Well, dreaded for me, anyway.

We try on last year's swimsuit. Does it fit? How's that elastic holding up? Shall I risk the bikini again, or is it time to concede defeat and stick exclusively to a maillot? Regardless of the answer to those questions, there's one more that needs asking: what am I going to do about my bikini line?

I-- like most women, I would imagine-- try to keep the whole groinal area tidy throughout the year. The occasional going over with Elvis' beard trimmer, edge the border with a razor, and you're good to go. But when it comes to the wearing of a swimsuit in public, one needs to pay a whole lot more attention to what's going on down there. Pubic hair escaping from a swimsuit is not a good look. Ever.

Shaving is not a good answer. I've heard tell of women who manage to emerge from the bath, razor in hand, with a smooth crotch, free of nicks, bumps and stubble. I'm not one of them, unfortunately, and the best I've ever been able to manage is slightly shorter stubble than when I started. And, you know, it itches. And if you cut yourself? Blood. Lots of blood, and your undies will be rubbing you the wrong way for days.

Last year, I went the chemical depilatory route and used Veet. The results weren't entirely satisfactory. I mean, at least you end up smooth, but the stubble is back in a day or two anyway. Plus there's the smell, although I seem to remember using Nair in the US and it wasn't so bad, but Nair isn't available here so it's a moot point. In any case, it takes so long! All that standing around (because of course you can't sit down with a groin full of goo), followed by the scraping and scrubbing to remove it all. If you're running late, you can forget about it. And I kept forgetting to do it before getting into the shower anyway. By the end of the summer, it was back to the razor.

The obvious solution is a bikini wax. I asked around for recommendations, but most of my friends do it themselves. It's a good solution-- or it would be, provided I was capabable of it, which I am not. I did try to give myself a bikini wax two years ago, before our big trip to Sicily and Campania. It (1) hurt like hell; (2) burst every capillary, vein and artery in the area, leaving me with serious bruising and what appeared to be varicose veins; and (3) removed approximately one quarter of the available hair. In short, it wasn't pretty, not pretty at all, and it was weeks before the aftermath calmed down enough that I could even go back to shaving.

DIY is clearly out. I meant to go have it done professionally, but I never did get around to it, so I used Veet when I could remember (or be bothered) to do so. I've kept asking around for recommendations, on the theory that someone is bound to have one. Also, I decided that if I was going to go for it, complete with all the pain and anguish that I'm certain is part of the entire bikini wax experience, I might as well go for the full monty and get a Brazilian. If you don't know what that is, you could google it, and I'm betting you might get more than you'd bargained for, so I'll just say that's when they take it all off, except for a tiny 'landing strip' front and center.

To tell the truth, I was wavering back and forth on the entire Brazilian issue. Not that it matters: if I'm going to pay someone to slather my nether regions in hot wax, you know I'm going to make damn sure that they know what they're doing, no matter how much wax is involved. But, unfortunately, I've gone an entire month and no one could provide me with even one recommendation. Our beach vacation is fast approaching, and I just couldn't put it off any longer. I went to Jumbo to buy some Veet.

I needed other items as well, of course, and while I was pushing my cart toward the cat food (handily located near the stacks of dried cod, so the two smells can blend together), I happened upon the epilady department. Epilady is just one brand of electric . . . epilators, I guess they're called. If you've managed to get this far being blissfully ignorant of epilators, they are somewhat like electric razors, but instead of the blades they have lots and lots of rotating tweezers, all the better to rip unwanted hairs out at the root. 'Ouch' is the word I'm looking for, I believe. Sparkle Hayter, as I recall, wrote a novel in which the heroine carried an Epilady in her purse for self-defense purposes, on the theory that it was much more painful than mace.

I've always filed the Epilady in the 'appliances I don't really need' category, right next to electric cigar cutters, nose hair trimmers and electric apple peelers. Although the apple peeler might be fun, come to think of it. I'd have to make more pie, I suppose, if I had one. But, once again, I digress.

