My left arm is covered in hives and it burns like someone dropped me on to the surface of the sun. I’m pretty sure my pores want to bleed but they are so burned shut that the blood can’t surface. Even my own fucking blood doesn’t want to be near this shit the people call Nair. What does that even mean? No + hair = Nair? Clever, you fuckers, clever.

I guess I should stop hashtag-searching #Fail on Twitter and continue to write about what happened to me tonight. I’m not sure what direction I want to take this post: Do I focus on the fact that Nair is devil cream shot straight from the phallus of Satan and if it’s burning and dissolving the hair out of your follicles that you probably shouldn’t be putting it on your skin at all?

Or do I run with the fact that you shouldn’t speed in a 45 to Walgreens anytime a hairless co-worker recommends something without doing a little research first? I mean, it’s a good thing that I decided to test this out on my arms and not my vagina…but damn. When you have two silky smooth friends at work combing through your lady-arm hair with a judgey tone, it’ll make you do that.

I was thinking that I didn’t want man arms, but no one said that I did in the first place and I’m blonde…so what the fuck did I do this for? She – the sexily hairless Ukrainian – made it seem so easy. I can imagine she is naturally a tougher breed than I being from the fucking Ukraine and all…so let’s consider this Jill’s “lack in judgement move number one” for starters. Jill’s “lack in judgement move number two” stems with not reading the warning label. Number three is letting it sit on my arms for too long and number four would be reapplying it for a second go around when I didn’t scrub all the hair off the first time.

Enter: my first chemical burn.

I almost wasn’t surprised when my arm exploded into tiny, white, blistery hives and turned a beautiful shade of red you would only see in a structure fire caused by a meth-lab explosion. My friend Brittany was running around in circles in my kitchen Googling “allergic reaction cure ” and for all I know “closest hospital to Downtown Orlando” while I’m basically lying in my kitchen sink under the cold, running water. I was rolling my eyes at myself, breathing exasperatedly. “Of course,” I said over and over again, “of fucking course.”

This was like the time I impatiently tried to cut bangs into my hair with my mom when I was 20 and home from college. My hair was wet and I was pulling it down in front of my face. My mom entered the bathroom saying, “let me help you.” Letting her in was probably the worst move I could have made that summer besides hooking up with a friend I once wrapped in toilet paper like a mummy in high school. With a sharp snip of the scissors, my locks bounced up to their real place and just like that I had a sexy chunk of hair missing out of the front of my jaw-dropped, naïve face. Spatial relationships were never my strong suit and they clearly weren’t my mother’s either.

Maybe I’ll sum this up by saying that impulse decisions can be either the greatest or the worst ones you can make. Maybe I’ll also sum this up by saying you should not be impulsive about your hair removal tactics. I’m not saying Nair isn’t a product that works for some skin types, but this was my experience and boy, was it fun. Why a girl who uses organic, paraben and sulfate free soaps thought spreading acidic cream cheese onto my arm-bagels was a grand plan, I’ll never know. My arms are smooth, my sanity is temporarily broken. Tomorrow is a new day. And now I want a bagel.