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.

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.

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.

I nicked myself shaving my face on the morning of my daughter's baby shower and I stood in my bathroom in my good dress with a piece of tissue pressed under my jaw and I looked at myself in the mirror and I thought: I have been doing this for eleven years. Eleven years. My daughter was in the next room getting ready. She was eight months pregnant. She was about to walk into a room full of women who loved her, all of them there to celebrate the fact that she was bringing a life into the world. And I was standing in my bathroom bleeding from my face. I didn't cry. That's the thing I keep coming back to. I didn't cry. I just stood there with the tissue and waited for it to stop and then I covered it with concealer and I went out and I smiled and I held my daughter and I told her she looked beautiful. Because this is what eleven years does. It stops feeling like something worth crying about. It just becomes Tuesday. It becomes the thing you do before anything else happens. Before the coffee, before you check your phone, before you are a mother or a grandmother or a woman who has things to do today. First you pick up the razor. That is what I want to tell you about. Not the hair. What the hair made me become. My name is Denise. I'm 52. I live in Leicester — Clarendon Park, in a Victorian terrace I've owned for eighteen years that takes more out of me every winter than I'll admit to my son when he asks if I've thought about downsizing. I worked for the NHS for twenty-four years as a community health administrator. I know what good healthcare looks like. I know what it looks like when the system is doing its job. I know what it looks like when it isn't. I have one daughter, Kezia, who is thirty-one and lives in Nottingham with her husband Dwight and is, as of four months ago, a mother herself. My grandson is called Samuel. He is sixteen weeks old and has his father's ears and my mother's eyes and when he looks at me he looks so hard I feel like he's trying to read something. My mother's name was Gloria. She passed in 2018. She had the same thing I have — the hair, the chin, the jaw — and she managed it the same way I manage it, which is to say she managed it in private and never spoke about it and took it to her grave as quietly as she'd carried it her whole life. I think about that a lot. I want to tell you when it started because I think the timeline matters. I first noticed it at thirty-one. A single dark hair on my chin that I tweezed out in the bathroom mirror on a Wednesday morning before work. I didn't think much of it. Women get stray hairs. I tweezed it and moved on. By thirty-four it was not a stray hair. It was a patch. Chin and jaw, both sides, growing in the specific coarse dark way that is different from the soft hair you have on the rest of your face. Different in texture. Different in speed. Different in the way it makes you feel when you see it. I went to my GP at thirty-five. A locum I hadn't seen before, a young man, who looked at me for less than a minute and said it was hormonal and not unusual and I could try the pill if it bothered me. I said it bothered me. He prescribed the pill. It helped slightly for about eight months. Then it stopped helping and the hair came back faster than before. I went back. Different GP this time. She looked at my notes, asked me a few questions about my periods, said everything sounded within normal range and sometimes women just get facial hair and there wasn't a great deal to be done about it besides managing it cosmetically. Managing it cosmetically. That phrase has lived in my head for seventeen years. I tried threading. The threading salon near my office in town, Tuesdays in my lunch break. It worked for ten days, sometimes twelve. Then the hair came back. Then I went back. Then it came back faster. Then I started going every ten days instead of every fortnight and the skin on my chin started breaking out from the repeated pulling and I had the hair and I had the spots from dealing with the hair and I was thirty-seven years old and spending my lunch breaks in a threading salon and telling no one. I stopped threading at thirty-nine because my skin couldn't take it anymore. The breakouts had left marks. Dark patches along my jaw that my regular foundation wasn't covering. I had started a whole separate skincare routine just to address what the threading had done to my skin, on top of managing the hair the threading was supposed to be handling, and the whole thing had become a second job I hadn't applied for. I started shaving at thirty-nine. Not because I wanted to. Because shaving was faster, cheaper, and didn't break my skin out the way threading did. Three minutes every morning. A small pink razor on the edge of the bathroom sink. Get it done, put the razor down, do everything else. Clean. Efficient. Private. That was thirteen years ago. I want to tell you what thirteen years of a morning razor looks like from the inside. It looks like nothing. That is the most honest answer I can give you. It looks like absolutely nothing because it becomes so