Michelle Duff.

Tis the season to spend a small fortune getting your body hair tweezed, waxed, lasered, threadedot or trimmed to within an inch of its life.

That’s right, ladies, it’s Christmas depilatory time!

There is nothing worse than seeing pubic hair hanging out of someone’s bikini. Oh wait! Yes there is. There is spending literally thousands of dollars over the course of a lifetime for the pleasure of someone tipping hot wax on your nether regions and then ripping it off, while you writhe in pain. Yep, that’s definitely worse.

There is nothing worse than having visible leg hair, unless you consider how boring and repetitive shaving your legs is (that’s 15 minutes you’ll never get back, not to mention the five minutes spent pressing a piece of toilet paper to your kneecap to staunch the bleeding).

Just for kicks, I thought I’d roughly add it up. Let’s say I maintained a hair removal routine of an extended bikini line wax every six weeks ($45, one hour including travel and waiting time) a brow shape every four weeks ($28, one hour) and shaved my own legs and underarms every second day (20 minutes).

Let’s assume I started doing this age 17, and stopped at age 70 – remembering this is completely hypothetical, as women certainly start removing hair younger than this and may well continue into old age.

A year of bikini and eyebrow waxes will cost me $770, and 22 hours of my time. I will spend 60 hours shaving a year, which adds up to just over two working weeks worth of hair being ripped from my pores.

If you consider that in terms of lost earnings - using the median hourly earnings for women in New Zealand – which is $23.02 an hour – then I amlosing $1887 every year. If you add on my waxing spend, that’s a total of $2657.

Based on these conservative calculations, over the course of a lifetime, I will spend 108 working weeks – that’s two full years of my life – removing hair from my body. It will cost me around $141,000. Why do we do this again? We could choose not to, right? Actually, not so much. A new joint study by the University of Auckland and the Auckland University of Technology, published in the journal Feminism and Psychology, found the pressure for women to remove their hair is so strong it’s almost invisible – and the ‘‘choice’’ is not really a choice at all.

Researchers spoke to 299 women aged 18-35 about their thoughts on hair removal. They found while the participants said women should do what they want with their body hair, in reality it was very difficult not to conform to a ‘‘hairless ideal.’’

But some wished this was not the case. ‘‘Sometimes I wonder what a day in the life of a hairy woman is like … not to feel selfconscious about stubble, ingrowns, not to spend moments and dollars in the pursuit of a smooth body,’’ one woman said. And: ‘‘I feel quite envious when I see ‘hairy women’ with armpit hair and unshaved legs – I wish all women could feel as uninhibited