Via Virginia at Beauty Schooled, who is celebrating her graduation from Beauty U by republishing selected posts, I found this August 24 article about the trend of spas offering hair removal services to increasingly younger clients – starting at age 8.
Wanda Stawczyk, owner of Wanda’s European Skin Care Center in New York, says girls who start waxing young, even before they have dark hair, will always have lighter, thinner hair.
“It’s a very big result,” she tells ParentDish. “The hair is diminished almost 100 percent.”
She advocates for it even more strongly on her website.
“I call it the ‘Virgin’ — waxing for children 8 years old and up who have never shaved before,” the website reads. “Virgin hair can be waxed so successfully that growth can be permanently stopped in just 2 to 6 sessions. Save your child a lifetime of waxing … and put the money in the bank for her college education instead!”
Pediatricians consulted for the article raise concerns only about removal of pubic hair:
Waxing pubic hair if a girl is too young can make it difficult for doctors to tell if a girl is maturing as she should, Williams says.
“We use development of a certain type of hair and distribution of hair as a marker of normal puberty,” she says.
No worries, though. Wanda says her salon doesn’t do bikini waxes on their prepubescent clients:
“Everything but bikini. We don’t want to introduce them to that kind of service yet.”
Regular bikini waxing starts at 14 or 15 for her clients, Stawczyk says. Apparently they missed the latest issue of Cosmopolitan.