integrated into your routine that you stop seeing it as something that requires acknowledgement. It's like asking what it looks like to brush your teeth. It looks like Tuesday. It looks like Thursday. It looks like every morning of your life for thirteen years. What it feels like is different. It feels like the first thing you are every morning is someone with a problem to solve. Before you are a mother, before you are a colleague, before you are a woman who is going to have a good day or a difficult day or an ordinary day, you are a woman with a razor in her hand solving a problem that will be back tomorrow. You don't think about this consciously. You stopped thinking about it consciously a long time ago. But it's there. It's the first three minutes of every day and it shapes something about the rest of them in a way you couldn't explain to someone who hasn't done it. My ex-husband Marcus never saw me without makeup on. In nine years of marriage. Not once. I made sure of it the same way you make sure of anything that matters — quietly, consistently, without drama. He thought I was just particular about my appearance. He wasn't wrong. He just didn't know what particular meant in this context. My daughter Kezia has seen me without makeup twice in her adult life. Both times were emergencies. The second time, three years ago, when I had a minor procedure and she came to collect me from the hospital and I was still coming round from the sedation, she looked at my face and she didn't say anything. But I saw her see it. And I saw her decide not to say anything. And I have never loved her more than I did in that moment and I have never felt more ashamed in the same moment. She was protecting me. My thirty-year-old daughter was protecting me from something I'd been carrying since she was a teenager. I keep coming back to that. I want to tell you about the baby shower. Kezia was eight months along. Her friend Priya had organised it — a Sunday afternoon in Priya's house in West Bridgford, thirty women, prosecco and lemon cake and one of those nappy-guessing games that I always think are slightly undignified but everyone seems to enjoy. I had been looking forward to it for weeks. I had bought a dress — deep burgundy, long sleeves, the kind of dress that feels like a decision. I had done my hair the night before. I had laid everything out. Sunday morning I got up at half six. Did my routine. Made coffee. Went back to the bathroom for a second pass because the light was better by then and I'd missed a bit along the left side of my jaw. Second pass is when it happened. The razor caught a small bump — an ingrown hair, the kind you get after years of shaving the same skin — and it nicked the skin just below my jaw on the right side. Small cut. The kind that shouldn't bleed much. It bled for seven minutes. I stood at the bathroom mirror with a piece of folded tissue pressed under my jaw and I watched the clock on my phone and I thought about nothing. That is the truth. I was not having a dramatic internal moment. I was waiting for a cut to stop bleeding so I could cover it with concealer and get in my car. And then somewhere around minute five, something shifted. Not dramatically. Not a breakdown. Just a quiet thought that arrived without permission: I have been doing this for eleven years. Not seven minutes. Eleven years. Every morning. The razor on the sink. The three minutes before anything else. The ingrown hairs and the dark patches and the concealer over the marks the razor left. Eleven years of this being the first thing I am every morning. My daughter was in the living room watching something on her phone, belly enormous, eight months away from becoming a mother, and I was in the bathroom bleeding. I covered the cut. I fixed my makeup. I went out and I smiled and we drove to Nottingham together and I held her hand in the car when she said she was nervous about becoming a mum and I told her she was going to be extraordinary. I did not tell her about the bathroom. I have not told anyone about the bathroom. Until now. Four weeks after the baby shower I was on the phone with my friend Roberta. Roberta and I have known each other for twenty-two years. We met at our church in Clarendon Park, both of us newly moved to Leicester, both of us turning up alone to a Sunday service and ending up sitting next to each other and talking for an hour after in the car park. She is fifty-eight. She is the kind of woman who says the true thing in the kindest possible way, which is the rarest combination I know. We talk every Sunday. We have talked every Sunday for twenty-two years with very few exceptions. We talk about everything. We have never, in twenty-two years, talked about this. That Sunday she asked me how I was and something in the way she asked it — or something in me that had been loosened by the bathroom four weeks earlier — made me tell her. Not everything. Just: I've been struggling with facial hair for a long time and I don't know what to do about it and I'm tired. Roberta was quiet for a moment. Then she said, "Denise. Can I tell you something? Because I think I've been waiting to tell you this for a while and I didn't know how to bring it up." I said tell me. She said