appears to increase. 

(Although it should also be pointed out that Ancient Greek statues show adult women to 

be pubic hair-free. Maybe this aesthetic ideal isn’t so porno-derivative after all.) 

Trends in how we remove hair ebb and flow. The latest diktats issued by Hollywood 

stylists suggest somewhat terrifyingly that shaving excess hair from the faces of female 

celebrities is an increasingly common practice. “Shaving rids the face of that fine fuzz that 

laser hair removal can’t pick up,” says Kate Somerville, a Los Angeles facialist of some 

standing. “It doesn’t grow back thicker or darker. That’s an old wives’ tale.” 

Any time a celebrity woman dares to be seen in public displaying so much as a suspicion 

of body bristle, all hell breaks out. Body hair makes headlines, causes ructions. The latest 

depilatory refusenik is Irina Shayk, supermodel, girlfriend of Cristiano Ronaldo and 

Swimwear Illustrated cover girl. In late February, Shayk was snapped by paparazzi on her 



03/05/2011 21:29 

way from a TV studio in Los Angeles. She was wearing a red miniskirt from beneath which 

stretched acres of perfectly toned, perfectly tanned leg. But – hang on! What was that, 

glinting in the sunlight? Could it really have been a fuzzy aura of leg hair? Heavens! The 

media reacted with alarm at the subtly hairy subverting of Shayk’s man-pleasing glamour. 

Her leg hair was pronounced “disgusting”, “gross”, “ugly”. “Why on earth did Ronaldo let 

her get away with it?” asked outraged bloggers. So there is, unquestionably, cultural 

pressure on women to depilate. 

Conversely, there’s also a lot of cultural pressure on us not to talk about depilating. Rachel 

Johnson, sister of Boris Johnson, editor of The Lady, can testify to our cultural 

sensitivities on the issue of body-hair removal. Earlier this year, for the March issue of 

Vogue, Johnson wrote an article detailing her experiences of a semi-extreme bikini wax. 

She was inspired to go from what she described as “Mama Grizzly to porn star in 20 

painless minutes” at the Ministry of Waxing by her daughter, who – Johnson was initially 

distressed to discover – had submitted to a Brazilian herself, at the age of 15. The piece 

caused a furore. Johnson was damned as publicity-seeking, as the (gasp!) “unladylike 

editor of The Lady” and as a bad mother. 

How does she feel about it all now, I ask her, two months on. Does she regret it? “I think 

my Vogue piece lit a blue touch paper and the reason was that I put my finger on a 

generational difference when it comes to ‘intimate grooming’, for want of a better phrase. 

No one under the age of 40 seems to have pubic hair. Nor do porn stars. This seems 

worthy of comment and analysis. 

“That said, most cultures go for depilation in varying degrees. Look at the Arab cultures, 

the orthodox Jews. The Ancient Greeks scraped their bodies with strigils. It’s been going 

on since the cave, probably. Two thousand years later, I referenced hair removal in a piece 

for Vogue and the fur really flew (pun intended). There was a massive Daily Mail-led 

outbreak of misogyny, and all the Glendas of Fleet Street piled in with a will. On 

reflection, I don’t think it was the subject – although an endemic misogynistic attitude 

towards women’s bodies was definitely a factor in the hysterical outcry that followed my 

modest effort about a bikini wax (I didn’t have the full Brazilian). My crime, I realise, was 

to write about my daughter, not the wax, in the context of a subject that the self-appointed 

guardians of Middle England’s moral compass had already decided was revolting and 

taboo. I had to be doubly punished.” 

Johnson is certainly right on the generational split on bikini waxing. I’m at the top end of 

Generation Brazilian; I am 39, I started Brazilianing for journalistic reasons and I am 

slightly unusual as far as my (perhaps less rigorously waxed) peers are concerned. But 

women 20 years younger than me get extreme bikini waxes as a matter of course, and they 

have been getting them since their teens. 

My friend Daisy – a successful, self-assured 24-year-old writer – got her first Brazilian 

wax when she was 14. Why, I ask. “Because I was having sex,” she replies. What about the 

politics of it? Doesn’t hair removal seem like an un-feminist thing to do? “It never 

occurred to me to think of it as political,” she says. She looks puzzled. “Explain. How is it 




political?” 


03/05/2011 21:29 

I ask around a little more, and discover that there’s a generational split on not just the 

degree to which women are shaving and waxing, but the way they think about it too. The 

younger Twitter straw-poll respondents are largely with Daisy: it is sexy and sexual but 

certainly not sexist to be a woman and feel the need to wax or shave. It is just what you 

do, in the same way that you brush your teeth and shave undercuts into your hip, 

bleached hair. They talk in terms of feeling “clean and smooth”. I’m reminded of 

something that Jasmine said, about how a Brazilian gives you added swagger, that it’s the 

grooming equivalent of wearing high heels. 

The tweeters in their late thirties and forties are conscious of the politics, however. They 

apologise for depilating and underplay the extent of it. It isn’t until I tweet a confession to 

exactly how much time and money I spend on depilation that some of them confess to 

being slaves to it, as I am. “I spend the same as you in a month and I’m a part-time 

primary school teacher from Newcastle,” says @higgum75 (the 75 is a reference to her 

year of birth). 

