Wax elegant
Beauty bar offers body bling, memberships
The hairless body revolution continues on Queen St. W. The twist with the new Fuzz Wax Bar, another player in the booming Toronto wax-only, express model, is a membership system: bottom line is that you can get a full Brazilian every month (plus some freebies) for the $35 rate. One-shot Brazilians are $45 a pop.
But the real beauty news at the shop — which since it opened this spring, has drawn a whopping third of its traffic from male clientele — is that you can get vajazzled. Now, I will admit this concept has puzzled me since the dubious label entered the lexicon. I could never quite wrap my head around what the end result would look like.
But a chat with the Fuzz founders, Jessica Frampton and Florence Gaven, expanded my horizons. Frampton and Gaven (the latter a French import, full of mysterious French woman waxing wisdom) are a very Queen Street story: they met in a vintage store and immediately set into a chat about the problems with waxing in this city. (It is true that until recently, most maintenance was done at day spas, where for the past decade the price of a Brazilian was pushed to a stratospheric $70, and required a commitment to a good 45 minutes of torture.) The bar concept — also found uptown at Waxon at Summerhill, where they beat Fuzz to market by a few moments — reduces the proce- dure to 15 minutes with snappy and liberal doses of hard wax. The blue goo used at Fuzz is imported from France and comes in little blue beads that are melted tableside. So Frampton and Gaven decided to add what they call body bling — Swarovski crystals that can be arranged in any design but usually form a heart or initials — and body glitter: fabulous golds and reds and hot pinks that are applied via stencil. “You can use them in the classic bikini zone,” says Frampton, noting that they can be used to cover Csection scars and stretch marks as well as any skin speckling or imperfections. “But,” she continues, “we like them anywhere secret on the body, nestled into an inner hip bone, at the base of the spine, on a shoulder, or even on a bicep.” At $15 for the application of either, the stones or stencils last about four days. “We did a brisk business in glitter Pride flags,” adds Gaven. Sure, the flaming heart does look a tad stripper-ish, but isn’t that the fun part of something semi-permanent? And pardon me, but isn’t that the point of playful? Fuzz Wax Bar: 701 Queen St. W., 647-748-3899 or info@fuzzwaxbar.com, www.fuzzwaxbar.com