BRAZILIANS FOR THE BOYS. NO, SERIOUSLY.

As three Wall Street types left an Upper East Side salon in Manhattan last week, a beautician told a NEWSWEEK reporter: "It's not their backs I'm waxing. It's their b-lls." There is such a thing as being too well groomed, but apparently not for some upwardly mobile heterosexual men. In several major metro areas--New York, L.A., Atlanta, Washington, D.C.--men are paying up to $100 for bikini waxes that take it all--all--off. Ken Knox, associate editor at Adult Video News, says, "For years, gay men have been shaving and using the Nair hair-removal cream. But it's the straight guys who seem to be doing the more extreme waxing."

There are powerful motives at play. Men claim it makes oral sex more sensual, says Lidia Tivichi of New York's Kimara Ahnert salon. "Without the hair, everything down there looks bigger," she says. "I know they like that, too." When the pain is unbearable, men use anesthetic cream before appointments. Still, Cynthia Esser-Thorin, who owns Pink Cheeks in Sherman Oaks, Calif., says that at times "we have to pull a man off the ceiling." (She uses her feet to steady the hairiest guys.) Not Ron, a divorced 39-year-old banker from L.A.: "Conversation helps. If [a waxer] talks to me midtear, I can keep my mind off it."

© 2004