As a 39-year-old, I instinctively think that there are politics buried within depilation. I 

know that my principles are compromised by doing it, by how much time and money I 

dedicate to it, and by how wilfully I submit to something that – let’s face it – really hurts. 

I know because depilating is the one thing that I do explicitly to please men. I do not dress 

for men or modulate my (really quite foul) language for men; I do not underplay my 

achievements or curb my tendency to shout the odds over practically anything for men. 

But I do shave my legs for men, because I think they’ll like me less if I don’t. I think they’ll 

think I’m ugly. Not just my boyfriend (who, to be fair, has never once expressed an 

opinion regarding my body hair), but all men. And I know this isn’t great. 

Mariella Frostrup agrees: waxing for the boys is not great. “I once heard a woman on LBC 

[shows how long ago it was] complaining that her boyfriend made her wax ‘every inch of 

her body’, or he wouldn’t lay a finger on her. Ouch. I’d definitely have opted for celibacy.” 

But what of men, anyway? Would they all actually, secretly, rather we waxed every inch of 

our bodies? Or are they less troubled by our depilatory habits than I assume they are? The 

male faction of Twitter respond cautiously – coyly, even – to my straw poll on their hairy 

lady likes and dislikes. Piers Morgan and his producer Jonathan Wald each try to make 

the other tell me what he thinks is acceptable, and where, but ultimately neither one 

reveals anything. Someone else – who, if his Twitter profile picture is anything to go by, 

seems youngish, in his late twenties – surprises me by telling me that while he can’t stand 

hairy legs on a woman, he rather likes hairy armpits. “Sign of confidence,” he says. “Or 

being German.” A third tells me he’s appalled at my depilatory budget, but still expects 

partners to be thoroughly hair-free. 

Andy Jones, a 27-year-old journalist who spent several years of his life writing a weekly 

dating column, has a broad experience of female depilation practices. “I’m old enough to 

remember just before the Brazilian wax thing happened. My first sexual encounters were 



03/05/2011 21:29 

with women who didn’t wax.” Were they not even shaving their legs, I ask. “Shaved legs, 

oh yeah, that’s a given. But I expected pubic hair. I got my sex education from schoolyard 

chats, text books, the odd jazz mag; I was expecting it. Now, no one does.” 

Jones believes that free and available pornography is dictating our expectations of 

women’s bodies. He cites everything from the lip-glossy, breast-augmented, spray-tan 

look of the stars of The Only Way Is Essex (“It’s a porn star aesthetic, no question”) to 

overhearing 14-year-old schoolkids explicitly discussing sexual practices on the bus (“That 

I find completely shocking”). He says there was definitely a sea change in how women 

waxed about a decade ago. “When I was writing the dating column, I’d go on about two or 

three dates a week. Most of the sexual encounters I had involved no pubic hair.” Would it 

bother him now, I wonder, if he were to find himself in bed with a woman who wasn’t 

Triple XXX’d into a pristine vision of hairlessness? 

“It wouldn’t shock me. I’d notice it. But I wouldn’t get up and walk out.” I’m sure you 

wouldn’t. “Oh, I’ve got friends who would say – shamefully, but still – ‘I like her, but I 

don’t like her downstairs, so I won’t see her again.’ ’’ I am stunned by this. “Guys like 

women to look a certain way,” Jones says. 

Cynthia Chua, the 39-year-old founder of the Ministry of Waxing empire, has a slightly 

different perspective on the subtext. She tells me that she has a full body wax on a regular 

basis. “But I don’t do it for a partner. I don’t think anyone does it just for a partner any 

more. I do it because I get depressed when I don’t wax. It is half an hour when I look after 

myself. That’s what grooming is about.” 

Of course, she would say that. Her flourishing business (more international outposts and 

a pop-up wax station in Selfridges are coming soon) is built on it. But there is perhaps 

genuine merit in what Chua says too. Depilating is about upkeep, maintaining yourself, 

tending to yourself; it isn’t just about gussying yourself up for the benefit of porn-addled 

youngsters. 

Will it ever end? Will we ever make peace with our hair, grow it out, let it be? I am already 

booked in for my next wax, and while I am unsettled by Jones’s revelations about how 

judgmental men have become over women’s pubic hair configurations (how dare they?), 

the fact is, I get Triple XXX’d out of habit and preference, and because as Jasmine says, it 

does gives you a swagger. 

Whatever hair removal signifies – culturally, politically, socially – however much it costs 

or it hurts, we will continue to depilate. We associate it with doing the bare minimum 

now. We associate removing it with feeling cleaner. Feminism has lost that battle, I think. 

I am also a bit of a wax junkie. At the end of my conversation with Chua, I grab the chance 

to ask her what, if anything, I should next think about the issue. “Women in the UK do 

need some help with the tootsie waxing,” she says. “You get beautiful manicures, but 

sometimes I see bushy fingers and knuckles.” 

I hang up and look at my hands. I turn them into the light. I twist my fingers round a 




little. Dear God. I think she’s right. And I reach for my tweezers. 

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