she'd had the same thing. Had it for years. Had been managing it — that word again, managing — the same way I had, in private, without telling anyone, including me, her closest friend of twenty-two years. She said about eight months ago her niece, who works in cosmetic dermatology in Birmingham, had told her about a plant extract she'd been researching. Something that had been used in traditional medicine for thousands of years but that recent research was catching up with. Something that worked differently from everything Roberta had tried before. She said the name. Cyperus rotundus. I wrote it on the back of an envelope. She said, "I haven't picked up a razor in five months." I sat in my kitchen on a Sunday afternoon with the phone in my hand and I felt something I hadn't expected to feel. Not hope exactly. Something quieter than hope. Something that arrives when you've been without hope for long enough that you've stopped calling it by its name. I said, "Send me everything you know." She sent me a voice note. Twenty-three minutes. Roberta talking me through everything her niece had told her and everything she'd read herself. I listened to it twice, the second time with a notebook. Then I went and read everything I could find on my own. I am going to tell you what I understood, because I spent twenty-four years working in NHS administration and I know how to read a clinical summary without losing the thread. Here is what I had never been told in thirteen years of managing this. Facial hair — the kind we are talking about, the coarse dark hair on the chin and jaw and upper lip, the kind that grows back the same day you deal with it — is not a skin condition. It is a hormonal signalling condition. The hair is a symptom. The signal is the problem. Inside the hair follicle there are receptors that respond to androgens. The primary androgen involved is something called DHT — dihydrotestosterone. All women have some DHT. In women with elevated androgen activity — whether from PCOS, from perimenopause, from genetic predisposition, from any number of factors — the follicles on the face receive a stronger signal. They respond to that signal by producing hair that is darker, coarser, faster-growing than it should be. The razor removes the hair. The follicle receives the signal tomorrow morning and grows it back. The threading removes the hair. The follicle receives the signal in ten days and grows it back, faster, because the repeated trauma to the follicle has stimulated it. The laser destroys the hair shaft. The follicle, if the hormonal signal is still active, recovers and produces new hair. This is why the laser consultant told Roberta's niece that hormonal hair requires ongoing maintenance. Because the laser addressed the follicle. It did not address what the follicle is being told. No one addressed what the follicle is being told. Not the locum at thirty-five. Not the GP at thirty-seven. Not the threading salon. Not the razor I have been picking up every morning for eleven years. The follicle has been receiving the same instruction every day for eleven years and everything I did addressed the outcome of that instruction and nothing touched the instruction itself. What Cyperus rotundus appears to do — and there is published research on this, not marketing, actual peer-reviewed research — is inhibit an enzyme called 5-alpha reductase at the follicle level. That enzyme converts testosterone into DHT. Inhibit that enzyme and the DHT signal weakens. The follicle receives less instruction to produce that kind of hair. Over weeks and months the hair becomes finer. Slower. Lighter. You are not removing the hair. You are changing what the follicle is being told to do. I read that at twenty past ten on a Sunday night and I sat at my kitchen table in the quiet and I thought about my mother Gloria. Who had this. Who managed it in silence her whole life. Who took it to her grave without ever knowing that there was a name for the signal her follicles were receiving or that something existed that could address it. I thought about the locum at thirty-five who looked at me for less than a minute. I thought about the GP who said sometimes women just get facial hair. I thought about Kezia in the car deciding not to say anything. I thought about thirteen years of Tuesday mornings. And then I ordered the oil. Rosalica Cyperus Oil. I ordered it that Sunday night. It arrived on Wednesday. Small amber bottle, gold dropper, the kind of thing that looks like it belongs on a proper skincare shelf rather than tucked at the back of a cabinet where nobody sees it. Two drops on the chin and jaw and upper lip at night, pressed in gently. After my skincare routine. Thirty seconds. I kept the razor on the sink. I wasn't trusting anything yet. Week one, nothing I could point to. Week two, I noticed the left side of my jaw — always the faster side, always the one I have to do twice — was slower. Not dramatically. I was two days past where I'd normally need a second pass and it wasn't necessary yet. I noted it. I told myself it was probably nothing. Week three, I went five days without shaving. I want to be careful about how I write that because I don't want it to sound like nothing. Five days. I have