One of the stories I swapped in the commissioning emails was that an ex-boyfriend texted me a few years ago saying, “Just wanted to let you know I’ve got a new girlfriend, she’s Thai and has a silky smooth hairless body…” As an Egyptian woman, I’m well acquainted with hair removal. My ancestors removed all of the hair on their bodies including from their head, leaving only eyebrows. Every time I visited Egypt as a teenager, my cousins and aunties would remove all the hair from my body (a ‘Hollywood’ wax is not a modern western phenomenon) – from my arms, legs, everywhere – using one big lump of sticky caramel that they would cook in the kitchen using sugar, water and salt. Although painful, we always had such a laugh doing it, a shared experience from generation to generation. The tiniest part of me wishes I’d grown up in Egypt for precisely that reason, where my face hair, body hair, and kinky head hair would have been totally normal, as opposed to something pointed out to me time and time again and laughed at by others – from boyfriends to my friends at primary school who nicknamed me ‘Loo Brush’ on account of my frizzy ponytail. True story.