The Ramblings of Chaos: hair so long you can braid it

with summer and a wedding and NHL playoffs* coming up, its time to start really working on the daunting hair removal process for parts of my body that are (usually) covered up in winter.

*instead of growing a playoff beard - cause, eww gross - i am choosing to grow a playoff muff. really hoping the playoffs are over before i start hitting the beach.

i was digging through my rubbermaid tower of beauty products and found some leftover linen strips used for waxing. being uber cheap, i thought i would make my own wax and use up the strips before buying a whole new kit. good idea? you'd think so....

being the expert googler that i am, i searched a bunch of sites for homemade wax recipes, which all seemed to have the exact same ingredients and the same measurements. all it takes is a little water, white sugar and some lemon juice. easy enough. or so i thought.

so i mix the sugar and the water and realized - hey no lemon juice, whatever shall i do? i figured the lemon was just to make it smell nice, so i added a few drops of tea tree oil instead. whilst in my first aid/baking cupboard - cause every first aid incident can be fixed with baking - i saw the food coloring i bought six years ago and have never used. oooo. the wax will look pretty when its blue. in it goes to the sugar and water and tea tree oil mixture.

cook. cook. stir. stir. everything was turning melty and somewhat sticky. it was mega hot though, so i took it off the stove to cool before i dumped the wax on my legs and lady bits. as said wax begins to cool, it started to crystallize. cool if i wanted to make a batch of tea-tree oil flavored suckers. not so cool when you want to make wax to rip out your body hair.

Light-bulb: adding more water will make it better. so i add more water and start to cook it again. it was too liquidy, so i added more sugar. and i left it to cook for a bit. Yay for it starting to become the proper consistency (finally). not so yay for the concoction turning a muddy green-brown. (totally spaced on the fact that when sugar caramelizes it turns from white to brown.... im losing it in my old age, folks)

i did the 'drop a drop of said concoction into cold water to see if it forms a ball' thing that you do when caramelizing sugar. things looked ready, just needed to cool the final product.

off to the couch i go, with the concoction cooling on 3 hot pads on the coffee table, DVR remote in hand, linen strips ready to go and cats sleeping in their tree (they tend to want to be with you during the most messy and awkwardest of tasks, so them being asleep is a major bonus.)

i finished watching Fringe. wax is still steaming. i watched Gossip Girl. wax is still hot. i slightly touch the layer of wax-skin that is forming as it cools. holy fucking hell. it burns worse than the burn i got when i was stirring the wax the first time around (did i mention that part?)

flushed burn under cool water. pouted a bit. continued watching TV. checked wax every 20 minutes and it wasn't cooling down very much. WTF?!?! and because it was taking so long to get to a temperature i could actually withstand, the top of the mixture was starting to crystallize. when i tried to move my spatula - to give things a stir - it wouldnt move. mutha-effer. back to square one.

i ditched the homemade ~~shit~~ wax and added the real stuff to my 'must pick up the next time i am out' list.

lessons learned: