Hellloo my dewdrops! How wild and wooly are you, as we make our way through our 7th week of Covid confinement? I have to say I’m holding up pretty well. Never have I been so happy about letting my hair revert to its natural state and colour. I see friends and colleagues on Zoom wearing hats and scarves to hide their stripes, be they dark or light, and I’m glad that that is at least one thing I don’t have to deal with. I could seriously use a haircut, but otherwise, white is right, at least for me.

 

There are other services I sorely miss, however. My nails are a complete disaster. The gel manicure is gone – it either grew out, or I picked and filed it off, and the result is not pretty. I could also use a pedicure, a facial, a massage, and maybe a teeth cleaning. On the whole, however, I’m holding up. So much so that, on a recent Zoom call with some close friends, my girlfriend leaned into the screen and said “Hey… You look great. Do you have someone coming in on the sly to give you Botox?”

 

I was seriously taken aback. Not about the Botox – I’ve been doing that for ages, twice a year, and obviously I don’t care who knows it, but I was rather shocked to be asked if I was sneaking someone in to shoot me up. Are people doing that? Are there stylists and manicurists making secret house calls? Back alley massage therapists? Black market aestheticians? There must be. I see too many people on television and social media looking a bit too polished for the times, if you know what I mean. I can see how you could be tempted, especially if you have a public face, and someone willing to sacrifice their health, and yours, and maybe the planet’s, to maintain it. Whenever there are rules and restrictions, there’s always someone willing to bend or break them, and God knows we can be slaves to our vanity. And of course Botox is not something one can administer to one’s self; if I’m going to get a faceful of poison, I want a medical professional to give it to me.

 

Once you give up hair and nails and other aesthetic procedures, you end up with a fair amount of extra time and money on your hands. A quick calculation reveals that at my vainglorious peak, when I was getting my hair cut and coloured every 4 weeks, my nails done every 3, plus all the other services (waxing, threading, razor blading, etc), I was spending 7-8 hours a month with one beauty professional or another. That’s an entire working day, basically removing hair from one place and adding it to another. I didn’t begrudge the time, and I still don’t. I love my hair stylist (Claire with the Hair) and my aesthetician (Amrit, who knows ALL my secrets), and I miss them as people and not just service providers.

 

But if ever there was a time to figure out how to give yourself a bikini wax, this is it, because that can’t be done from 6 feet away, and I’m not sure I want to watch an online tutorial.

 

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