A Love Note to All My Hair

@isaacsmall

Look, I’ve always been hairy. I’m half Indian. My hair and hue is just like my grandmother’s, sister’s, cousin’s, friend’s, and mother’s: dark brown and coarse. According to my grandmother, her hair was normal. The concept of shaved legs was foreign. Tweezers? Never heard of them.

But, in the 4th grade, my hairy legs, unbeknownst to me, stood out on the playground at recess. I rarely watched TV so I wasn't a victim of the Gillette, Nair, or Veet commercials. But, as I monkeyed my way through the jungle bars, I heard my friend say, “Oh my god! Your legs look like a gorilla. When are you gonna start shaving?” Her passing comment was delivered as unsolicited advice. It was not her fault. She had probably seen the Veet commercials or heard her mom talk about waxing her brows. And the truth was, even after her comment, those words of warning only came to haunt me years later. 

I think like many young women, I went through a “boy phase.” For a few years my best friend and I said we wanted to become boys. We did, kind of. We both kept a clean bob cut, swore to never wear pink and never touch sparkles, and as for bows, they couldn’t even be looked at. We would wander in the boy’s section of Gap and were convinced the hidden hair under our brothers’ baseball hat’s was enough to not warrant glares from salesmen. The ‘Boy Club,’ founded in summer of 2010, came to its demise in the fall of 2013, when we started to grow boobs and had our first periods. Fall of 2013 was the same fall that I asked my mom if I could start Veeting my now seemingly cursed leg hair. 

My desire to extinguish any and all leg hair wasn’t mine originally. Yes it was the girl on the playground, and the seemingly effortless smooth sheen of my mothers legs, but the catalyst was neither. It was only once I got onto a travel swim team did I start to examine my own leg hair, that seemed even darker after stepping out of the ice cold water, standing next to legs that appeared more like the skin on my forearm. Even my friend who swam on the team with me seemed to worry about her hair, though it was blonde and thin. When she started Veeting her legs, she encouraged me to do so as well. Instead of standing hunched, legs glued together, as if that would divert the eyes and eliminate the hair, I could apply a cream, to strip my hair, grant confidence, and smooth the muscular brown legs that my navy blue speedo outlined. Why wouldn’t I take that offer? The diving board would no longer be a pedestal for my insecurities, and my speedo would be a suit of comfort instead of an unveiling of hidden monstrosities. 

Veet is not pleasant. For starters, it smells like nail polish and what I imagine the intoxicating chemical cocktail of a DDT to smell like. The chemicals work through and burn down hair follicles; most of the time it burns the skin too. I hoped the burning would lighten my skin in the process — a two-for-one. The sensation lingered and turned into an itch… but if it hurt, it meant the Veet was working, right? The final step required scraping a gunky goo and keratin off the affected skin. The process needed to be repeated every other week to keep up a silky smooth appearance, and to make the laborious endeavor worth it. 

After eliminating my leg hair, I started tweezing my unibrow, nairing my upper lip, bleaching my arms, and waxing my stomach. If I’d been in my grandmother’s village, accompanied by other friendly female mustaches, unibrows, and Indian leg warmers, the “unwanted” hair would not have been a second thought. But I wasn’t in my Dadiji’s village; I was under the scrutiny of my peers who saw my legs as beastly. Worse than beastly: masculine. I didn’t have the boobs to compensate for my lack of femininity. So, I continued to burn and pluck my skin raw: bleeding, blistering, blain-looking marks of my attempts at femininity. 

I still shave my legs, tweeze, and occasionally bleach but I no longer uphold some of these regiments as rituals. It is sad that in all my years of middle and high school I didn’t get any attention, not even a first kiss. Despite my best efforts, no boy cared to look up from our budding chests, let alone talk to us as people. All the hours dedicated to hairlessness, whiteness, and femininity wasted away... gone with the gunk and goop down the drain. An A for effort isn’t enough. I had tried and failed. I had tried and realized I was attempting the impossible. How naive I had been, for a city girl, to be tricked into a Gillette-airbrushed-syndrome. 

I have to give myself a break though, because how could I not? Everyone around me is also being tricked by professional trickers. I don’t blame my sister for her daily bathroom display of disgust at the week-old armpit hair. I know she too, though she might not know it, would be unbothered by the lack of grooming, if only she knew it wasn’t any different from the hair on our head, or the one that grants “such long luscious lashes.” My leg hair is luscious because the hair that draws jealousy grows from my skin just as the hair that brings judgement. There’s no difference to myself, only the thoughts of others. And, well, I’m trying to love myself, not please others. I am trying to love my hair, even if no one else will. 

Till the next meta-self-love-realization.

By Devin Yadav

Call Me By Your Name obsessed, wannabe Bowie groupie, and off brand irl Moana