thought I was. “Oh my!” Mom says. “Did any of you know Mara had a goatee?”
I knew that there were many more important issues going on in the world and that my worrying about such an insignificant bodily matter was selfish and maybe even bordering on narcissistic, but I couldn’t help my feelings. I was irrational. Global warming was spawning under my skin. Genocide was happening on my face.
I finally had to talk to someone about it, and it was during my winter break from Columbia that it finally burst forth.
“Mom, I’ve got chin hair!”
“But I don’t see it.”
“It’s there,” I said.
She came in closer.
“Don’t come too close!”
“Why not?”
“’Cause then you’ll see it!”
She blamed it on my dad’s side of the family and never spoke of it again.
I continued to pluck my way through my master’s program, and from then on kept my chin hairs to myself. But in the midst of all this, I began dating a guy. We were fooling around—nuzzling, hugging—one day in Central Park. Tenderly, he put his hand on my face. “I love the fuzz on your face,” he said. “It’s so soft.” He then made a downward stroking motion from my cheek all the way to my chin. That moment may have seemed romantic to him, but it was the closest I’d ever come to shitting myself besides that one time I had dysentery and was stuck on a twelve-hour bus ride from Dharamsala to Delhi. I turned in the other direction as quickly as possible and encouraged him to fondle my hoodie.
I would never put myself in that position again:
Natural sunlight.
Bare face.
Man at close range.
After attending grad school, I moved to Bangkok for a job as a features writer at a Thai newspaper.
In retrospect, not the best idea in the world for a hairy Western five-footer with budding self-esteem issues.
Thai people, as it turns out, aren’t hairy. They don’t have any hair except on their heads. They seemed like magical people to me with all their hairlessness, like they lived in some kind of fairy-tale world. I kept looking for hair, scanning crowds for it to reassure myself that I was normal. Maybe I was overreacting—at this point I’m pretty sure I had some form of body-hair dysmorphic disorder—but I often felt like if I stopped plucking, I’d be able to grow more impressive facial hair than most Thai men. That thought made me feel so unsexy that it’s hard to properly explain.
That’s when I decided to try “permanent reduction” methods for the first time. It was 2005 when I finally signed up for laser. Once a month, I would go to a Bangkok hospital called, I swear, Bumrungrad. I’d lie on a gurney in a brightly lit room. All blank white walls, slightly yellowed by time. A doctor would come in with gloves, goggles, and a mask on over his face. A nurse would cover my eyes with darkened goggles and swab jelly on my skin. The doctor would then spend about ten minutes zapping my face with something that looked like the suction side of a Hoover. I had to fold my tongue over my upper front teeth so that when they did my upper lip, I wouldn’t feel the pain of the laser reaching my gums or whiff the slight smell of melting enamel. After, they’d give me icepacks for my red face, which emitted so much heat that my cheek, if placed on a woman’s abdomen, could probably help relieve menstrual cramps.
It couldn’t have been very healthy, but I wasn’t thinking about that then. I had one goal in mind: complete eradication. I’d ride home on the back of a motorcycle taxi and stay home for the night, until the swelling had receded.
I should have realized that there was a problem. I’ve always been kind of cheap. For example, I won’t pay ten bucks for a sandwich that would give me nutrition and probably pleasure—six is my top price—but I could somehow rationalize spending a thousand dollars for someone to fry my face.
On my last visit, they elevated the laser a bit too high and it burned my upper lip. I still have the scar. It’s about the size of a raindrop. When I’m cold, it turns white.
When people ask where I got the scar, I tell them, “One time I was making soup—some sort of bean stew—and it was boiling so wildly that it splattered me…. Yeah, just like that, third-degree burn. Crazy, right?”
Yeah, right.
It was embarrassing to admit that I made myself look worse by trying to look better. It still is.
Even right now.
Yep, still embarrassing.
But not only was I embarrassed; I also felt ashamed. I was back to being that kid poised with the lint remover over my leg—feeling equal shame for having hair as for getting rid of it. Why couldn’t I just be okay with who I was? Why was I spending so much money and time hiding myself?
But if you thought I’d stop it with the laser after realizing all that, then you haven’t been reading this very closely.
Two years later, in the middle of my second laser treatment back in New York, I began to consider the possibility of a medical problem. I felt like I was fighting a rare battle—but I wasn’t sure because, theoretically, if other women were like me, it would be a battle fought alone and behind closed doors. If other women were waging it, I wouldn’t know. But then again, could any of them have so many wanton whiskers? This couldn’t be what was supposed to be happening to a woman’s body.
So I went to my gyno for a follicular assessment and possible intervention.
Unfortunately, she had some bad news for me: I was normal. She explained that there are three common reasons for unusual quantities of hair on women. They either have polycystic ovaries or hormone imbalances, or they were simply born with hairy genes. “Many Eastern Europeans have a lot of dark, thick hair,” Dr. Chrisomalis said. I could have sworn that she was examining my chin as she spoke.
A waxer once told me that she knows what she’s about to deal with before people even take off their pants because the eyebrows reveal everything. Why couldn’t my doc just check out my eyes, then?
“But it’s got to be something else,” I pleaded. I’d recently contemplated the possibility that I’d hit early menopause—there had been some hot flashes, I’m pretty sure—and I’d never given up that early idea that I might be part man. I speculated now that my nuts just hadn’t descended yet. “I’ve got hair even on my …”
But I couldn’t tell a medical professional about the nipple hair. And what would be the point, anyway? I’d plucked that morning especially for her.
“I don’t think you have PCOS,” she said. “Other symptoms are weight gain and acne, but if it’d make you feel better, we can do some tests and maybe some blood work on your hormone levels.”
She extracted some of my blood and scheduled me for an ultrasound. That actually got me a tiny bit excited. It would be awesome if something was medically wrong. I’d be officially diagnosed and on my way to a cure. I could stop going crazy.
But