The epilators, or whatever they're called, seem to be popular. Jumbo had six models to choose from, with a bewildering array of options and attachments. They would seem to be quite popular, but then again, just because everybody's doing it doesn't make it a great idea. Still. . . They don't cost much more than going into the salon. They're reusable, therefore a better choice from an economic standpoint. And I had all this hair I'd been growing out, ripe for the plucking, so to speak. It seemed a shame to waste it, plus I had over a week to recover in case things went horribly wrong. Which, knowing me, they probably would, but I've never let that sort of thing stop me before.

That's when I saw the box marked "New! 4-way Pain Softener". There's no pain like soft pain, right? Water softener, fabric softener, pain softener-- why not? And, hey-- 4-ways? Not to mention the specially shaped tweezer head "for your most sensitive areas." It wasn't an actual Epilady, but a Braun Silk-Epil, and I've always found Braun to be a good brand. I put the box in my cart, abandoning the Veet in its place, and continued on with the rest of my grocery shopping.

It wasn't until I got home that I started to get scared. Since I'm a girl, and therefore not afraid to RTFM, I read the instructions. The first thing that struck me was that you are NOT supposed to use the "4-way pain softening attachment" with the "specially designed tweezing head for your most sensitive areas." Umm, wasn't that the point? Don't your most sensitive areas deserve some 4-way pain softening? Especially when the booklet candidly states that the bikini line tends to be a painful area to depilate? Oh, they say the pain will diminish every time you use the damn thing, but that's hardly a comforting thought when you are dying in agony, is it?

I decided to take it back, and explain to the folks in customer service that I'd made a terrible mistake, that I was much to frightened to use it, and could I please have my money back? I got out my Portuguese dictionary and started to enrich my vocabulary. Then I thought of all possible responses (laughter being first and foremost, but I sadly no longer have a sense of either shame or embarrassment), and looked up more words in Portuguese. I calculated the chance that someone in customer service would speak English. I know from experience that the odds are pretty dang high. I delved deeper into my dictionary.

Eventually, I came to the conclusion that I was more scared of taking it back than actually using it. I decided to do a small test patch on my arm, and then decide. It hardly hurt at all! Oh, it stung a bit, but nothing major. My pain threshold is pretty high, in any case. I decided to give it a shot.

I did expect that depilating my bikini line would hurt. It did. In fact, it felt exactly like someone was ripping my pubic hair out at the roots, which is about what you'd expect. What I did not expect was the blood. Lots of blood, in fact: apparently it was ripping out more than hair. Suddenly, I realized why the booklet was so insistent on cleaning the tweezer heads with rubbing alcohol both before and after use. The blood seemed to be coming more from the crease between the my thighs and my crotch, so I soldiered on.

And, you know, I started to get the hang of it. Especially when I realized that I had hiked the speed up to high instead of the recommended low. Whoops! Makes a big difference, that does. The right side crease hardly bled at all. When I finished, I had a line of what appeared to be small puncture wounds in my left crease, a few in my right, the occasional big red bump, and a rash of little red bumps which, I knew from waxing my eyebrows, would fade before too long. Which they did. More importantly, the skin was baby-bottom smooth. A week later, and the pin-prick scabs are gone, as are all of the big red bumps but one.

Chalk one up for the epilator!

So, now I'm epilator mad. Not mad enough to take the damn thing to my armpits, but mad enough to let my leg hairs grow out enough to epilate them, too. I had shaved them the day I bought the device, so I waited a week and let 'er rip. They claim that the Silk-epil will yank out hairs as short as half a millimeter, and it will, just not as well. Most of the hair was longer than that, though, so no problem. In retrospect, I should have waited a few more days, but still! Smooth, smooth, smooth-- and I won't have to shave nearly as often. Sure, it stings, but it doesn't rise to the level of actual pain, so that's fine by me. They also claim that the hair should grow back finer and softer, but the truth of that statement will have to wait.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to wax my eyebrows.