Hairy Maclary
Does anyone else remember reading the Hairy Maclary books when they were a small child? I can recall getting them out of the library before I was able to read, but beyond the fact that he came from Donaldson’s Dairy, I can’t remember anything about the storyline at all. In a rather tenuous link from poetry about a milkman’s dog, this post is going to be about hair. If you’re a guy, I suggest that this probably isn’t a theme which you are going to enjoy, and therefore you might be better served by going back and rereading the post on Google Maps 
I could write a very long post about my outrage at the fact that it is socially acceptable for *men* to be hairy in public, whilst women are expected to be hairless, but unfortunately I have genuinely got work to do at the moment, and thus I am going to confine myself to ranting about a product called Boots Sensitive Moisturising Hair Removal Cream. But first, a little background…
Generally, I shave my legs. That is to say, generally I try to avoid shaving them but when circumstances demand it, that is my preferred method of hair removal. If I was left to my own devices, I would be eternally happy and hairy, but whenever I am in a relationship I recognise that leg-shaving is expected of me and try to comply. Shaving my legs is one of my least favourite activities in the entire world, and I really don’t think most men appreciate quite how tiresome the process is. Legs are absolutely massive! That is to say, mine are not particularly long and neither are they particularly fat, but if the overall surface area of a leg is nevertheless enormous. Add to this, and I apologise for stating the obvious, the fact that most people have no fewer than *two* legs, both with a similar surface area and both of which need to be shaved.
Shaving two entire legs can easily take half an hour. It’s not a technically demanding task, but my God, is it boring! It wouldn’t be so bad if you could read whilst shaving your legs, or partake in some other distracting activity, but the problem is that if your concentration slips for as little as thirty seconds, you will probably find that your hand slips also and you end up cutting yourself. Razors are sharp 
My legs are covered in genuine scars which I have accumulated over years of painful leg shaving. New razors are particularly treacherous. There was one unfortunate incident when I dropped my razor in the bath and sat on it, and there are regular incidents where I accidentally slice through a fingernail. On the whole, I prefer to shave with a blunt razor. This minimises injury to myself, however the downside is obviously that it makes it one hell of a lot harder to remove any hair and thus somewhat defeats the point of the exercise. I generally end up with a friction burn before I achieve anything resembling smooth legs, and the situation is complicated further by shaving cream, or the lack thereof. I used to use shaving cream, until one day I accidentally got it in a place where shaving cream was not supposed to go and contracted a highly unpleasant and painful infection. So now I have to shave without shaving cream, which is kind of painful too but on balance somewhat better.
There was one memorable occasion many years ago when I decided to try waxing my bikini line in preparation for going on holiday. Or, more to the point, my sister decided to try waxing my bikini line prior to me going on holiday. The instructions all seemed so straightforward, but having allowed her to apply a large strip of wax to my thigh, things started to go rather wrong. Much as we both tried to grab it and pull it off again, it appeared to be inalterably glued to my skin 
After the best part of an hour trying, it eventually had to be scraped off piece by piece with a pair of scissors, and for months afterwards I was still trying to remove fragments of wax from my leg.
Anyhow, I was in Boots yesterday lunch time, standing in front of the hair removal display and contemplating whether I was brave enough to buy a new blade for my razor. As I was trying desperately to remember what brand my current razor was so that I could purchase one which would fit, my eyes alighted on a shelf of hair removal cream. Hair removal cream - what a brilliant idea! Slap a bit of cream on your legs, stand there for five minutes, wash it off and hey presto - you have legs which are beautifully smooth 
I couldn’t imagine why I had never tried such a simple and painless solution before. I later remembered that my mother had told me that the use of hair removal chemicals under the arms was dangerous as they could seep into your lymph glands and cause breast cancer, but I felt one little experiment was hardly going to kill me.
Reviewing the different brands on offer, I decided to go with Boots own which was the cheapest. There were various warnings about potential allergic reactions, so I opted to go with the one designed specially designed for sensitive skin. It cost me £1.50 for what I thought was a decent sized bottle, and I headed home that evening excited about trying it out. I was envisaging a lifetime free of shaving
Once in the seclusion of my own bathroom, I began to get a little confused by the instructions. The back of the packet told me to leave it on for five minutes whilst the back of the bottle told me to leave it on for six, and both had dire warnings about what might happen if I left it on for longer than that. There were also a plethora of warnings about things I was not supposed to do for 24 hours afterwards - use soap, shave and swim featuring high up on the list. It all seemed a little dangerous, but I decided to give it a go anyway.
So. The instructions told me to squeeze the cream onto my legs in vertical lines and then spread it out with the spatula provided so that all my skin was covered in a thick layer. I set about squeezing and spreading as directed, and managed to cover the entire of my left leg in a thin layer of cream along with the shin of my right leg, before the tube pronounced itself empty How ridiculous! What is the point of selling a cream to remove leg hair in a tube which is too small to contain enough cream to cover two average sized legs?! I was highly already highly annoyed.
As much of my legs as possible covered, I proceeded to sit on the bathroom floor and wait. Six minutes isn’t too long, but the stench of the cream began to become nauseating. Seriously, I don’t know what kind of chemical they use in that stuff but by the end I was pretty much hanging out of the bathroom window (oblivious to the fact that I was naked!) in an attempt not to pass out from the smell. Hopefully the neighbours weren’t in their loft room.
Once six minutes were up, the instructions stated that I was supposed to scrape the cream off my legs with the spatula, and the hair would come along with it. I dutifully began to scrape. What the instructions didn’t say, was what I was supposed to do with the cream afterwards. I mean, think about it; I’ve just emptied an entire tube of cream onto my leg. I’m now removing an entire tube of cream from the said leg, but I clearly can’t just put it back in the tube again, so what am I going to do?! I didn’t want to take the risk of trying to wash it down the sink in case it solidified and blocked the pipes, so in the end I had to collect it in tissues and put it in my bag to throw away in a public litter bin this morning. Not exactly convenient.
I might, however, have overlooked that problem, were it not for the fact that mixed up with all this cream I was scraping off was precious little hair. By the time I had removed as much as was possible with the spatula, my legs were only fractionally less hairy than they were when I started. Peculiarly, the cream seemed to have removed *part* of some hairs. That is to say, whilst some hairs were left untouched completely, others were reduced to about a quarter of their length with the net result that my legs are now covered in a patchy and unsightly stubble. 
To say I was not impressed would be the understatement of the century. The rest of the cream then had to be removed with tepid water, which was problematic in itself as it left behind a nasty residue. By the end of the exercise, I was covered in the disgusting gunk in all kinds of places where I hadn’t intended to get it, and I reeked all over of the nasty chemical smell. I went to sleep half expecting to die from the fumes 
Happily I didn’t and my legs haven’t come up in any sort of rash which is a relief. In fact, if you stroked them this morning (although please don’t unless you intend to follow it through) you would find that they are actually quite smooth to the touch despite the stubble, so the cream has at least fulfilled it’s promise to moisturise. If I wanted to moisturise my legs however (and why on earth would I want to do that?!) I would do so with moisturiser rather than hair removal cream, and hopefully that would smell a whole lot better.
I have since researched this cream on the internet and come across dozens of reviews saying how utterly crap it is. Boots ought to be ashamed of themselves for selling such a useless product, and I am convinced they could be done under the Trade Descriptions Act for selling a hair removal cream which fails to remove hair. As for me, I guess I’ll be spending my evening shaving - can’t wait….!
Tags: Boots hair removal cream, hair, legs, shaving