How Long Do Your Leg Hairs Grow?

When was the last time you tried to find out?

Photo by Billie on Unsplash

Over the past few weeks, I’ve really let the ‘ol beauty standards slip. When I say slip, I actually mean fall off a cliff. And when I say few weeks, I actually mean few months. Well…it’s winter in London, isn’t it? No-one’s seeing your bare skin for at least half a year, so why bother preening? That’s why tights were invented amirite? For me personally, this precipice was precipitated by a period of intense physical showmanship owing to the two weddings and honeymoon of 2024. I was waxed, plucked, lasered, injected, dyed, trimmed and polished to Hunger Games levels of personal perfection.

I will say that outside of my nails and outside of summer holidays, I’ve been giving less and less of a fuck about certain elements of the whole maintenance palaver since becoming a parent. I am definitely not getting my greying hair coloured every 10 days like some of my friends and professional peers. I get a pedi once every six weeks tops. And I’m pretty lax on shaving my legs and underarm hair. Even though I’d gone through the rigmarole of all those appointments prior to my Palm Springs wedding, I’d totally forgotten about the bits I manage myself and was minutes from walking down the aisle with hairy pits much to the chagrin of my American bridesmaids. ‘This is not a Julia Roberts moment, Katherine!’ Jeez Louise, calm down and pass the Venus.

In the interim, I feel like I’ve been in maintenance burnout and since mid-October, I’ve barely touched a razor, let alone made it to a beauty salon (outside of infills, but that means something different to me). On 1^st January, I was sporting inch long grey roots, there was a centimetre gap between my pedicure and my tootsie cuticles, my brows had grown wispy and wild and my body hair, well… There’s a line in Jilly Cooper’s Rivals (the book rather than the recent Disney series) when the downtrodden Lizzie Vereker describes her private parts as resembling a Welsh ewe. Let’s just say I could certainly empathise. I also realised that my leg hairs curl, just like pubes. I’d never seen them like that and I’m pretty sure they weren’t coiled when I was a teenager, i.e.: the last time I’d let them grow out.