Philadelphia aesthetician Melanie Engle, whose specialty is eyebrow shaping, is no stranger to odd requests. But nothing prepared her for being asked by one client to book a bikini wax appointment for her 8-year-old daughter.
“The first thing I had to do was try and stay calm, and not yell ‘What are you thinking?’ ” said Engle. “This wasn’t about the girl developing hair early — it was the mother’s obsession with wanting her daughter to be a supermodel.”
Waxing body hair — from the simple shaping of an eyebrow arch to the painful transformation of the bikini line — has long been a rite of passage for adult women. But now, more mothers around the U.S. are taking their tweens — kids 10 to 12 years old and some even younger — to salons to get body hair removed.“For waxing, 12 years old is the ‘new normal,’ ” Engle said.
The International Spa Association reports that 16 percent of teens who have visited a spa have had a hair removal procedure done, but the organization has no numbers for younger children because they aren’t allowed to survey them. Several salon owners around the country told TODAYshow.com that the number of kids 12 and under coming in for waxing services has increased dramatically over the past three years.
“There is a huge demand for waxing,” said Diane Fisher, owner of Eclips Salon and Eclips Kids Day Spa in McLean and Ashburn, Va., both Washington, D.C., suburbs. “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.”
Nearly 20 percent of the clients that Nance Mitchell sees for bikini waxes in her Beverly Hills, Calif., salon are tweens, she says.
“The increase began a couple of years ago,” said Mitchell, who has been doing bikini waxes for more than 30 years. “Some kids come in with their mothers when the mothers are getting waxed, so they want to do it too. One 10-year-old had thick hair coming down her leg, and she had a bikini and leg wax because she couldn’t go to camp like that without getting teased
Or this one...
The bikini waxing of 8-year-old girls before, but some of the stomach-turning details in this story on MSNBC cannot be missed: One salon in NYC boasts that children 8 years and older can get discounted waxing for "virgin" hair: "Virgin hair can be waxed so successfully that growth can be permanently stopped in just 2 to 6 sessions. Save your child a lifetime of waxing... and put the money in the bank for her college education instead!" But then there's Wanda Ramos, who let her daughter, Gabriella, get waxed because kids at school made fun of her unibrow. "It made a big difference," Ramos says. "She feels more confident and other kids don’t make fun of her anymore — she gets compliments on how she looks now." Self-assurance is great, but isn't all of it putting focus on the wrong things? [MSNBC]
(Tank, circra 1973)
2 comments:
How in the world did you find that picture to go with this post?
ok, that's freaking ridiculous. NO 8 year old should be getting a bikini wax. Do they really have hair down their? I don't remember having hair down there. The eyebrow and mustache thing isn't such a big deal, its little places, but a bikini wax?? I'm disgusted with society and how superficial it is. Stop trying to make your fucking kids look like god damn super models. Every child is going to get teased for something, whether they get waxed or not, and probably they are gonna get teased for getting wax. At that young of an age hopefully they are gonna realize its not something to flaunt. Being older and telling your friends is different because you know every other older teenage girl is doing it.
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