In need of a wax? a resident of Guangzhou zoo.

Firstly, expect to look hard for somewhere which does it in the first places (and outside of the big cities don’t expect to find anywhere at all).  Chinese women don’t have the European body hair ‘problem’, although it’s good to know that our neurosis is getting through to them and more and more Chinese women now imagine they have the problem and so get it done anyway.  Oh the power of advertising for giving women complexes about problems they never knew they had.

Years ago women had fatty deposits on the tops of their thighs and they learned to live with it.  Then the ad men (I’m guessing men anyway) invented cellulite and there was an array of creams and potions and special brushes for us to buy.  All this time we’d had this problem, but we didn’t know it.   Thanks ad men, but sometimes ignorance is bliss.  And as piles of Chinese women go and get themselves de-haired every few months, I guess they must be thinking the same thing.

Anyway, having found your salon, then be prepared to pay ‘western’ prices; the only places that perform this service are the salons that cater to Western women, and they adjust their prices accordingly.   With this extra cost, however, comes the advantage that the receptionist speaks English, and it’s her job to translate for the person performing the service.

The salon I visited had two prices; one is for ‘averagely hairy’ and the other for ‘very hairy’.  I told her my hair growth was probably average but she didn’t trust me and demanded to inspect my legs herself.   I asked if they could do the ‘bikini line’ at the same time but got told that the girl who did this wasn’t there.  So, they have a special girl just for bikini lines?  Not only that but they had to give her the day off on a Friday, which must be one of their busiest days, obviously due to the stress this job entails.   Staring at the crotches of (I’m guessing mainly) foreign women was obviously too much for her.

Meanwhile, the girl doing the leg waxing didn’t know how to get the top off of the bottle, which didn’t bode well in my book, and she had to call the receptionist back to show her.  However in the end she managed okay.  I think 100RMB is a lot of money for an ‘average’ leg wax (after inspection, I was declared only ‘averagely hairy).

But that’s China.