I tried sugar waxing at home

First things first: I hate shaving. And I hate spending money. So when I heard about “sugaring”, (also called sugar waxing) I had to try it out.

If you’ve never heard of this sweet trend, here’s the gist: you take some sugar, lemon juice, and a pinch of salt, and melt it down in a pan. You let it cool, and like a bonafide European Wax Center specialist, ya rip off your hair with it. It’s supposed to be gentler than a wax, since the ingredients are nice to your skin, and opposite to waxing, you rip the hair out in the direction it grows, removing the root.

Fun? No. Cheap and longer lasting than a shave? Totes! Seeing as I had all the ingredients in my kitchen and leg hair a’ plenty, I got to work.

Here’s how it went down:

First, I channeled my inner Gordon Ramsay and  following these instructions, cooked down my sugar mixture. It took around 45 minutes of occasional stirring and pan swirling, which, with my 12 second attention span, I accomplished by putting on an episode of Botched and getting up during commercials to stir.

I successfully didn’t burn anything. But the hardest part was telling if the mixture was done. It’s supposed to be a dark golden brown when it’s finished, but there’s about a thousand shades of brown.

I ended up just taking it off the stove when I got impatient, but it seemed to cool into the right consistency.

Consistency, I found, is a HUGE factor in getting the sugar to work. When the mixture was cool, it was still too gooey to roll into a ball and apply to my legs, as per the instructions.

I put it next to an air conditioner and gave it some time to itself.

When my sugar was ready, I rolled it into a ball.

Since I’m an amateur, I used a pretty tiny amount so I could focus on a small part of my leg.

…Applied…

…and ripped.

There was some wincing, but it quickly ended when I realized that it worked! I was left with a pretty cool hairless patch in the forest of my leg hair.

But as I continued working, the sugar started to melt. It got stickier and stickier until I couldn’t even roll it into a ball anymore because it was sticking onto my palms.

Messy, and kinda gross. Thankfully the sugar wax cleans up super easily with just water.

I’m a low maintenance kind of gal, so I don’t foresee myself sugaring my legs in the future. It’s pretty time consuming, and it seems like you need a lot of practice perfecting your waxing technique before it becomes efficient. But on the flipside, the parts of my leg that did get the sugar treatment are still pretty smooth, and its been a week!

Unfortunately, I think it’s back to shaving for me, but sugaring is a pretty neat hair removal practice to have in your arsenal!