not gone five days without shaving my face since I was thirty-eight years old. The hair was still there at day five. But it was finer. At the tips, lighter. My usual foundation was doing something it hadn't been able to do in years. I texted Roberta: five days. She texted back a single word: keep going. Week five I was at Kezia's for a Sunday dinner. Just us — her and Dwight and Samuel, who was six weeks old and making the specific sounds that six-week-olds make that convince you they are trying to communicate something important. I had driven up from Leicester, two hours, arrived at noon. I had not shaved that morning. I want to say that again. I drove two hours to my daughter's house on a Sunday morning and I did not shave before I left. I held Samuel for most of the afternoon. He did the thing he does where he looks at you like he's reading something. Kezia took a photo of us on her phone — me in the armchair, Samuel on my chest, both of us slightly asleep. She showed it to me later. I looked at it for a long time. I said, "Send that to me." She said, "Yeah?" I said yes. It's on my fridge now. I am seven months in. The razor is still in my house. I want to be honest with you — I am not going to tell you I am cured or that the hair is gone, because I am fifty-two years old and my hormones are my hormones and the hair is still there. But it is not what it was. The morning shave that was three minutes every day is now twice a week, sometimes less. The ingrown hairs that left dark patches along my jaw are fading because I am not dragging a blade across that skin every morning anymore. My skin is doing something it hasn't done in thirteen years which is recovering. Two weeks ago I got up on a Tuesday morning and made coffee and drank half of it standing at the kitchen window looking at the garden before I remembered I hadn't shaved yet. I hadn't thought about it first. After thirteen years of it being the first thing I am every morning, on a Tuesday in April I drank half a cup of coffee before I remembered. That is the whole story. That is what I want for you. Last month I put the razor in the bathroom cabinet. Not on the sink. In the cabinet, at the back, where I have to reach for it. Yesterday I put it in the bin. Not the bathroom bin. The wheelie bin outside, at the end of the path. So I couldn't take it back. If you have been picking up a razor every morning and you have stopped counting how many years it's been, I want you to hear this. The razor is not solving it. It never was. It was never designed to. It addresses the hair and nothing else, and the hair comes back because the instruction that produces the hair is still being sent and nobody has ever touched the instruction. Cyperus rotundus touches the instruction. It takes weeks. It is not a trick and it is not a miracle and I am not standing here telling you the hair will disappear. I am telling you that seven months ago I was shaving my face every morning before my coffee and last Tuesday I drank half a cup before I remembered, and that distance — between every morning and forgetting — is the distance I am trying to describe to you. Rosalica Cyperus Oil. Two drops at night. Sixty day money back guarantee — if nothing changes in two months you return it, no questions, full refund. That guarantee is the reason I ordered it on a Sunday night on the word of my friend and her niece. I have spent money on things that did nothing. I was not doing it again without a way back. The link is below. 👉 rosalica.com/products/cyperus-rotundus-oil-hair-reduction-formula P.S. Samuel is four months old now. Last Sunday I drove up to Nottingham without shaving first. I held him for two hours in the afternoon. He did the looking thing. At one point he reached up and put his hand flat against my jaw — the way babies do, the specific pressure of a small hand learning the world through touch. I let him. I just let him. P.P.S. Roberta and I still talk every Sunday. We have talked about this almost every week for the past seven months, which means we have now said more about this in seven months than we said in twenty-two years. She said something a few weeks ago that I keep thinking about. She said: imagine if we'd told each other sooner. I said: I know. We didn't say anything else about it. We didn't need to. P.P.P.S. The sixty day guarantee matters. I work in healthcare administration. I know how much the small print tells you about whether an organisation believes in what it's offering. The small print on Rosalica is clean. Sixty days, send it back, full refund, no telephone queue. They believe in this product enough to let you try it without risk. That is the only reason I clicked on a Sunday night and it is the reason I'm telling you to click now. P.P.P.P.S. My mother Gloria managed this in silence for her whole life and took it with her in 2018. She was sixty-seven. She never knew there was a name for the signal. She never knew anything existed that could address it. I think about that every time I reach for the oil instead of the razor. I think: she deserved to know this. Every woman who has been told sometimes women just get facial hair deserved to know this. You deserve to know this. That's why I'm writing it down.

