The PCOS Collective

I cancelled my threading appointment for the fourth time in six weeks on a Thursday morning in October and I sat in my car in the Tesco car park in Didsbury and I did something I haven't done since my dad died in 2019. I cried in public. Not because of the appointment. Not really. Because I was sitting there doing the maths again — the way I do every time I cancel and rebook — working out how many days I had left before I absolutely could not put it off any longer, and the answer was two. Maybe three if I stayed in certain lights and didn't let anyone look at me too directly. I am a 47 year old woman who plans her social life around her facial hair. I have been doing this for eleven years and I have never said that sentence out loud before. My name is Claire. I live in Didsbury, south Manchester, in a semi I've owned since 2009. I work four days a week as an office manager for a structural engineering firm in Spinningfields — I've been there twelve years, I know where everything is and how everything works and nobody's diary runs without me. My husband Paul is a secondary school PE teacher in Wythenshawe. We have two kids: Josh, who's nineteen and at Leeds, and Megan, who's sixteen and currently conducting what I can only describe as a sustained campaign to get a dog. I am the person in our family who holds things together. That is not me being a martyr. It is just a fact about our household the same way it's a fact that Paul burns pasta and Megan leaves her PE kit in the car. I am also, and have been since my late thirties, a woman with a facial hair problem that I have managed with the dedication and organisation I apply to everything else in my life. Managed. That's the word I always use. Managed. I want to tell you what managing actually looked like. It started around thirty-six, thirty-seven. I noticed it first on my upper lip — a darkness, fine hairs that caught the light in a way they hadn't before. I wasn't alarmed. Women get this. My mum had it. Her mum had it. I bought a bleaching kit from Boots and got on with things. By forty it had moved to my chin. Not dramatic — you wouldn't necessarily notice if you weren't looking. But I was always looking, so I noticed. I booked my first threading appointment at a little salon on Burton Road. Twenty minutes, ten pounds, done. I told myself I'd go every three weeks. That was seven years ago. What I did not account for, at forty, is what happens to hormonal facial hair in your mid-forties. It does not stay the same. It gets faster. It gets coarser. The threading that used to last three weeks started lasting two. Then sometimes less than two. I found myself rebooking before I'd even got home from the appointment. I tried waxing. The waxing left me red and bumpy for four days and I looked worse than if I'd done nothing. I tried an epilator I bought off Amazon for £34.99 that made me cry actual tears from the pain and went in the back of the wardrobe after one use. I tried a home IPL device — the Philips Lumea, which is not cheap, which I bought on a Black Friday deal and used religiously for four months. It helped slightly on my upper lip. On my chin it did essentially nothing. I rang the helpline and a very patient young man told me that the device works best on coarse dark hair on fair skin, which I have, but that hormonal regrowth can be resistant because the underlying hormonal signal keeps reactivating the follicle. He said it very kindly. He said I might want to try in conjunction with a GP referral. I said thank you and put the Lumea in the wardrobe next to the epilator. I want to tell you what managing looked like from the inside. Not the appointments. The rest of it. I keep the visor mirror in my car permanently closed because I caught myself once, at a red light on the A57, turning it down to check, and I don't want that to become something I do every time I'm at a red light. So I just don't open it. I carry a small magnifying compact in my handbag. Not for makeup. To check. I do this in the toilets at work, at restaurants, at my mum's. It is a reflex now. I don't always register I'm doing it until the compact is already in my hand. At the school parents' evenings I sit so that Megan's teachers are looking at me from a slightly upward angle, which is the most forgiving. I have sat like this for three years. I have chosen my seat at every parents' evening for three years based on the angle of the light. Paul has never mentioned it. I don't know if he hasn't noticed or if he has and decided not to say anything, and I have never asked because I don't want either answer. I've started wearing more turtlenecks. Not because I'm cold. Last Christmas my sister-in-law Sandra posted a photo from Christmas dinner on the family WhatsApp. I was mid-laugh in it, face turned slightly, winter