GOOD GROOMING'S NOT FOR SISSIES

by Mariane Holbrook

Aren't men just the cutest and cleverest things you ever saw?

They have more fun than anybody. They lie awake nights dreaming of parachuting from a plane into a vat of pig waste or swimming at night with water moccasins in country club ponds to retrieve golf balls. (Hey, they get ten cents apiece for those babies, so quit laughing!)

The latest "It's A Man Thing" is some guy in India named Narayan Prasad Pal who earned a coveted spot in the Guinness Book of World Records for letting his ear hair grow to 5 1/2 inches! Now if that isn't something to make my little heart pant with yearning and desire, I don't know what is.

But it got me to thinkin' about hair, so I got on my trusty, rusty ole iMac computer and discovered some hair things. Hold onto your seats here because this info could significantly impact your life:

Hair grows approximately one-half inch per month. Hair growth occurs fastest between the ages of 15 and 30, and grows faster on women than men.

The average life span of a strand of hair is between 4 and 7 years.

It's normal to shed between 75-150 hairs per day

There was a lot more but I bore easily. And I do worry because God numbers the very hairs on our heads and with 6 1/2 billion people on earth losing 75-150 hairs per day, that involves some pretty serious salon bookkeeping, if you ask me.

Anyway, one day I looked in the mirror and saw a hair on my chin (you know, as in "chinny, chin chin?") OMIGOSH. I panicked. I found a magnifying glass and peered at that thing, incredulous because of what it could portend. What if I sprouted a full-grown beard? Whose genes could I blame THAT on?

I showed it to John who, with tongue in cheek, offered to buy me a Remington MS3-4000 MicroScreen 3 TCT Cord/Cordless Rechargeable razor for my birthday instead of the usual lawn mower he gives me. (The term "thoughtful gift-giver" was kinda, sorta wasted on this man.)

I gave him a withering look and made a mental note to skip the rinse cycle on his laundry.

Then I did what any sane woman would do. I went to the internet and ordered the most expensive hair removal cream I could find. And from Sweden, yet! (I could have gone for the exotic "body sugaring hair removal system" but I didn't wanna go there. Not at MY age!

What really sold me on this particular product was that its Thioglycolic Acid content was only 12.7 pH. Now I don't know Thioglycolic from Thio-anything, but it sounded impressive to me so I immediately placed an online order for the $89 cream, forking over to this internationally obscure company my credit card number, banking router number, social security number, password to EBay and Amazon.com, library card number (everything they demanded except my underwear size, and I ain't givin' THAT to NOBODY.

I sat by my mailbox on a blue plastic crate every day waiting for the cream to arrive and when it did, I was ecstatic. Right on time, too, because I was scheduled to speak at a women's meeting that very night at church and let me tell you, I needed to look GOOD. Having a black hair on your chin is not any well-groomed woman's definition of "LOOKIN' GOOD!"

I hurried into the house and smeared the cream on that disgusting black hair. Then I decided there might be other black hairs furtively hiding just beneath the skin surface, ready to spring out one morning and scare the be-jeepers outta me. So I smeared the cream all over my face just to be sure. The directions said to spread lightly, but hey, this was WAR so I put it on extra thick and used up the whole tube with just that one application.

There! That oughta do it!

So I waited for the cream to do its magic and counted out the required 20 minutes. I looked in the mirror and that hair was STILL THERE! I couldn't believe it so I left the cream on my face another 20 minutes.

I began to feel a little warmth on my skin so I figured I'd wash the white creamy stuff off and hope for the best.

Wiping my face on a towel, I peeked with one eye at the mirror.

"Who is THAT?" I screamed. Somebody with a tomato aspic face was staring at me in my mirror.

Then the real burning began. We're talkin' torture, here. I mean, FIRE, HEAT, HOT COALS, BURNING.

I had exactly 3 hours until my speech before 25 women at church for whom the word "scrutinizing" is too gentle a word

Later I stood meekly before this group who didn't hear a word I said. They sat in open-mouthed, gaping, wide-eyed disbelief staring at my scalded face and that one stinkin' stubborn black hair which swung like a rope from the bright, blistering redness of my chinny-chin-chin.