My mother has always said Zizi has healing hands. It’s one of an endless number of paradoxes about my diminutive friend and beauty therapist. She is under 5ft tall, with sturdy olive skin, tousled hair, and a fondness for pedal-pusher playsuits, so it’s hard to guess her age. In truth, she’s almost 50, but still frequents raves. She cares for her brother, and her mum, who has been in the UK for a lifetime but still only speaks Portuguese. Zizi is fit from lugging her treatment bed around, from the miracles she works on whoever is lucky enough to be on it, from Hiit circuits she does in the park. And she’s addicted to smoking cigarettes.
Zizi has been waxing, pedicuring and massaging the female members of my family for almost two decades. She knows all our backs, labia, feet and underarms intricately. If the things I share are anything to go by, she’s also the custodian of a tapestry of secrets: things we’ve each told her, but never each other. Zizi’s secret, how her touch cures muscle tension, her varnish clings to nails for days longer than it rightfully should, and why the hairs on which she has wrought wondrous violence struggle so long to grow back, none of us know. She has some kind of beauty therapist superpower.
At one recent appointment, Zizi surprises me with a distinctly pro-scientific suggestion. Why not try laser hair removal, she suggests. Instead of paying her every few months to wreak painful violence on my hair follicles, why not kill them off once and for all? Over the years, as I’ve heard it, laser has been notoriously unreliable at working on darker skin tones. But Zizi points out the technology has advanced a long way. She’d like to train at using it herself. In the meantime, she’s advocating herself out of an income, because she thinks it might be better for me.
Looking into laser hair removal, I find that Zizi is right – the technology has come a long way. The first company to create FDA-approved laser therapy was successfully sued by patients angry that, after undergoing the treatment, their hair had grown right back. The company quietly settled out of court and gradually went out of business.
Laser works by targeting the melanin found in hair. So long as the hair is darker than the skin around it, only the hair absorbs the light, not the surrounding skin. For years, this only worked well for people with light skin and dark hair. Eventually, scientists developed different wavelengths – short for lighter skins, and long for darker skin, where that contrast was less pronounced. But getting it wrong was no small thing. The potential side-effects include itching, redness, acne, hypo- or hyper-pigmentation and burning of the skin similar to sunburn.
Knowing this, who in their right mind would still even consider such a process? Who would take off their clothes, put on some dark glasses, and buckle up next to a machine knowing it will excite atoms to emit specific wavelengths of light, to target the melanin in their body hairs, with potentially dangerous results? Me, that’s who.
In the time between deciding to try laser hair removal and actually getting it done, three things happened.
First, I turned 40. With that, came the second thing; a revelation. There are binary approaches to ageing, I realised. You can attempt to prevent it. Or you can embrace the physical, spiritual and emotional changes it entails.
Preventing it has never appealed to me. Although I grew up in the UK, I have been blessed with an inheritance in my mother’s Ghanaian culture that has always presented older women as unrivalled in stature, and beauty. In my Akan heritage, to be young is to be a nobody. Old people are VIPs and status is accumulated with age. You cannot assume the most prestigious positions in the community or kingdom until you have passed certain milestones, you cannot mediate disputes until you have amassed wisdom, you cannot even fulfil the full stylistic potential of traditional fashion until your body has filled out, matured and, ideally, fattened, too. Why, as a woman getting older, would I choose the European approach to deifying youth, when I could lean into the warm embrace of a world that regards age as beauty and power?
The third thing that happened was a decision that shaped my new book. Having decided not to modify my body but embrace it, I would devote a year to the process. I called it My Year of Adornment. Each season, each month, I would invest in the acceptance, appreciation, and beautification of what I have. My body is my body. Rather than seek to amend it, I would adorn it.
I am creating a new history for myself, and initially, hair removal seemed to be on the right side of it – an investment in de-fuzzing my skin so that it can be better appreciated. But now as I lie in the undignified position of spreading my butt cheeks under the chill of a laser clinician’s hosepipe-like nozzle, I begin to question that. As atoms are excited, electrons rise and fall, and light beams are making their way into my crack, I wonder why I hate my hairs enough to obliterate them with such sophisticated levels of scientific violence. And, why, to top it all off, I’m about £1,000 poorer for the privilege.
In fairness, this is an absolute bargain when you consider that the average American woman, waxing once or twice a month, will spend more than $23,000 (roughly £18,500) over the course of her lifetime. Ninety-nine per cent of women have done something like this at some point in their lives. The average British woman spends an even higher £23,000 on hair removal, part of an estimated £70,294 lifetime spend on her appearance.
I remember the sharp shock of Naomi Wolf’s seminal work, The Beauty Myth, first published when I was in primary school. Reading it as a university student, as I contemplated the work life ahead, I was struck by Wolf’s description of a “Third Shift” that women are required to work. Her thesis – hard to refute – is that in addition to professional career responsibilities, unequal domestic and caring responsibilities, women are also required to perform the labour of keeping up with societal beauty standards. A woman, Wolf wrote, will “add serious ‘beauty’ labour to her professional agenda. Her new assignment grew ever more rigorous: the amounts of money, skill and craft she must invest were to fall no lower than the amounts previously expected … Women took on all at once the roles of professional housewife, professional careerist and professional beauty.”
