Yes, we know, the headline to this post makes us want to gag, too, but apparently it’s a real thing that’s happening in waxing salons around the country. Now moms are taking their prepubescent daughters to get their legs and bikini lines waxed.
“But young girls don’t even have bikini lines,” you say. Right. But according to some aestheticians, waxing pre-pubescent legs and pubis’ helps prevent future hair growth. Oh. Well, in that case …
According to a story from MSN, waxing is on the rise in the 10- to 12-year-old set, and some customers are as young as eight. Says Diane Fisher of Eclips Salon and Eclips Kids Day Spa (what kids need to escape to a day spa for we have no idea): “Some kids do have a lot of hair. A 10-year-old with a dark mustache is going to feel self-conscious, and is going to ask for waxing.”
And Wanda Stawczyk, who runs Wanda’s European Skin Care in New York, told The New York Post that she thinks “in 10 years, waxing children will be like taking them to the dentist or putting braces on their teeth.” We hope not.
Never mind that may of these girls have nothing more than peach fuzz on their bodies — getting young girls and tweens bikini and leg waxes inscribes in them at a frighteningly early age that there is one acceptable way to be feminine, and that involves getting hair painfully ripped out of your skin. It also seriously messes with traditional notions of female rights of passage. As our Amelia pointed: “It robs girls of the pride they could have felt the day they discovered their first pube.”
Waxing sexualizes their young bodies, and emphasizes conforming to traditional standards of beauty over being a well-rounded, happy girl. But that doesn’t seem to matter to some moms, like Monica Longworth, who took her young daughter Glynis for waxing when she was only in the second grade. She noticed her daughter was “a hairy little girl” and that the blond hair on her legs was a “bit too thick.”
A “bit too thick” for whom?
What do you think? Would you wax your pre-teen daughter?
Original by Julie Gerstein