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.

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.

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.

I nicked myself shaving my face on the morning of my daughter's baby shower and I stood in my bathroom in my good dress with a piece of tissue pressed under my jaw and I looked at myself in the mirror and I thought: I have been doing this for eleven years. Eleven years. My daughter was in the next room getting ready. She was eight months pregnant. She was about to walk into a room full of women who loved her, all of them there to celebrate the fact that she was bringing a life into the world. And I was standing in my bathroom bleeding from my face. I didn't cry. That's the thing I keep coming back to. I didn't cry. I just stood there with the tissue and waited for it to stop and then I covered it with concealer and I went out and I smiled and I held my daughter and I told her she looked beautiful. Because this is what eleven years does. It stops feeling like something worth crying about. It just becomes Tuesday. It becomes the thing you do before anything else happens. Before the coffee, before you check your phone, before you are a mother or a grandmother or a woman who has things to do today. First you pick up the razor. That is what I want to tell you about. Not the hair. What the hair made me become. My name is Denise. I'm 52. I live in Leicester — Clarendon Park, in a Victorian terrace I've owned for eighteen years that takes more out of me every winter than I'll admit to my son when he asks if I've thought about downsizing. I worked for the NHS for twenty-four years as a community health administrator. I know what good healthcare looks like. I know what it looks like when the system is doing its job. I know what it looks like when it isn't. I have one daughter, Kezia, who is thirty-one and lives in Nottingham with her husband Dwight and is, as of four months ago, a mother herself. My grandson is called Samuel. He is sixteen weeks old and has his father's ears and my mother's eyes and when he looks at me he looks so hard I feel like he's trying to read something. My mother's name was Gloria. She passed in 2018. She had the same thing I have — the hair, the chin, the jaw — and she managed it the same way I manage it, which is to say she managed it in private and never spoke about it and took it to her grave as quietly as she'd carried it her whole life. I think about that a lot. I want to tell you when it started because I think the timeline matters. I first noticed it at thirty-one. A single dark hair on my chin that I tweezed out in the bathroom mirror on a Wednesday morning before work. I didn't think much of it. Women get stray hairs. I tweezed it and moved on. By thirty-four it was not a stray hair. It was a patch. Chin and jaw, both sides, growing in the specific coarse dark way that is different from the soft hair you have on the rest of your face. Different in texture. Different in speed. Different in the way it makes you feel when you see it. I went to my GP at thirty-five. A locum I hadn't seen before, a young man, who looked at me for less than a minute and said it was hormonal and not unusual and I could try the pill if it bothered me. I said it bothered me. He prescribed the pill. It helped slightly for about eight months. Then it stopped helping and the hair came back faster than before. I went back. Different GP this time. She looked at my notes, asked me a few questions about my periods, said everything sounded within normal range and sometimes women just get facial hair and there wasn't a great deal to be done about it besides managing it cosmetically. Managing it cosmetically. That phrase has lived in my head for seventeen years. I tried threading. The threading salon near my office in town, Tuesdays in my lunch break. It worked for ten days, sometimes twelve. Then the hair came back. Then I went back. Then it came back faster. Then I started going every ten days instead of every fortnight and the skin on my chin started breaking out from the repeated pulling and I had the hair and I had the spots from dealing with the hair and I was thirty-seven years old and spending my lunch breaks in a threading salon and telling no one. I stopped threading at thirty-nine because my skin couldn't take it anymore. The breakouts had left marks. Dark patches along my jaw that my regular foundation wasn't covering. I had started a whole separate skincare routine just to address what the threading had done to my skin, on top of managing the hair the threading was supposed to be handling, and the whole thing had become a second job I hadn't applied for. I started shaving at thirty-nine. Not because I wanted to. Because shaving was faster, cheaper, and didn't break my skin out the way threading did. Three minutes every morning. A small pink razor on the edge of the bathroom sink. Get it done, put the razor down, do everything else. Clean. Efficient. Private. That was thirteen years ago. I want to tell you what thirteen years of a morning razor looks like from the inside. It looks like nothing. That is the most honest answer I can give you. It looks like absolutely nothing because it becomes