I’ve lost count of the number of times, in a meeting, a woman has mistaken my glance at her hands – I love hands! – for scrutiny of her nails and apologised for her failure to have kept up with manicures. Or that girlfriends on holiday – despite having demanding jobs and families – have been self-conscious at the un-pedicured state of their sandal-wearing toes. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve offered such apologies. This expectation is an unfair burden of time, but also money. There’s growing evidence of the scale of a “pink tax”, or gender-based price disparities that exist in everyday products. To put it another way, oOften, when men and women buy similar day-to-day products – soaps, lotions, face creams, deodorants – the versions marketed towards women cost more.
Razors are a major culprit. Those marketed at women tick every box in the gender-disparity agenda – costing more, packaged in pink, wasteful, elaborate packaging, making big claims about silky skin and sexy shins. Saving myself in the long-term from this relentless expenditure is partly why I’ve invested in laser, I tell myself, as I wince with the discomfort of my position, and the pinching pain of the hair-destroying beam. But why? Why do I keep on coming back to uncomfortable and expensive appointments, just to squash the capillaries which nature, in its wisdom, wanted us to have in our nether regions, underarms, and everywhere else they exist on our skin? At the moment of greatest discomfort – whoever said laser is painless was lying – I’m tempted to swear silently at Zizi. This was her idea, after all. But I know that, in truth, she was trying to save me whatever is left of the £23,000 I haven’t already spent on pink-packaged razors and painful, expensive waxing. I can’t blame her.
The idea that beauty requires consumption is profitable. I remember very clearly the day I started wearing makeup regularly. It was my 27th birthday. For this I can’t blame my mother, friends, or even necessarily magazines and the media. I just had it in my head that once you reach 27, you should wear makeup. It was based on some notion that this is when real adult life starts. The dress rehearsal is over. At 27, you need to be ready to go – each day of your life is the real deal. It isn’t a drill. Face needs to be done. I was so confident in this understanding that I imparted my wisdom to my little sister, then 23. “You’re fine for now, but when you hit 27, you’re going to need to take each day very seriously, and make sure your face is made up accordingly.”
There was a positive side to this madness. I approached each day as if it could be my last. I chose my clothes, hairstyle and makeup with all the seriousness of someone strutting on to the stage of her life. It was a device to help me be present. To not think of any day as disposable. Tomorrow was not guaranteed. It’s true that all this applied equally when I was 26. But 26 was not the age at which I had set out to take the business of living seriously – 27 was.
Incidentally, 27 is around the age when women are told they should begin preventive Botox. Botox injections in this age group have increased by 28% since 2010. “If you start getting Botox early enough and it’s done properly, you’re not going to need as much in the future,” dermatologist Dr Patricia Wexler advised readers of Vogue. “But remember”, the article points out, “youthful faces move.” The solution to this, Wexler says, is “lower doses of Botox via ultra-targeted micro-injections administered on specific areas of the face such as the forehead, brows, or around the eyes”. The thing is, all faces move – or were intended to.
It feels like choice, the cosmetics we buy, the procedures we undergo. But the reality is the vast majority of cosmetic surgeons are men, and the majority of cosmetic companies are led by men. It felt like hair removal was a personal preference. But now I wonder whether I’m just performing a display of Darwinian non-savagery, as pre-programmed as my evolutionary genes. In between signing up for laser hair removal at the beginning of my year of adornment and almost completing the course at its end, I’ve completely gone off the idea. Worse, I begin to appraise the pathetic little tuft of hair clinging on to my bikini area with a forlorn sense of having banished something that may have loved me. If only I had known why I banished it. If only I had known the permanence of this procedure had a cost.
There are still resolutions I can make. I will not aspire to Instagram Face. Beautiful as Kim, Bella and Kendall are, their faces aren’t the ones my ancestors bestowed on me. I try to consume less, for our planet, and because when I do consume, I know I’m taxed for consuming while female. And I’m not OK with this. I can’t promise to abstain from Fenty lipgloss, though. Did you know it promises plumping as well as tingling? It doesn’t solve the problems of capitalism or globalised beauty standards. But it does give me comfort that someone navigating these minefields from the same perspective as me is running the show.
This is an edited extract from Decolonising My Body by Afua Hirsch (Square Peg, £20), available from guardianbookshop.com for £17.
Join Afua Hirsch for an online Guardian Live event on 8 November, when she will discuss Decolonising My Body with Nosheen Iqbal. Book tickets at theguardian.live
Stylist Melanie Wilkinson; photo assistant Ejatu Shaw; fashion assistant Sam Deaman; makeup Lucinda Worth using SUQQU; hair by Sosina from Charlotte Mensah; nails by We Create London
