Nasal Hair

Jill has a very stressful mid-management job and at 53 she continually worries about being replaced. Not so much because of her age or because she doesn’t work hard enough, but because her new boss is a lot shorter than she is and seems uncomfortable around her.

"I thought it was the eye-chest thingy that made him uncomfortable and then I read a magazine article about Cary Grant and freaked out," laughs Jill.

"Apparently, he was turned off doing up close and personal scenes in movies with Sophia Loren because she had nasal hair. Huh? Is there such a thing?"

Quickly Jill located a mirror and tipped her nose back in the general direction of her eyes in order to discover whether she, too, had nasal hair.

"Oh my God, I did. Where did these hairs come from? Is it a menopausaul thing?"

She blushed at the thought of having offended people like Cary Grant -- and probably her new boss, too -- who, by virtue of being shorter than her, or up close and personal with her, were forced to look up her nose.

Being taller than average Jill had grown accustomed to looking down her nose at people, but it never occurred to her that they might be looking up hers.

She wondered whether she should perform nasal cavity inspections before she goes to work every day just to make sure there's nothing there that might offend her boss.

"Locating a pair of tweezers at short notice was very difficult," says Jill. "You see, I had given up plucking my eyebrows years ago after Brooke Shields made bushy eyebrows popular."

"Remembering the pain of the weekly eyebrow plucking sessions I winced at the thought of having to inflict the tweezers on a part of my anatomy that I never see - and therefore do not care much about," says Jill. "But, for the sake of all those short people out there - especially my boss - I was determined to have a hairless nose."

People pull some incredibly grotesque faces when plucking their eyebrows, but they were nothing compared with the pug nosed spectacle that stared back at her from the mirror as Jill proceeded to attack the foliage inside her nose.

"I had to contort my nose into amazing shapes in order to find stray hairs," laughs Jill, "and the pain I suffered when each hair was removed was exquisite. Eyebrow plucking was a cinch compared to this!"

Finally, Jill completed the task and was left with two nasal cavities that had a healthy pink glow about them. She was satisfied that everyone who looked up her nose would be pleased by what they saw. Nary a hair in sight.

And then it occurred to her that perhaps Nature put those hairs in our noses for a purpose.

"What purpose, I don't know," says Jill, "but perhaps they prevent stray insects from making a home in our noses, or maybe they were intended to filter large particles from the air we breathe."

"Anyway, I rationalized that nasal hair, like armpit hair - and, dare I mention, any other bodily hair apart from our crowning glories - is rather ugly and serves no real purpose now that we have evolved to live in air-conditioned, insect free, hot and cold running water houses rather than caves."

Jill was eager to try out her new hair-free nose on a few short people, but as luck would have it, she did not run into any short people that weekend. However, she tipped her head back a few times when she was among people of equal height, hoping they would catch a glimpse of her hairless pink nasal cavities and say something complimentary, but nobody did.

"I thought that nasal hair may be something only short people notice in people taller than themselves," says Jill, "so I had to wait until I went to work the next day to gain a reaction from my boss - the person for whom I had gone through all this agony!"

Jill spent all that night wondering how fast nasal hairs grow. Are they like a man's beard? Would she wake up in the morning with stubble in her nasal cavities? Would nose plucking become a daily, rather than a weekly plucking session as it was with eyebrows? Would the hairs grow back longer or thicker?

Naturally, after these dire thoughts before going to bed Jill had a terrible nightmare about being exhibited in a freak circus as the incredible nasal bearded woman and when dawn broke she rushed into the bathroom to see what had grown overnight. Nothing had. What a relief.

At work that day, Jill deliberately spent a lot of time standing in front of her boss, looking down her nose at him, thus forcing him to look up hers.

She dearly wanted to ask him: "Do you notice anything different about me?" but did not have the courage to do so. He did not treat her any differently so she was at a loss to know whether he ever noticed the nasal hair in the first place.

"Maybe he was too focused on that part of my anatomy that meets his eyes to care about looking up a bit," laughs Jill, "so after a few weeks I stopped plucking my nasal hairs."

She came to the conclusion that nobody but Cary Grant would notice such a silly thing, but every now and again she wonders.