light coming through the dining room window catching my chin at exactly the wrong angle. I asked her to take it down. I said I looked terrible. She said I looked lovely. I said please, Sandra. She took it down. I have a recurring appointment in my calendar every two weeks. It has been there since 2017. It says "Burton Road - 10am." It moves sometimes. It shifts and reschedules and occasionally it gets cancelled and I spend the next three days not making eye contact with anyone in certain lights. But it never gets deleted. It is just there. A permanent fixture in my life like the mortgage and the dentist and the school run. I have spent — I did this calculation one evening in September when Paul was watching the football and I probably should have been doing something else — I have spent somewhere in the region of £3,200 on threading since 2017. That is before the Lumea. Before the epilator. Before the three different prescription-strength bleaching creams I've tried. Before the consultation at a laser clinic in the Northern Quarter where a very thorough woman told me that hormonal facial hair in perimenopausal women is particularly resistant to laser because the ovarian signal keeps stimulating the follicle and I might need ongoing maintenance sessions indefinitely. She said indefinitely with the kind of calm that told me she'd said it many times before and had made peace with the business model. I had not made peace with it. I drove home from that consultation and I put the estimate — £1,400 for an initial course, maintenance not included — in the kitchen drawer with the other things I mean to deal with and haven't. The morning in the Tesco car park in October wasn't my lowest point. I want to be honest about that. It was just the morning the maths broke something in me. £3,200. Eleven years. Still going every two weeks. And getting worse, not better. I'd been telling myself for eleven years that I was managing it. Sitting in that car park I thought: this is not managing it. This is running alongside something that is outpacing me and has been for years. I am not managing this. I am losing to it, slowly, on a very polite and well-organised schedule. I took a breath. I rebooked the appointment for the following Tuesday. I drove to Tesco. I bought semi-skimmed milk and a packet of Hobnobs and I did not think about it again until I got home and put the milk in the fridge and saw the photo on there — me and Megan at Center Parcs in August, both of us in the pool, hair wet, no makeup, squinting in the sun. Megan looks exactly like me at sixteen. The same jaw. The same colouring. I stood at the fridge for a long time. There's a woman at my gym called Deborah. She's fifty-two, teaches primary school in Chorlton, divorced, funny in the specific way that women who've been through something are funny — dry and quick and slightly bleak around the edges. We've been in the same Thursday spin class for about three years. We don't socialise outside the gym but we have the kind of friendship that exists entirely within those walls and is somehow completely honest because of it. Two weeks after the Tesco car park morning I was in the changing rooms after spin, and Deborah was at the mirror doing her hair, and I don't know why — I think I was tired, and tired makes me honest — I said, "Deb, do you ever have your chin threaded?" She looked at me in the mirror. She said, "Oh, love. Sit down." She told me she'd had the same thing since she was thirty-eight. Threading, waxing, the full circuit. She told me about the Lumea — she'd had one too, same result as me. She told me she'd gone to the same laser clinic in the Northern Quarter and got the same speech about indefinite maintenance. Then she said, "Can I tell you what I actually did about it? Because I nearly didn't. I nearly just kept going to Burton Road every fortnight for the rest of my life." I said please. She told me about an oil. Something she'd read about in a Facebook group for women going through perimenopause — one of those groups that's mostly people posting recipes and moaning about sleep, but occasionally someone posts something useful. A woman in the group had written about a plant extract called Cyperus rotundus. Deborah had googled it. She'd read about it. She'd ordered a bottle, mostly out of desperation and the fact that it wasn't very expensive and the company offered a money back guarantee. She said, "Claire. I cancelled my threading appointment in March." I looked at her. She said, "I haven't rebooked it." It was November. She hadn't rebooked it since March. I stood there with my gym bag in my hand and I felt something I can only describe as the particular hope that comes when you've stopped expecting to feel it. The kind that arrives quietly because you've given up on the loud version. I said, "Send