My foray into the world of depilatories, and WTF with deleted journals?

I'm far from obsessive about the whole shaving thing. I have been known to appear in public in shorts with a month's worth of growth on my legs. I may have mentioned I don't care what people think of me, and at the top of this list are strangers at the grocery store who I will probably never see again. But occasionally resembling a Wookiee from the knees down starts getting tiresome and I give in and shave. But I do it for ME, not for society...a crucial difference there.

When I first joined my sisters in hair removal, it was with plain old razors (and at times Barbisol, back then the only option in shaving lotion. It gave my legs a heady, masculine scent, very popular with the ladies. Unfortunately I was in high school and not yet aware of my bisexuality (although looking back I suspect this was more the fault of the limited options at my very small-town school)). Then one Christmas my mother and I gave each other the new Epilady razor. This promised to keep legs hair-free for months at a time. Nowhere on the cheerful pink packaging did it mention that it did this by savagely ripping the hairs out by the roots one at a time. I touched the coil to my skin in one place and my reaction was the 1980's equivalent of "Oh, hell no" and an apology to my mother for wasting $60. Back to cheap disposable razors until I moved out on my own, when I graduated to electric. And that's where I've been up until this point.

Electric razors do okay I guess, except by only skimming the hair off at the surface, I would do my right leg and already have stubble by the time I finished my left. And my underarms never got as smooth as I would like. My curiosity was piqued by these new bladeless razor products put out by Veet and Nair, and yesterday I decided to try one out. I got the Veet "fresh scent" lotion which came with an appropriately sexy purple bladeless razor. "Fresh scent" indeed, as long as it was in the can. Once applied to the legs, it smelled a lot more like the foul chemicals used in perms. I watched in fascination as the hair appeared to stretch out and kink under the cream. It came off easily enough with the razor, but it was a bit unnerving seeing all my hair literally jumping ship, like prairie dogs being flooded out of their holes. Even the areas I hadn't "shaved" yet already had stray, uprooted strands of hair gasping their dying breaths on my skin. Most disturbing.

However my resulting silky smooth legs when I was done, silkier and smoother than I'd ever felt them, encouraged me to move onto my underarms. This process wasn't nearly as pleasant, unfortunately. Perhaps I didn't leave the cream on long enough, perhaps the skin was just more sensitive, but this felt a lot more like physically tearing the hair out follicle by follicle, and I rushed through it to get past the pain. For the first time in my life I had supermodel underarms, but at what price? The skin was so irritated and raw I literally couldn't lower my arms for about an hour. This morning I'm afraid to even apply deoderant.

I am very glad I quit while I was ahead, before trying it on my "genital/perianal area."

In completely unrelated news, what's the deal with deleted journals lately? First schatze (who at least came back) and now vagynafondue. I thought I had all the time in the world to read her past entries, and now she's gone. These are both entertaining writers who seemed very committed to Sparkle Motion LJ. Perhaps the server is just randomly deleting journals? Have we angered the LJ gods? Could mine be next?

I have to get my hair cut.