One stray hair can strike fear in women
As hard as I tried, I couldn’t stop staring at the long, black hair growing out of the chin of the female clerk scanning my groceries. One lone hair growing on her otherwise hair-free face.
I was certain she wasn’t growing it on purpose. In fact, I was certain she didn’t know it was there. Her eyebrows were perfectly plucked, her makeup impeccably applied, and the space between her upper lip and nose had nary a hint of peach fuzz. This was a woman who obviously took time to coif. She either missed it or that little bugger grew on her way to work.
This, as most females will tell you, is a horror women share: a rogue hair that sprouts between your last glance in the mirror and your office. Unfortunately, hair doesn’t surface just on our chins. It can surprise us on our cheeks, our foreheads and sometimes on our necks. It grows like gangbusters above our lip.
I know there’s probably a very good medical reason why this happens to women and why when the rest of our hair is thinning, hair grows so thick and quickly in places where it isn’t welcome.
As if aging isn’t hard enough. None of us after, oh, the age of 18 is immune. What the heck is a woman to do? Elizabeth and Cindy keep tweezers in their cars.
“Sometimes I can’t see it until I get in the car,” Cindy says. It’s amazing how the light reflects on those defiant strands. My very blond sister-in-law, Linda, was tweezerless in her car when she noticed her first black chin hair. Trying to tug it out with her fingernails only made it curl. That made her panic and pull out a bottle of hair spray, squirt some on her finger and slick the hair down until she could get home to pluck it.
And yes, gentlemen, this is something women talk about.
Like the women in my book club. At one of our meetings, Maggie shared that while her feet were securely fastened in stirrups and her gynecologist was busy conducting her annual exam, he said to her, “I can get rid of that mustache for you.” Too stunned to ask which mustache he might be referring to, Maggie finally croaked out, “Oh?” He told her he was now doing laser hair removal and that she was a perfect candidate. She didn’t ask how he would know that about her sitting where he was, but she did make an appointment. She walked around the room showing off her hairless lip as the rest of us oohed and ahhed and began to tell our own horror hair stories.
One member, who asked to remain nameless, had an old boyfriend point out a chin hair to her. She was so embarrassed she ended the relationship. Peg thinks she wandered around for days with a long hair popping out right above her left eyebrow before she finally caught it in her rearview mirror.
“I went through every friend I had seen the past couple of days and wondered why no one had told me,” Peg said. Through the grocery store, the dentist’s office, a party at one of her daughter’s school. Dozens of people had seen her. She compared the humiliation of that to getting the back of her dress caught in her underpants on the way out of the restroom. At that point, someone admitted she had noticed it.
Most of us wouldn’t hesitate to point out spinach in a stranger’s teeth or a tag sticking out of a friend’s shirt. Why are we so bashful about hair?
After that, we promised each other, no matter what, we’d point out visible, stray hair. We also paired up and vowed we’d pluck one another’s chins if one of us was ever in a vegetative state. We decided lying in a bed, hooked to machines wouldn’t be half as bad as being caught with hair on our chins.
My friend Sue has a theory. Since hairs usually pop up in the same place, we get used to checking that place every morning and again, when we get in our cars. What throws us, says Sue, is when hair decides to emerge in a new place. Sue, of course, has light hair and says she can go a few days without checking.
We dark-haired girls hate her.
But light-haired, dark-haired and no-haired girls need to stick together. We need a universal signal. Here’s a suggestion: When you spot someone with a rogue hair, silently point to your own chin with your index finger. That way they’ll know.
I’d suggest men could take part in this, but when I asked my husband if he’d be willing to do this for me when the time came, he cringed, as if to say, “Please, please, please don’t make me do that.” So much for better or for worse.
Jesse referred to his second wife’s lone hair as “Bertha.” (No wonder it didn’t work out.)
When I queried one of my male friends what he’d call a single hair growing out of his wife’s chin, he replied, “Gross?”
I think this better remain a chick thing.
