Róisín Ingle

.... on hair-raising stuff

. . . . on hair-raising stuff

I’M STARING IN the mirror at the space between my nose and my top lip. “Can you see it?” I say to my boyfriend again. “I saw it yesterday,” he says, bored. “Yes, but look at it now. Look. It’s black and huge, like a spider’s leg. It’s much bigger than it was yesterday. At least half an inch longer.”

“Oh yeah, huge, definitely longer,” he says, not even looking and acting completely unbothered by what I have come to describe as the “Hair of Doom”.

It is a hair that has suddenly sprouted in what for men would be the moustache area. The crucial and horrifying word here being moustache! I don’t want a moustache! I just don’t.

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It’s not that I am excessively vain. I am 40. So I live with a lot of things that come with reaching that age. I have extra bits of skin on my body, small rubbery nubs that as far as I can see serve no practical purpose except to remind you that things they are a-changing. That you are getting older. Properly older, not older through a Madonna-style prism.

I’ve been overweight for so long that middle-age spread is something I haven’t had to contend with in any meaningful way.

And I honestly don’t mind the age-related wrinkles. I have friends who use Botox but skin smoothing injections don’t interest me. I’d rather spend the money on a relaxing foot massage or a session with those feet-nibbling fish.

I’m happy enough with my face, generally. I don’t tend to spend too long in front of the mirror. I’ve especially never liked those awful magnifying mirrors that allow you get so up close and personal with your skin that you can count your pores.

In winter I mostly don’t shave my legs or under arm hair, laziness mostly but also the extra layer of fluff provides a definite cosiness in the cold weather. While I don’t tend to reveal my fuzzy legs neither do I subscribe to society’s expectations that women should “tend” to this or any other area. Hairy or hair free should be a personal choice not something essential to femininity.

There was a wonderful documentary on the subject on the BBC a few years ago called F**k off, I’m A Hairy Woman. I agree with the presenter who made the point that it’s an almost accepted tyranny that women, whether depicted in adult magazines or 19th century nude portraits, should be free of body hair.

“To me, there seems to be something both worrying and obscene about society’s requirement for adult women to remove the body hair that proclaims them sexually mature adults, and turn themselves into facsimiles of pre-pubertal girls,” comedian Shazia Mirza wrote at the time.

I was 21 when I found my first hair growing from my neck. I swore the friend I confided in about the aberration to secrecy and plucked it out with my fingers because I didn’t own tweezers. I’ve been picking these stray hairs out for years. Apart from a couple of visits to the threading corner of The Body Shop I’ve generally let my eyebrows do what nature intended they would. That is grow in a normal eyebrow fashion as opposed to being turned into something that looks pencilled on and emaciated.

Unexpected, even unsightly, hair growth has not tended to bother me. I’m hairy and proud. Hairy and not really bothered. But. Ah, here. Look it. I don’t want a moustache! I know I am not going to turn in Magnum P.I. overnight, but my consternation about the sudden upper lip hair has come as a surprise. I may think that I’m all for hairy women being hairy without fear of discrimination, and yet the real reason I am upset about the stray hair on my upper lip is because I am worried about what people will think.

I’m concerned that the obvious beginnings of a moustache will cause people to think things like “she’s really letting herself go, well even more than usual” or “would she not sort herself out” and even just, “Ha! Look at that lady. The moustache on her.”

I wrestled for a while with my inner hairy feminist who was making the point that a couple of hairs on my upper lip did not constitute a crisis but the worried bit of me won out. The “Hair of Doom” had to go. I plucked it.

With my fingers because I still don’t own tweezers so it took a few attempts. I put some moisturising cream on the pale red spot where the hair used to be. But as sure as my grey roots are already advancing on the dyed hair on my head another one is going to grow back there shortly.

It’s the way of the world. The way of ageing. Instead of saving up for laser therapy to zap the hairs, I think I’ll ask the expert Body Shop threading ladies to do a quick whip around the facial area when I next go for an eyebrow threading session.

In the meantime I am going to try to learn to love my hair. Every last sodding bit.

In other news ... Life Support is a new compilation album of Irish music in aid of Pieta House, the suicide and self-harm crisis centre. The album will be launched at the Mercantile, on Dame Street in Dublin on April 24th with a special gig of acoustic performances from Delorentos, We Cut Corners, Ross Breen and EleventyFour.