so integrated into your routine that you stop seeing it as something that requires acknowledgement. It's like asking what it looks like to brush your teeth. It looks like Tuesday. It looks like Thursday. It looks like every morning of your life for thirteen years. What it feels like is different. It feels like the first thing you are every morning is someone with a problem to solve. Before you are a mother, before you are a colleague, before you are a woman who is going to have a good day or a difficult day or an ordinary day, you are a woman with a razor in her hand solving a problem that will be back tomorrow. You don't think about this consciously. You stopped thinking about it consciously a long time ago. But it's there. It's the first three minutes of every day and it shapes something about the rest of them in a way you couldn't explain to someone who hasn't done it. My ex-husband Marcus never saw me without makeup on. In nine years of marriage. Not once. I made sure of it the same way you make sure of anything that matters — quietly, consistently, without drama. He thought I was just particular about my appearance. He wasn't wrong. He just didn't know what particular meant in this context. My daughter Kezia has seen me without makeup twice in her adult life. Both times were emergencies. The second time, three years ago, when I had a minor procedure and she came to collect me from the hospital and I was still coming round from the sedation, she looked at my face and she didn't say anything. But I saw her see it. And I saw her decide not to say anything. And I have never loved her more than I did in that moment and I have never felt more ashamed in the same moment. She was protecting me. My thirty-year-old daughter was protecting me from something I'd been carrying since she was a teenager. I keep coming back to that. I want to tell you about the baby shower. Kezia was eight months along. Her friend Priya had organised it — a Sunday afternoon in Priya's house in West Bridgford, thirty women, prosecco and lemon cake and one of those nappy-guessing games that I always think are slightly undignified but everyone seems to enjoy. I had been looking forward to it for weeks. I had bought a dress — deep burgundy, long sleeves, the kind of dress that feels like a decision. I had done my hair the night before. I had laid everything out. Sunday morning I got up at half six. Did my routine. Made coffee. Went back to the bathroom for a second pass because the light was better by then and I'd missed a bit along the left side of my jaw. Second pass is when it happened. The razor caught a small bump — an ingrown hair, the kind you get after years of shaving the same skin — and it nicked the skin just below my jaw on the right side. Small cut. The kind that shouldn't bleed much. It bled for seven minutes. I stood at the bathroom mirror with a piece of folded tissue pressed under my jaw and I watched the clock on my phone and I thought about nothing. That is the truth. I was not having a dramatic internal moment. I was waiting for a cut to stop bleeding so I could cover it with concealer and get in my car. And then somewhere around minute five, something shifted. Not dramatically. Not a breakdown. Just a quiet thought that arrived without permission: I have been doing this for eleven years. Not seven minutes. Eleven years. Every morning. The razor on the sink. The three minutes before anything else. The ingrown hairs and the dark patches and the concealer over the marks the razor left. Eleven years of this being the first thing I am every morning. My daughter was in the living room watching something on her phone, belly enormous, eight months away from becoming a mother, and I was in the bathroom bleeding. I covered the cut. I fixed my makeup. I went out and I smiled and we drove to Nottingham together and I held her hand in the car when she said she was nervous about becoming a mum and I told her she was going to be extraordinary. I did not tell her about the bathroom. I have not told anyone about the bathroom. Until now. Four weeks after the baby shower I was on the phone with my friend Roberta. Roberta and I have known each other for twenty-two years. We met at our church in Clarendon Park, both of us newly moved to Leicester, both of us turning up alone to a Sunday service and ending up sitting next to each other and talking for an hour after in the car park. She is fifty-eight. She is the kind of woman who says the true thing in the kindest possible way, which is the rarest combination I know. We talk every Sunday. We have talked every Sunday for twenty-two years with very few exceptions. We talk about everything. We have never, in twenty-two years, talked about this. That Sunday she asked me how I was and something in the way she asked it — or something in me that had been loosened by the bathroom four weeks earlier — made me tell her. Not everything. Just: I've been struggling with facial hair for a long time and I don't know what to do about it and I'm tired. Roberta was quiet for a moment. Then she said, "Denise. Can I tell you something? Because I think I've been waiting to tell you this for a while and I didn't know how to bring it up." I said tell me. She said