It was a beautiful spring day in California, and fourth-grade Candice was boldly wearing a swag new outfit from LTD2: a bucket hat and skort that both read "Angel."
I was enjoying a nice game of tetherball when my best friend, Maddie, came to me with a worried look in her eyes.
Apparently, she'd heard a few boys -- my crush included -- calling me "Chewbacca."
It was the best day of my life. Seriously, it was.
As you may have guessed, a few things got lost in translation here. First and foremost, I had never seen "Star Wars," and I had no idea who Chewbacca was.
Second, I was an absurdly confident 9-year-old and assumed “Chewbacca" was some sort of French word meaning “fashionable” or “love of my life.”
I never bothered looking into it. Because, as I mentioned, I was absurdly confident and did not for a moment doubt that I was wrong.
As for Maddie’s sad, pitiful look? She was just upset because her crush had been in the group and hadn’t bothered calling her “Chewbacca.” I hugged my BFF and told her everything was going to be okay.
Years later, I developed more social awareness and learned that “Chewbacca" was not a flattering French adjective.
But by then I had long since begun shaving/waxing/threading/tweezing/bleaching/sugaring and had gotten over my DOUCHEBAG fourth-grade crush.
Being hairy is hard. The problem is that we hairy girls spend so much time trying to hide our identity that we forget to take a moment to really bitch about it. We let our song go unsung. So here are 65 problems hairy girls are too familiar with.
Let our song be sung!
1. You've been called “Chewbacca” several times.
2. Your outfits revolve around which parts of your body are properly shaved.
3. You leave a trail of hair everywhere you go.
4. …And then you wonder how you can possibly shed THIS much and still be THIS hairy.
5. Half of your monthly budget goes toward hair removal.
6. You’ve definitely used products where they shouldn't have gone. And you have BURNED.
7. There is NO such thing as spontaneous sex in your world.
8. You get the 5 o'clock shadow everywhere.
9. You can grow a better mustache than most 18-year-old boys.
10. You think often about your esthetician, and you wonder how you can feel so much love for someone who causes you so much pain.
11. You are low-key SUPER resentful toward your naturally hairless friends.
12. …That is, until you remember that if we were all left naked in a snowstorm, you would have significant higher chances of survival. Then you feel bad and wish you could make them a little coat out of your fur in case of emergency.
13. You could write a book on hair-related childhood trauma.
14. Your happy trail is not so happy.
15. No matter how many hours you spend shaving in the shower, there’s no way you’re going to get it all.
16. Summer is your arch-nemesis.
17. Winter, on the other hand, is your best friend.
18. You grow hair in places people didn’t believe hair could grow.
19. You find yourself wondering how you would fare in medieval times, when hair removal wasn’t even an option. Would I ever have found love?
20. Your pores are so dark that you never really look hairless, even on your face.
21. You have to shower even when you don’t want to, because shaving. Ugh.
22. There is no such thing in your world as a “reusable razor."
23. Your esthetician is a close friend.
24. You are constantly aware of the lighting.
25. Your first wax was a real milestone.
26. You have tried literally every hair removal product on the market.
27. You've picked (pun intended) "red and bumpy" over "dark and hairy."
28. You have more facial hair than your boyfriend.
29. Your bathroom is always covered in miscellaneous hair clippings.
30. You have no choice but to believe in evolution.
31. After a bad haircut, you marvel at your body’s ability to rapidly grow hair on every part of your body EXCEPT your head.
32. You grow three hairs per pore.
33. You could never pull a Miley and make hairy armpits a trendy statement, because your hair would grow to be about 6 feet long. Dying it pink would honestly just be too expensive.
34. You are constantly trying to make “lumbersexual” happen.
35. If you forget tweezers, your weekend is over.
36. You see nothing weird about having your cousin in Germany ship you special tweezers.
37. Your day is ruined when you miss a patch.
38. You have been looking forward to laser hair removal since you were a toddler.
39. Razor burn is a constant struggle.
40. You find yourself casually asking the waxing lady how much she’ll charge for the fuzz on your butt.
41. Your skin is never completely smooth.
42. Your housemates don’t understand what anybody could be doing in the shower for THAT long.
43. You have immensely improved your flexibility in an attempt to shave every nook and cranny of your body.
44. You get a concerning amount of pleasure from extracting your ingrown hairs.
45. You have PTSD from your pre-waxing days. (Shout-out to the boy who asked my sister when she was planning on “mowing the lawn” in middle school).
46. You are ahead on all the latest hair-removal fads — "sugaring," anyone?!
47. You have definitely shaved parts of your body that were not meant to be shaved.
48. You learned the hard way that dry shaving is just not an option.
49. You can get an entire Brazilian without flinching. You are VERY proud of this.
50. When other people realize how hairy your arms are, they can't stop talking about it. And it's not even to be mean. "They're just, like, SO hairy."
51. You’re always a little prickly.
52. You've developed the skill of plucking with your bare fingers when push comes to shove.
53. You logically know that the Kardashians are ridiculous, but part of you loves them for proving that hairy girls can become sexy pop culture icons.
54. Your face looked like that of a 15-year-old boy when you were 9.
55. Your legs looked like those of a 45-year-old man when you were 5.
56. There is a sick part of you that wants to "let it all go" just to see how long "it" can get.
57. Estheticians are up there with firefighters and policemen as the real MVPs, as far as you’re concerned.
58. You want to hop on board with the feminist movement to stop shaving. But for you, that's legitimately unsanitary.
59. You're hyper-paranoid about having a mustache.
60. If tweezing were an art form, you would be Picasso.
61. You find yourself more attached to the woman who gave you your first Brazilian than you are to the boy who first swiped your V-card.
62. Your drain is constantly clogged.
63. You look at baby pictures and have difficulty distinguishing yourself from a baby wolf.
64. Ingrown hairs have left you with countless herpes scares.
65. You find yourself fantasizing about the day when everyone else goes bald and you still have a full head of hair.
