A 4000-year old Beauty Ritual You’ve Been Replacing With a Plastic Razor – On the ancient history of sugar waxing, slowness, and what we lost when we stopped sitting with ourselves.
There is a particular kind of shame that lives in the bathroom cabinet.
Mine used to be full of it. Disposable razors with their pink tax and their plastic waste, wax strips that tore at my skin and gave me ingrown hairs. Not to mention the depilatory creams that smelled like a chemical plant and left me red and rashy for days. I would make everything worse by slapping on some commercial lotion.
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Hello years of hyperpigmentation.
I called it a beauty routine. I called it self-care. But there was nothing slow about it. Nothing sacred. Nothing that felt, even remotely, like something a woman would choose for herself if the world hadn’t handed her a razor at thirteen and told her to get on with it. There was no one teaching me about the sacred art of preparation – not for society, marriage or a man – but for me.
I didn’t find sugaring. Sugar waxing found me — the way most of the old things do.
1 year out of a near-death experience, facing down a spiritual awakening that would turn my life upside down. I had anxiety around razors. I do not know why. I just did not want to use them anymore. They felt so violent, so rigid, like putting a knife to my skin. I had gotten into taking long, hot showers as a form of relaxation and meditation. Inviting something so harsh into my routine made no sense.
I went on Youtube to look up how to make sugar wax. So many videos made a simple 3-ingredient process very difficult. There was no uniform formula; no consistency with ingredients, temperature or duration. It took me around 8 times to get it right the first time; and another 2-3 burnt pots every other time I decided to make it after a long stretch of time.
Now, I tested it so many times that after 5+ years, I found a formula that works for me.
What We Gave Up Without Knowing
Women have been removing body hair for over four thousand years, and for most of that time, they used three ingredients. Sugar. Lemon. Water. Known as sukkar in Egypt, ağda in Turkey, and moum in Iran, each culture perfected their own techniques. The method spread through Arabic and Persian cultures, becoming an essential part of beauty rituals.
That’s it.
Sugar waxing has been in use since approximately 1900 BC. Historically, sugar was confined to the regions surrounding Persia until the first millennium AD. As a result, it is speculated that honey was the first sugaring agent Wikipedia — which means the recipe is even older than the sugar itself. Women were making halawa with honey and lemon long before refined sugar existed.
Ancient Egyptian women mixed these three things(sometimes replacing sugar with honey) into a warm paste and used it to care for their skin. Not in a clinical, strip-lit salon. Ancient Egyptians employed mixtures of beeswax and honey, along with tools like pumice stones, for removing unwanted hair. This practice was integral to standards of purity in North African and Middle Eastern societies and was often part of ceremonial events. They discovered that sugaring not only removed hair but also exfoliates skin, leaving it smoother and more supple without stubble or irritation.
Within Islamic traditions, sugaring holds significant cultural value as a practice aligned with fitrah — the innate human disposition toward cleanliness and hygiene. Hadith recommend removing pubic and armpit hair at least every 40 days. This act is viewed as a spiritual practice, not merely a cosmetic one.
Halawa was never just vanity. It was a sacred hygiene practice. A woman tending her body in the Islamic tradition was fulfilling a religious and spiritual obligation — caring for the body as a trust, as something given to her to tend with attention and respect.
In ancient Persia, a bride’s full-body sugaring session was a sacred pre-wedding rite. It more than hair removal, it was a crossing, a threshold. Older women would gather, the paste would be warmed, and a girl would be tended to — slowly, deliberately, with intention — as she moved into her womanhood. It was embodied. It was witnessed. It meant something.
The Formula — Unchanged for Four Millennia
Three ingredients. The same three ingredients for four thousand years.