she'd had the same thing. Had it for years. Had been managing it — that word again, managing — the same way I had, in private, without telling anyone, including me, her closest friend of twenty-two years. She said about eight months ago her niece, who works in cosmetic dermatology in Birmingham, had told her about a plant extract she'd been researching. Something that had been used in traditional medicine for thousands of years but that recent research was catching up with. Something that worked differently from everything Roberta had tried before. She said the name. Cyperus rotundus. I wrote it on the back of an envelope. She said, "I haven't picked up a razor in five months." I sat in my kitchen on a Sunday afternoon with the phone in my hand and I felt something I hadn't expected to feel. Not hope exactly. Something quieter than hope. Something that arrives when you've been without hope for long enough that you've stopped calling it by its name. I said, "Send me everything you know." She sent me a voice note. Twenty-three minutes. Roberta talking me through everything her niece had told her and everything she'd read herself. I listened to it twice, the second time with a notebook. Then I went and read everything I could find on my own. I am going to tell you what I understood, because I spent twenty-four years working in NHS administration and I know how to read a clinical summary without losing the thread. Here is what I had never been told in thirteen years of managing this. Facial hair — the kind we are talking about, the coarse dark hair on the chin and jaw and upper lip, the kind that grows back the same day you deal with it — is not a skin condition. It is a hormonal signalling condition. The hair is a symptom. The signal is the problem. Inside the hair follicle there are receptors that respond to androgens. The primary androgen involved is something called DHT — dihydrotestosterone. All women have some DHT. In women with elevated androgen activity — whether from PCOS, from perimenopause, from genetic predisposition, from any number of factors — the follicles on the face receive a stronger signal. They respond to that signal by producing hair that is darker, coarser, faster-growing than it should be. The razor removes the hair. The follicle receives the signal tomorrow morning and grows it back. The threading removes the hair. The follicle receives the signal in ten days and grows it back, faster, because the repeated trauma to the follicle has stimulated it. The laser destroys the hair shaft. The follicle, if the hormonal signal is still active, recovers and produces new hair. This is why the laser consultant told Roberta's niece that hormonal hair requires ongoing maintenance. Because the laser addressed the follicle. It did not address what the follicle is being told. No one addressed what the follicle is being told. Not the locum at thirty-five. Not the GP at thirty-seven. Not the threading salon. Not the razor I have been picking up every morning for eleven years. The follicle has been receiving the same instruction every day for eleven years and everything I did addressed the outcome of that instruction and nothing touched the instruction itself. What Cyperus rotundus appears to do — and there is published research on this, not marketing, actual peer-reviewed research — is inhibit an enzyme called 5-alpha reductase at the follicle level. That enzyme converts testosterone into DHT. Inhibit that enzyme and the DHT signal weakens. The follicle receives less instruction to produce that kind of hair. Over weeks and months the hair becomes finer. Slower. Lighter. You are not removing the hair. You are changing what the follicle is being told to do. I read that at twenty past ten on a Sunday night and I sat at my kitchen table in the quiet and I thought about my mother Gloria. Who had this. Who managed it in silence her whole life. Who took it to her grave without ever knowing that there was a name for the signal her follicles were receiving or that something existed that could address it. I thought about the locum at thirty-five who looked at me for less than a minute. I thought about the GP who said sometimes women just get facial hair. I thought about Kezia in the car deciding not to say anything. I thought about thirteen years of Tuesday mornings. And then I ordered the oil. Rosalica Cyperus Oil. I ordered it that Sunday night. It arrived on Wednesday. Small amber bottle, gold dropper, the kind of thing that looks like it belongs on a proper skincare shelf rather than tucked at the back of a cabinet where nobody sees it. Two drops on the chin and jaw and upper lip at night, pressed in gently. After my skincare routine. Thirty seconds. I kept the razor on the sink. I wasn't trusting anything yet. Week one, nothing I could point to. Week two, I noticed the left side of my jaw — always the faster side, always the one I have to do twice — was slower. Not dramatically. I was two days past where I'd normally need a second pass and it wasn't necessary yet. I noted it. I told myself it was probably nothing. Week three, I went five days without shaving. I want to be careful about how I write that because I don't want it to sound like nothing. Five days. I have