swimming and tmi
6 Mar 2008 01:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cimoreneI'm going to Baby Swim again today with Brother Windows, his wife, and Carmela and the triplets. The last time I did that was a month ago. Baby Swim is this sort of baby water aerobics where a bunch of adults cradle a baby apiece in a swimming pool, sing little songs, move around with them and generally get them comfortable with the water. It's supposed to be therapeutic, I think. B.W.'s mother-in-law was one of the first pioneer Finnish group of it, when she was a baby.
That isn't the point of this post, though!
So I've had an issue since puberty with swimsuit bottoms and pubic hair. I'm olive skinned and dark brunette, nearly half Jewish and more than 2/3 Polish, which may or may not have a bearing on the fact that my hair is unusually dark and thick everywhere, but my skin, while thick, is also kind of irritable.
The problem is a horribly persistent pattern of ingrown hairs, which are extremely painful as well as unbearably itchy, and I'd get tons of them whenever I tried to get rid of the pubic hair.
Unfortunately, I've never in my life owned a swimsuit bottom that would adequately make this a non-issue - I suppose one could just swim in board shorts, but I've never tried it, and I've never come across a pair of boy-cut bottoms that were actually low enough in the leg holes and fit. For a while I searched desperately for them, because the discomfort every single time I tried to remove those hairs was really more like agony, but I eventually gave up when they started to go out of style, not having ever found a single pair that were adequate.
Of course, there are people who just swim hairy, and I know this, but the culture of the Southeastern and Midwestern US was particularly unforgiving of that in teenaged girls, and even though I passionately hate our stupid nonsensical hair-removal norms, I still have always felt pressured by them.
Anyway, the opportunities for swimming are generally small in Finland (ie: there is no such thing as warm enough weather for swimming, by my standards; in the summer it never gets warmer than early spring on the gulf coast; and I'm too socially anxious to go to a swimming hall alone, and I've never quite been able to talk/nag/bully Wax into going), so I didn't discover this until last month, which was the first time I've been swimming since... 2003, I suppose, or maybe 2002: the sauna can solve my problems.
The sauna is very hot and if you stew in there for long enough, your skin gets impregnated with steam. You sweat, and all the dead, dry skin on the surface loosens up; your nose and throat and sinuses fill with steam that loosens any congestion you're feeling; your pores all open wide. I suspect it's the pore-opening that really helps. I've done it twice now - lounging in the sauna until thoroughly warm and damp, then shaving, then going back in the sauna to warm up, then scrubbing the newly-shaved skin to exfoliate it and shaving again more carefully, to get the missed spots. (Scrubbing my skin with a nailbrush, particularly on the legs and arms where it's pretty tough, doesn't really hurt; it feels pretty good, though it leaves red marks at first. You could never do this to someone with really delicate skin like Wax's for example.)
This almost completely does away with my ingrown hair problem, amazingly. I've had problems with them on my legs, too, and those seem reduced too though not completely done away with. There's still the lesser problem that when it's trimmed, the ends of the remaining hair are harsh and horribly irritating to the skin (ie, amazingly itchy for a week or so). But without the ingrown hairs and their pain, that's pretty negligible. I doubt this solution is remotely practicable for people outside of Finland, though, since it's not normal for houses and apartments to have their own saunas in the rest of the world.
That isn't the point of this post, though!
So I've had an issue since puberty with swimsuit bottoms and pubic hair. I'm olive skinned and dark brunette, nearly half Jewish and more than 2/3 Polish, which may or may not have a bearing on the fact that my hair is unusually dark and thick everywhere, but my skin, while thick, is also kind of irritable.
The problem is a horribly persistent pattern of ingrown hairs, which are extremely painful as well as unbearably itchy, and I'd get tons of them whenever I tried to get rid of the pubic hair.
Unfortunately, I've never in my life owned a swimsuit bottom that would adequately make this a non-issue - I suppose one could just swim in board shorts, but I've never tried it, and I've never come across a pair of boy-cut bottoms that were actually low enough in the leg holes and fit. For a while I searched desperately for them, because the discomfort every single time I tried to remove those hairs was really more like agony, but I eventually gave up when they started to go out of style, not having ever found a single pair that were adequate.
Of course, there are people who just swim hairy, and I know this, but the culture of the Southeastern and Midwestern US was particularly unforgiving of that in teenaged girls, and even though I passionately hate our stupid nonsensical hair-removal norms, I still have always felt pressured by them.
Anyway, the opportunities for swimming are generally small in Finland (ie: there is no such thing as warm enough weather for swimming, by my standards; in the summer it never gets warmer than early spring on the gulf coast; and I'm too socially anxious to go to a swimming hall alone, and I've never quite been able to talk/nag/bully Wax into going), so I didn't discover this until last month, which was the first time I've been swimming since... 2003, I suppose, or maybe 2002: the sauna can solve my problems.
The sauna is very hot and if you stew in there for long enough, your skin gets impregnated with steam. You sweat, and all the dead, dry skin on the surface loosens up; your nose and throat and sinuses fill with steam that loosens any congestion you're feeling; your pores all open wide. I suspect it's the pore-opening that really helps. I've done it twice now - lounging in the sauna until thoroughly warm and damp, then shaving, then going back in the sauna to warm up, then scrubbing the newly-shaved skin to exfoliate it and shaving again more carefully, to get the missed spots. (Scrubbing my skin with a nailbrush, particularly on the legs and arms where it's pretty tough, doesn't really hurt; it feels pretty good, though it leaves red marks at first. You could never do this to someone with really delicate skin like Wax's for example.)
This almost completely does away with my ingrown hair problem, amazingly. I've had problems with them on my legs, too, and those seem reduced too though not completely done away with. There's still the lesser problem that when it's trimmed, the ends of the remaining hair are harsh and horribly irritating to the skin (ie, amazingly itchy for a week or so). But without the ingrown hairs and their pain, that's pretty negligible. I doubt this solution is remotely practicable for people outside of Finland, though, since it's not normal for houses and apartments to have their own saunas in the rest of the world.
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