me the link." She did, right there, standing at the changing room mirror in our gym kit. I went home and I read everything I could find. I am going to tell you what I understood, because I'm an office manager and I think in systems and processes and what happens when one part of a system is getting the wrong instruction. Here is what nobody explained to me in eleven years of threading appointments and consultations. Facial hair — the kind women get on their chin and upper lip and jaw, the kind that gets worse in your forties — is not a skin problem. It is not a beauty problem. It is a hormonal signalling problem. Inside each hair follicle there are receptors that respond to androgens — male hormones, primarily something called DHT, dihydrotestosterone. All women have some DHT. As we move through our thirties and into perimenopause, the balance of our hormones shifts. Oestrogen decreases. Androgens become relatively more dominant. The follicles on the face — the ones that are sensitive to androgens, the same follicles that would produce a beard on a man — receive more signal. They respond by producing hair that is darker, coarser, faster-growing. The threading removes the hair. The follicle still has its receptors. The DHT signal is still transmitting. In two weeks, sometimes less, the hair is back. Darker than last time, sometimes. Faster than last time, often. The Lumea removes the hair shaft. The follicle recovers and receives the signal again. The hair comes back. The laser does the same thing, more aggressively, at higher cost, with the same fundamental limitation: none of these things talk to the follicle. None of them address what the follicle is being told to do. What Cyperus rotundus appears to do — and there is real research on this, published research, not marketing copy — is inhibit an enzyme called 5-alpha reductase at the follicle level. That enzyme is what converts testosterone into DHT. Reduce the activity of that enzyme at the site, and the DHT signal weakens. The follicle receives less instruction to produce that kind of hair. The hair that grows comes back finer. Slower. Lighter. You are not removing the hair. You are turning down the instruction the hair is receiving. I read that distinction at half past eleven on a Tuesday night with Paul already asleep upstairs and the house quiet and I felt a very specific kind of frustration. Not at the oil. At the eleven years. At the Burton Road appointments and the Lumea and the Northern Quarter laser consultation. At the fact that not one person in eleven years — not a GP, not an aesthetician, not a consultant — had explained the mechanism to me. They had all been treating the outcome. Nobody had touched the cause. I ordered Rosalica Cyperus Oil that night. I chose it because the formulation used a standardised extract that matched what the research cited, and because they offered a sixty day money back guarantee. I was not spending money on another thing that didn't work without a way out. I have a Lumea and an epilator in my wardrobe that represent a lesson I've already learned. It arrived three days later. Two drops on the chin and upper lip at night, pressed in gently, let it absorb. That was it. I did it after my skincare routine. It took thirty seconds. The first two weeks I kept my threading appointment as normal. I wasn't trusting anything yet. Week three I noticed the upper lip was slower. Not dramatically. I was at my usual point in the cycle where I'd normally be thinking about rebooking and I wasn't thinking about it yet. Small. Possibly nothing. I noted it. Week five I pushed my threading appointment back by four days. I could. The regrowth was there but finer, and my usual concealer was handling it in a way it hadn't for the last three years. I texted Deborah: pushed the appointment back. might actually be doing something. She texted back: told you. give it another month. Week seven I was at Josh's parents' weekend in Leeds. Lunch with him and his flatmates in a pub near campus, afternoon light coming through big windows, the kind of light I'd normally have chosen my seat to avoid. I didn't choose my seat. I sat down where there was space and I didn't think about the light until we were halfway through the meal. I was talking to Josh's flatmate about his geography dissertation when I realised I hadn't thought about where the light was. I just sat down. Like a normal person. I excused myself to the loo. Stood at the mirror. Looked at my jaw in pub toilet lighting, which is not kind to anyone. It wasn't perfect. It won't be perfect. I'm forty-seven and this is hormonal and the hormones don't stop because I've found something that addresses them topically. But what I saw in that mirror was manageable in a way it hadn't been in years. Not managed by architecture and avoidance and seat