not gone five days without shaving my face since I was thirty-eight years old. The hair was still there at day five. But it was finer. At the tips, lighter. My usual foundation was doing something it hadn't been able to do in years. I texted Roberta: five days. She texted back a single word: keep going. Week five I was at Kezia's for a Sunday dinner. Just us — her and Dwight and Samuel, who was six weeks old and making the specific sounds that six-week-olds make that convince you they are trying to communicate something important. I had driven up from Leicester, two hours, arrived at noon. I had not shaved that morning. I want to say that again. I drove two hours to my daughter's house on a Sunday morning and I did not shave before I left. I held Samuel for most of the afternoon. He did the thing he does where he looks at you like he's reading something. Kezia took a photo of us on her phone — me in the armchair, Samuel on my chest, both of us slightly asleep. She showed it to me later. I looked at it for a long time. I said, "Send that to me." She said, "Yeah?" I said yes. It's on my fridge now. I am seven months in. The razor is still in my house. I want to be honest with you — I am not going to tell you I am cured or that the hair is gone, because I am fifty-two years old and my hormones are my hormones and the hair is still there. But it is not what it was. The morning shave that was three minutes every day is now twice a week, sometimes less. The ingrown hairs that left dark patches along my jaw are fading because I am not dragging a blade across that skin every morning anymore. My skin is doing something it hasn't done in thirteen years which is recovering. Two weeks ago I got up on a Tuesday morning and made coffee and drank half of it standing at the kitchen window looking at the garden before I remembered I hadn't shaved yet. I hadn't thought about it first. After thirteen years of it being the first thing I am every morning, on a Tuesday in April I drank half a cup of coffee before I remembered. That is the whole story. That is what I want for you. Last month I put the razor in the bathroom cabinet. Not on the sink. In the cabinet, at the back, where I have to reach for it. Yesterday I put it in the bin. Not the bathroom bin. The wheelie bin outside, at the end of the path. So I couldn't take it back. If you have been picking up a razor every morning and you have stopped counting how many years it's been, I want you to hear this. The razor is not solving it. It never was. It was never designed to. It addresses the hair and nothing else, and the hair comes back because the instruction that produces the hair is still being sent and nobody has ever touched the instruction. Cyperus rotundus touches the instruction. It takes weeks. It is not a trick and it is not a miracle and I am not standing here telling you the hair will disappear. I am telling you that seven months ago I was shaving my face every morning before my coffee and last Tuesday I drank half a cup before I remembered, and that distance — between every morning and forgetting — is the distance I am trying to describe to you. Rosalica Cyperus Oil. Two drops at night. Sixty day money back guarantee — if nothing changes in two months you return it, no questions, full refund. That guarantee is the reason I ordered it on a Sunday night on the word of my friend and her niece. I have spent money on things that did nothing. I was not doing it again without a way back. The link is below. 👉 rosalica.com/products/cyperus-rotundus-oil-hair-reduction-formula P.S. Samuel is four months old now. Last Sunday I drove up to Nottingham without shaving first. I held him for two hours in the afternoon. He did the looking thing. At one point he reached up and put his hand flat against my jaw — the way babies do, the specific pressure of a small hand learning the world through touch. I let him. I just let him. P.P.S. Roberta and I still talk every Sunday. We have talked about this almost every week for the past seven months, which means we have now said more about this in seven months than we said in twenty-two years. She said something a few weeks ago that I keep thinking about. She said: imagine if we'd told each other sooner. I said: I know. We didn't say anything else about it. We didn't need to. P.P.P.S. The sixty day guarantee matters. I work in healthcare administration. I know how much the small print tells you about whether an organisation believes in what it's offering. The small print on Rosalica is clean. Sixty days, send it back, full refund, no telephone queue. They believe in this product enough to let you try it without risk. That is the only reason I clicked on a Sunday night and it is the reason I'm telling you to click now. P.P.P.P.S. My mother Gloria managed this in silence for her whole life and took it with her in 2018. She was sixty-seven. She never knew there was a name for the signal. She never knew anything existed that could address it. I think about that every time I reach for the oil instead of the razor. I think: she deserved to know this. Every woman who has been told sometimes women just get facial hair deserved to know this. You deserve to know this. That's why I'm writing it down.