Nor by the hair on our chinny-chin chins
Try as I might, I couldn’t stop staring at the long black hair growing on the chin of the clerk scanning my purchases. One, a single hair growing from her otherwise hairless face.
He was sure he wasn’t growing it there on purpose. In fact, he was sure she didn’t know he was there. Her eyebrows were perfectly plucked, her makeup impeccably applied, and the space between her upper lip and nose was free of a hint of peach fuzz. This was a woman who obviously took time to comb her hair. Either she missed it or that little son of a bitch grew up on his way to work.
This, as most women will tell you, is a woman’s worst nightmare: unruly hair sprouting between her last look in the mirror and her office.
Unfortunately, hair doesn’t just surface on our chins. It can surprise us on the cheeks, on the forehead and sometimes on the neck. It grows like gangbusters above our lip.
I know there is 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 fast in places where it is not welcome.
As if getting old wasn’t hard enough. None of us after the age of 18 are immune.
What the hell is a woman to do? Elizabeth and Cindy have tweezers in their car.
“Sometimes I can’t see it until I get in the car,” says Cindy. It’s amazing how the light reflects off those defiant locks. My very blonde sister-in-law, Linda was without tweezers on her because when she noticed her first black hair on her chin. Trying to pull it out with her fingernails only made her cringe. That made her panic and she took out a bottle of hairspray from her, she sprayed some on her finger and smoothed her hair until she could get home to rip it out.
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 in stirrups and her gynecologist was busy performing her annual exam, he told her, “I can get rid of that mustache for you.”
Too stunned to ask which mustache he could be referring to, Maggie finally croaked, “Oh?” He told her that she was now getting laser hair removal and that she was the perfect candidate. She didn’t ask how he would know that she was sitting where he was, but she made an appointment.
At the book club, he walked around the room showing off his hairless lip while the rest of us went ooh and aah and started telling our own hair horror stories.
One member, who asked not to be identified, had a former boyfriend point out a hair on her chin. She was so embarrassed that she ended the relationship. Peg believes she wandered around for days with long hair sticking out just above her left eyebrow before she finally caught it in her rearview mirror.
“I went through all the friends I’d seen in the last few days and wondered why no one had told me,” Peg lamented. Through the grocery store, the dentist’s office, a party at one of his daughter’s schools. Dozens of people had seen it. She compared the humiliation of that to having the back of her dress caught in her underpants as she left the office. At that time, someone admitted that she had noticed.
“NO WAY!” Peg screeched.
“I noticed it too,” growled another friend.
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 shy about hair?
After that, we promised each other, no matter what, we would point out loose, visible hair. We also paired up and promised we’d rip each other’s chins off if either of us were ever in a vegetative state. We decided that lying in bed, hooked up to machines wouldn’t be half as bad as getting caught with chin hair.
My friend, Sue has a theory. Since hairs usually appear in the same place, we get into the habit of checking that spot every morning and again when we get in our cars. What puzzles us, says Sue, is when the hair decides to emerge in a completely new place. Sue, of course, has light hair and says that she can go several days without checking it.
Dark-haired girls hate her.
But girls with light hair, dark hair and no hair, we all need to stick together. We need a universal signal. So here’s a tip: when you see someone with unruly hair, silently point your index finger at your own chin. So they will know.
I would suggest that men could participate in this, but when I asked my husband if he would be willing to do this for me when the time came, he shrugged, as if to say, “Please, please don’t do that.”
Both as for well and for worse.
Jesse referred to his second wife’s lonely hair as “Bertha”. (No wonder the marriage didn’t work out.) When I asked one of my male friends about what he would call a hair growing on his wife’s chin, he replied, “Disgusting?”
I think it’s best that this stays a girl thing.