Just Wait 20 Years or So, Kiddo

“Oooh, what’s this?” little me was thinking to myself while I patted Grandpa Ruby’s beard. “Good thing I don’t have one of these scruffy patched on my chin.” Ha! What an innocent fool I was as a child.

I’ve written about my potential career as the bearded lady in a circus before (Being the Bearded Lady at the Sideshow Might be Fun (Maybe?) and the connection between airplane bathrooms and chin hairs), but seeing this picture reminded me that my interest chin hair seems to have begun quite some time ago. How sad is it that I now pat my own damn chin that way, looking for stray hairs that need plucking, lest I reveal my status as a freak she-male to the world unintentionally? (As opposed to through these writings on chin hairs, where I intentionally alert people to my masculine afflictions.)

(Warning: this paragraph is full of cheesy puns.) I know that I am not the only one out there struggling to keep my chin up in the face of this assault on my feminine image. Many, many of my friends – all of us in our mid- to late 20s and 30s – who are obsessive chinnie chin chin pluckers. There’s a market that is ripe for the plucking (heh!) that, shockingly, the beauty industry has yet to exploit. Think about it: when’s the last time you saw an ad for laser hair removal for chin hair? Probably, uh, never. Sure, lasering off crotch, leg, and pit hair? Back and chest chair? Ads everywhere. You can’t open a damn magazine without some naked oiled body builder and airbrushed seductress leering at your figuratively hairy ass from the pages. “Oh, you may shave or even wax,” they smirk at you, “but our cootie and pit hairs will never grow back. Ever! Mwa ha ha ha.”

Yet the one place that it would truly be useful to get laser hair removal is my chin. I am 99.99% confident that female soul patches are never suddenly going to become stylish, but no model is showing off her hairless, oiled chin. Why is that? Damn beauty industry is so busy creating ridiculous insecurities in people (we are mammals, which by definition are warm blooded, produce milk, and have hair, although I often wonder about some people and warm blooded status) while ignoring the ones that would be useful to exploit. Fuckers.

And that does it for today’s look back at my childhood and tenuously related rant about why I hate society.