Sugar — removes the hair, preserves the paste, prevents bacteria Lemon — breaks the sucrose into fructose and glucose, creates the workable consistency, delivers vitamin C to the skin Water — the medium, the binding element
Unlike waxing, which can irritate the skin and pull at live skin cells, sugaring only adheres to dead skin cells and hair — much gentler on the skin, leaving it smooth and less prone to redness or irritation
And then came the twentieth century, and the razor blade, and the promise of speed, convenience.
And we lost so much in that search for efficiency.
The Problem With Modern Waxing (And I Say This As Someone Who Paid For It For Years)
Modern wax — whether hot or cold — adheres to your skin as much as it does to the hair. Which means when it’s pulled off (against the direction of growth, always against the grain, always pulling you the wrong way), it takes a layer of your skin with it. This is why you’re red. This is why you’re sensitive for days. This is why regular waxing clients eventually develop thinner, more reactive skin over time.
There’s also the heat. Hot wax is applied at temperatures that can cause micro-burns, particularly on sensitive areas. And then there are the synthetic resins, the preservatives, the artificial fragrances. You are pressing a petrochemical product onto the most absorbent skin on your body and hoping for the best.
Shaving, of course, is its own particular cruelty — not painful in the moment, but relentless in its demands. Daily. Every other day. The blade dragging across the hair at the surface, leaving a blunt edge that grows back coarser, scraping the dermis, breeding ingrowns, and asking nothing of you except that you do it again tomorrow.
There is no embodiment in shaving. It is the most disembodied beauty act I can think of — eyes half-open, standing in a shower, running a blade across your own skin with the same presence you’d bring to washing up.
I’m not judging. I did it for years. I just think we deserve to know there was always another way.
What Sugaring Actually Is
Sugar paste — real sugar paste, water-soluble, made from food-grade ingredients — works with your body, not against it.
It’s applied at body temperature, so there are no burns. It wraps around the hair shaft and seeps slightly into the follicle, gripping the hair from below the skin’s surface rather than just at the top. And critically, it’s removed in the direction of hair growth — which means less breakage, fewer ingrowns, and no trauma to the skin.
Because it’s water-soluble, any residue rinses off with warm water. No sticky patches. No strip marks. No synthetic anything left on your skin. Zero waste.
Over time, regular sugaring actually weakens the hair follicle. The hair grows back finer. Softer. Sometimes patchier. Some women who have sugared consistently for years report near-permanent reduction in certain areas.
In my case, it got rid of my strawberry legs for good.
The Part That Changed Everything For Me
When I left my corporate life and began building something slower, something more Mediterranean, more intentional, more mine, I started noticing how much of my self-care was still running on the old operating system.
Fast. Efficient. Painless. Over.
I was meditating in the mornings and rushing through my body care like it was admin. I was calling myself a slow living advocate while standing in a shower with a plastic razor at 7am.
The first time I made my own sugar paste — just the three ingredients, warm in a saucepan, golden and thick, I sat down and I took my time. And something shifted in me.
I was with my body. Actually with it. Touching it slowly, attentively, like it was worth the time. Like I was worth the time.
That’s what ritual does. It makes an ordinary act into an act of presence. And presence, I’ve come to believe, is the whole point.
On Embodiment and What We’re Really Talking About
There’s a reason the oldest beauty rituals were communal. Persian women didn’t sugar alone. Egyptian women tended to each other. The act of caring for the body was relational — to other women, to time, to self.
We’ve made beauty so solitary. So functional. So disconnected from meaning.
When I think about what I’m building with @almadobeauty — the scrubs, the sugar wax, the whole ethos of slow, Mediterranean, embodied living — this is the thread running underneath all of it. Not just natural ingredients (though yes, always). But the invitation to be here while you do it. To not rush. To let the act of caring for your body be, itself, an act of self-knowing.
The sugar wax I’m working on isn’t just a product. It’s a reclamation. A small, sticky, lemon-scented one — but a reclamation nonetheless.
The @almadobeauty sugar wax drop is coming. If you want to be the first to know — and the first to try it — make sure you’re on the list.
