Outfittacular! And what I do with my razor.

This probably is not a post you'll want to read if talk about body hair makes you squeamish. I will try to be as tasteful as possible, but, yeah. You've been warned.

So, to kick things off, here's what I'm wearing today:



And to the side:



I am truly sorry about the shitty lighting. If you click on the photo and enlarge it, you should be able to see it fairly well.

I've worn this outfit (or at least the top half of it) a few times now, and I quite like the purple/light pink combo. The shirt is one of the many items of clothing I got for my 21st birthday last year, and the cardigan thing is something I purchased off yoursclothing.co.uk. The jeans are Marks and Spencers, purchased before I left the UK to come to Japan. They're nice jeans actually - quite thick, but stretchy and comfortable, unlike the other pair I bought there that digs into my stomach like it knows for sure there's buried treasure under there.

I'm also kind of liking what my hair's doing today. I gave it a pretty decent wash last night, so it's feeling pretty soft and the curls are quite bouncy. The issue of taming the curls is one I will have to deal with at some point in the future.

All right, that's the outfit out of the way. The main thing I wanted to talk about is something that I think a lot of women, and certainly a lot of fat women, have to deal with. Body hair.

Body hair is not fun for women, particularly in this day and age when even hair that EVERY woman has in abundance is considered unsightly, and the only hair that is really, truly permissible is what grows on your head. This irks me, as someone who struggles to grow adequate hair on her head but has absolutely NO trouble growing it on the rest of her body.

Now, hair comes in a variety of formats, as I think most people know. The hair that grows on the head is different to the hair that grows on the arms and legs is different to pubic/facial hair. This is why many men grow beards that are vastly different in colour to the hair on their heads. My brother's beard is alarmingly ginger-y. Even if you didn't know this, you probably had some kind of intuition about it because of differences in the characteristics of the hair (it feels different, looks different, etc).

Everybody has the light arm and leg hair from childhood (with some rare exceptions, of course). When puberty hits, a lot of this hair will turn into the thicker, more noticeable hair that exists on the more stereotypically "manly" of men in more abundance than on anyone else. Some men don't grow much of this hair at all, and such men are often teased about never having gone through puberty. Of course, in this "hair is horrible!" age those men are at a considerable advantage, but whatevs.

On women, this hair is only really supposed to grow on our nether-regions and under our arms, and for the women that I personally would deem "lucky", this is the case. On many of the rest of us, however, this black, thick, unsightly hair appears on many other parts of the body. To anybody who reads this blog, has this problem, and thinks that they are utterly alone in their suffering, take it from me: YOU'RE NOT.

And so at this juncture, I would like to talk about the wonderful (*cough*) dance that my beloved razor and I have to do every two or three days in the shower.

First, after I have put conditioner in my hair, I apply facial soap to my face. This done, I take the razor and carefully remove the past few day's worth of growth that has sprouted under my chin and along my lower jaw. This can be tricky, as I can't really see how it looks in the mirror, but I've been doing this for several years and haven't yet had a problem.

Next come the underarms. Not so embarrassing a procedure, because everybody has underarm hair.

Then comes my breasts. Yeah. See why I put the warning up at the start of this entry? It's common for men to have this thick hair growing around the nipples, and I can tell you now that it's not so rare on women either. I have to be really careful when I complete this part of the ritual. I'm only removing a few stray black hairs that grow there, but they grow alarmingly close to my nipples, and also if I don't pay attention I can easily miss them.

I really don't like the word 'nipple'.

Next comes the area under my navel. I'm guessing the hair grows here because it's near my nether-regions. I don't know. But anyway, I get quite a few thick black hairs growing there, so off they go.

Last comes my nether-regions. Now, I realise that many people choose to either leave this area alone (and good on you if you do), or just shave or trim along the outside, to tidy everything up a bit, present a nice bikini line, and all that good stuff. I just get rid of it all. This started a few years ago, when I was kind of curious about what it would be like to not have any hair down there, and I got a strange rash. In order to see the rash better I decided that now was the time for me to see what it was like to revert back to the genitals of my childhood. Since then it's become something of a habit. To be honest, it isn't the nicest of habits. It gets very prickly after a few days and it's always at least scratchy. I have a feeling that some day I'll get sick of the prickliness, or a future boyfriend will get sick of the prickliness, or I'll be unable to reach properly down there, or something, and I'll let it grow back. And I'd be kind of OK with it all growing back too. But for now I'll stick to my bizarre ritual.

And that's the end of it. I don't regularly shave my legs at the moment, because it's a pain in the arse to do and nobody sees them anyway. If I'm about to wear a dress I'll make the effort, but there seems to be little point otherwise. I don't do any waxing, because I'm a wimp. Although I wouldn't mind investigating more long-lasting methods for removing facial hair, because the prickly feeling is particularly undesirable there. My face feels like sandpaper.

The reason why I wanted to talk about my hair-removal rituals was to outline just where exactly body hair grows on some women. I am, I believe, fairly hairy for a white overweight chick. I would wager that black people and brown people often have far more extensive hair trouble than I do. As for the asians, well... yeah, bugger off. Lucky bastards. :P

But yeah, as I said before. Everybody who is both female and somewhat mortified by the unsightly hair that grows under their chin or under their navel, you are certainly, CERTAINLY, not alone.