Veet, *this* is what beauty feels like.

Veet, for the uninitiated, is a brand of hair removal products, creams and wax strips.

Basically, you slap the cream or wax strip on your legs, arms, underarms (not recommended for hairy faces or muffs!), then wait. In the case of the cream, you're waiting for the hair to dissolve. The time required also gives you a chance to reflect on how you've just put something that dissolves HAIR onto your bare skin, and whether that's a wise move. In the case of the wax, you're just waiting to pluck up the courage to inflict pain on yourself. Then, you scrape off the cream and rinse, or rip off the wax strip and cry a little.

There are far more painful ways to remove body hair, such as epilators (I spell-checked this word; it suggested mutilators. Ha!) These handy little gadgets rip hair out of you with little barbs and claws and stuff. They look like fun on the adverts, but that's because the advert has calming feminine music, not the musical range of curses that really accompany this product.

I get quite excited talking about feminine stuff. Probably because sometimes I think about the hundreds of products the average woman uses in her lifetime to fit an social norm she's either expected to maintain, or an ideal she's expected to aim for, and I reflect on how it makes me feel, and whether it's worth making yourself feel like crap for "beauty".

The new slogan for Veet is "What beauty feels like." So, basically, once again, we're being told that female beauty is a hairless leg. Bollocks.

Confession: I haven't shaved my legs for several months now. I made this decision shortly after going out to see a friend last summer, and I was planning on wearing a really pretty floaty white knee-length skirt, since it was quite hot outside, and I fancied something light. However, I'd cut myself shaving on my knee (knees are so fiddly, I always cut myself there) and it wouldn't stop bleeding, so I had to opt for a pair of jeans and die of heat-related heat.

After that, I thought "What is the point of shaving?" I mean, women do it to feel beautiful, don't they? You get nice shiny smooth pins for two days, then the stubble comes in, and you feel a bit irritated but you can't really depilate with wax or creams unless you've got some decent growth first, and shaving every two days is rather time consuming. So, you wait, and you just feel ugly until it's time to remove the hair. Lather, rinse, repeat.

So, I've just stopped with the whole palaver. I am probably quite lucky though, in the sense that I have dark hair and dark skin, so unless you happened to be stroking my leg, you probably wouldn't notice I haven't shaved, so it's not like people pick up on it and stare at me when I wear shorts.

For some reason, I think that if my mother found out I'd stopped shaving, she'd probably feel disappointed in me. Maybe it's because I'm just a pair of dungarees away from becoming a Full-On Raging Lesbian. (This is partly a joke: to be a lesbian, you'd have to define as a woman, and frankly, I'm not up for that.)

So, to those who churn out slogans for Veet: take a look at my legs, if you can bear to stand it. I think they're beautiful. I'm sure others do. And they're not hairless like a child's. They are natural. A pair of naturally beautiful legs.

Ha!