Farley was a low-maintenance kind of girl and she liked that about herself. It didn’t take her three hours to get out of the apartment in the morning and she didn’t spend half of her paycheck on beauty supplies. Makeup was typically a once a week occurrence reserved for the days when the stars aligned exactly right. Farley preferred breakfast to looking fabulous, and plus she had been told multiple times that she had gorgeous skin.

The only beauty service that Farley invested in was waxing. At first she only waxed sporadically, every few months she would go in and get her “bitch brows” done, usually at the same time she got her hair cut because it was starting to look mullet-y. Her hair dresser would wave cloth strips of wax and hair in her face and exclaim about how she had removed four eyebrows worth of hair. Farley would be temporarily ashamed, but would get over it fairly quickly.

It wasn’t until she found a good wax center with specialists who insisted she come in every three weeks because she was a hairy, hairy beast of awesomeness that she got her eyebrows under control. Even with her month appointments, Farley sometimes had to take her razor to the few random hairs that popped up between her eyebrows and threatened anarchy.

All in all, she felt like she was on the up and up with feminine hygiene that was until she got an appointment with Mary. Her usual wax specialist, Anna, had quit to become a nurse. Mary had leaned over her prostrate form and tsked loudly.

“You’ve been shaving,” Mary said in the same tone Farley imagined an orthodox mama would use when confronting her child about masturbation – disapproval, disappointment, and a tired sort of angry and disgusted resignation. “I can tell.”

“Well….just now and then, when it gets bad,” Farley admitted.

Mary frowned at her. “Why don’t you pluck them?”

“I don’t own tweezers,” Farley said.

Mary sighed and her eyes moved down to Farley’s mouth. “Your lip needs to be touched up.”

“Oh, I don’t wax that I shave.” Farley shrugged.

“No, you do not shave your lip! It makes the hair come in coarser and darker.”

Farley squirmed a little under the intense stare of her wax specialist. “I thought that was a myth….”

“No, it isn’t.” Mary straightened up and shook her head. “Just the eyebrows then?”

“Do you, do you think I should wax my lip?” Farley asked, unsure. She really didn’t want to shave her lip, that sounded really painful, but if it was that bad…

“It is up to you,” Mary said. “But I think you should.”

“Can I add that now?”

“Yes.”

“Well, let’s do that then.” Farley smiled up at Mary.

A few minutes later, after Mary had cleaned her upper lip and around her eyebrows and then applied a powder, Farley felt the heat of the hot wax spreading over the left side of her upper lip. She tried to remember to breathe, but when Mary ripped off the strip and then smoothed her finger over the now bare skin, she whined.

“It’s your own fault it hurts so much,” Mary told her. “Shaving instead of plucking makes it more painful to pull the hair out later.”

Farley sniffled as her eyes smarted and Mary spread the wax over the other side of her upper lip.

“You will go and buy a pair of tweezers after this, yes?” Mary said, doom in her voice as she ripped off the second strip.

“Yes,” Farley whimpered and Mary made a noise of approval.

“When was the last time you waxed your bikini line?”