A few years ago, I discovered the pleasures of a salon leg wax. You go into a private room, and they spread nice-smelling warm wax on your legs, press on strips of cloth-like paper, and yank those off, along with your leg hairs. It’s kind of expensive, but my legs are not very hairy, so one wax lasts me a long time. I tend to get it done once in the winter, in December, before all the holiday parties, and once in the spring. Though in recent years I have often skipped the spring wax, and just started shaving, instead.
Months ago, I bought a home wax kit. The Italian exchange student who lived with us for part of the 2011-2012 school year used the same brand, and it seemed to work OK for her. She washed out and reused the strips – or at least I saw them drying on the clothes rack – and her legs always looked nice and smooth.
On Tuesday I decided to give it a try. The trouble started when I took the lid off the wax – a bunch of it stuck to the lid, and I tried to scrape it off with a silicone scraper and a paring knife. Long strings of the stuff escaped to the counter, and into the sink – where there were still some dirty dishes, left by that slatternly lady of the house. My containers from my packed lunch and the bowl from the cereal I’d eaten for dinner.
“No problem”, I thought, “wax comes off with hot water.” But not this stuff – I think it’s some polymer, not really wax at all – neither hot water or even straight Dawn could cut it – I had to resort to Goo Gone.
After Goo Gone-ing the sink and the paring knife, and chucking the scraper, I moved on to the bathroom, to try to use the stuff on my legs. It was just nastily sticky and pernicious. At one point I had bits of shredded toilet paper stuck to the bathroom floor and my left leg, trying to get the wax-like substance off. Luckily, I realized that the “finishing oil” that came in the kit was like Goo Gone, so I applied that liberally to get the sticky off. The hairs responded less well, though. None of them came off – maybe they were too short – I only had about ¾ inch stubble.
In the end the best course seemed to be to Goo Gone and finishing oil everything that had come into contact wax stuff, pack the kit back into its box, trash it, and just shave my legs. So I did.
Next morning I still found a few sticky patches on things – the outside of the Dawn bottle is gonna be sticky till the end; there’s only an inch or two of liquid in there, anyhow. My cereal bowl is in the dishwasher – I hope that gets the wax-like gunk off. The real proof is below – my yahrzeit candle holder that had three years at least worth of old real wax – and it all came off with hot water – no Goo Gone required.
Clean yahrzeit candle holder
