You Say Betweeny, I Say Bikini…

*Note to my three male readers: This post is about bikini waxes. If that grosses you out, stop reading!

Trust me, that's going nowhere good.

I’m a low-maintenance kind of gal.  Seriously.  Yes, I have my high maintenance moments (shopping binges at Anthropologie in advance of work conferences, $120 highlights so that I can pretend I’m still a natural blond, penchant for shampoo sold only at high-end salons, etc. etc.)  But there are moments when I get a window into the world of true high-maintenance behavior, and these moments make me intensely glad I’m not more obsessed with personal grooming.

Take Sunday as an example.  Due to the PTSD I incurred from my last budget bikini wax, during which I was forced to lie on a previously used piece of waxed paper that had bits of wax and hair clinging to it and after which my skin actually bled and got puffy and swollen and completely negated the point of the waxing, I decided to go high end.  I chose a fancy downtown salon and booked my appointment online (bonus: I didn’t have to talk to anyone!)  It was $35 for a bikini wax, which seemed reasonable considering the previously mentioned Journey-To-Hades wax job was probably $20 (memory dims, or perhaps has been blocked out).

It seemed reasonable until I was doing it.  Yes, the salon was VERY nice, all ecru and Tiffany blue with quirky little ad campaigns all over the place with waxing definitions for terms like “Landing Strip,” “Full Monty,” or “Bermuda Triangle.” (If you have to ask, you’ll never understand.) The salon employee (waxer?) who was helping me was sweet and funny, keeping up a chirpy banter throughout the procedure that made me, for whole seconds at a time, able to not focus on the fact that I was naked from the waist down, sprawled on a vinyl table, having hot wax in the salon’s signature blue shade smeared on my cooter and then ripped off with eyeball-watering efficiency.

The entire procedure–from the first undignified moments of being shown the Tidy Towel that the salon makes available for all bikini wax victims  patrons and which I was told I could use “if I needed to”  (who would choose NOT to use the Tidy Towel? Is anyone that confident in their personal hygiene regimen?), to the final moments where the poor salon employee was bent over me, doing a final check for any wax that hadn’t gotten ripped off successfully–took fifteen minutes.  $35 for fifteen minutes of pain, agony and humiliation.  And, I contemplated as I got dressed, some women do this every WEEK!  That’s over $2,000 a year if you’re a good tipper.  Which I am, when it comes to people touching my vajayjay.

Luckily, I’m an old married mom, so my days of wearing thong bathing suits are far behind me–not that I ever wore them.  In fact, I’ve discovered these wonderful swim shorts that I wear all summer long for my dips in the river with Lydia: you never need a bikini wax and only moderately resemble a Victorian lady in full swimming costume.  Perfect!  So it’s really only when I go on vacation to sunny locales that I submit to the torture of the wax, and I’m glad of it.  That’s $2,000 that I can spend on whatever the hell I want, and no matter what it is, it’s GOT to be more enjoyable than hair removal.

So, feeling pretty great about myself and my thrifty hygiene regimen, I went downstairs to the checkout desk, where I was rung up for $50.

“I thought it was $35,” I said.

“Oh, no, a Bikini wax is $35.  What you got is a Betweeny, and that’s $50.”

I vaguely remembered my perky waxer saying, towards the end of our time together, “This is called a Betweeny! Doesn’t it look great?” and me agreeing with her that, yes, my irritated red skin looked fantastic.

“Um, okay, but when I signed up online I chose the $35 one.  I never would have paid $50.”

The salesperson looked at me with what seemed like pity. “Did she take off too much?”

“NO!  No! She was fine!  It was fine! She just didn’t tell me how much it would cost.”

“Did she say it was a Betweeny?”

“Well, yeah, I think she used that word, but I had no idea what it meant.”

And this was the moment that I realized how glad I am to be low maintenance.  Here I was, standing in an airy and beautiful salon, with a lemon sage aromatherapy candle wafting perfume all around me, arguing about how much money I had just spent on my pubic hair.  And the reason I was arguing about it was that, during the fifteen minutes of shame I’d just endured, I hadn’t cued in to the magic word “Betweeny” and somehow known it would tack on fifteen bucks to my bill.

So Reader, after a few more moments of halfhearted complaining, I paid it.  And I tipped 20%.  Because I’m low maintenance…or a moron.  All I know was that I would have paid $100, if it had gotten me out of there any faster.

Watch out Myrtle Beach, here I come!

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