selection. Just manageable. I stood there for a moment. Then I went back out and I listened to Josh's flatmate talk about his dissertation and I didn't think about my face again for the rest of the afternoon. I am five months in now. I still get threaded. Once a month, sometimes less. I went from fortnightly to monthly and last month I pushed it to five weeks and it was fine. The appointment on Burton Road is still in my calendar. But it has moved. It is a monthly entry now, not fortnightly, and some months it shifts further still. I have not done the full calculation yet — I'm superstitious about it — but I know that at monthly instead of fortnightly I am spending roughly half what I was spending. Which over a year is several hundred pounds. Which over the next decade is a number I am choosing not to think about right now because it will make me feel too many things about the last eleven years. The compact is still in my handbag. Old habits. But last week I caught myself at a restaurant not opening it. I noticed because I always open it. I was just sitting there talking to my friend across the table and I didn't check. It's a small thing. It is the smallest possible thing. It has taken me eleven years. Paul said something last month that I've been sitting with. We were in the kitchen on a Sunday morning, both in our dressing gowns, the kind of Sunday where you don't have to be anywhere and the coffee takes longer than it should because nobody's in a rush. He was reading something on his phone. I was looking out at the garden. He looked up at me and he said, "You seem lighter lately." I said what do you mean lighter. He said, "I don't know. Just lighter. Like something's eased off." He went back to his phone. He had no idea what he'd just said. He didn't know about the compact. He didn't know about the seat selection. He didn't know about eleven years of fortnightly appointments or the £3,200 or the Tesco car park in October. He just noticed that something had eased off. It had. If you are the woman who keeps the visor mirror closed, I see you. If you have a recurring appointment in your calendar that never gets deleted, only rescheduled, I see you. If you've done the maths and then wished you hadn't, I see you. The threading is not solving it. The waxing is not solving it. The home IPL is not solving it. They are all removing the outcome of a signal that nobody has touched. Rosalica Cyperus Oil works on the signal. Two drops at night. It takes weeks, not days — this is not a trick, it is a recalibration, and recalibration takes time. But the direction it moves in is the right one. Sixty day money back guarantee. No faff, no phone tree. If your skin looks exactly the same in two months, you return it. That's the whole arrangement. It's what made me order it at half past eleven on a Tuesday night and it's what I'd want you to have if you're sitting where I was. 👉 rosalica.com/products/cyperus-rotundus-oil-hair-reduction-formula P.S. I did finally do the full calculation. Since starting the oil I have had four threading appointments instead of the ten I would have had in the same period. The difference is £72 so far. Over a year that is roughly £180 saved. Over five years it is close to £900. I am not saying the oil pays for itself — that is not the point. The point is that the appointment is no longer running my calendar. The point is that I rescheduled it last month and felt nothing. No panic. No counting days. Just: I'll go next week. And then I did. P.P.S. The sixty day guarantee was the only reason I clicked. I have a Lumea in my wardrobe. I have an epilator in there too. I have been in this position before — hopeful, £34.99 or £300 lighter, and then disappointed. The guarantee meant I wasn't risking that again. I want you to know that because if you're the kind of person who reads the small print — and I am absolutely that kind of person, I am the person who manages everyone else's contracts for a living — the small print on this one is clean. Sixty days. Send it back if nothing changes. P.P.P.S. Deborah and I are still in the same Thursday spin class. Last week after the session she asked how it was going and I told her about the Leeds weekend, about sitting in the pub without choosing my seat. She didn't say anything for a moment. Then she said, "That's the one. That's the moment you know." She was right. That was the moment. Sitting in a pub in Leeds listening to a twenty year old talk about his geography dissertation, and not once thinking about where the light was falling. P.P.P.P.S. The photo Megan took of me on her phone last weekend — both of us in the kitchen, Saturday morning, me in my dressing gown, no makeup, natural light from the garden window. She showed it to me expecting me to hate it. I looked at it for a moment. I told her to keep it.