If you have been following my blog from the very first post, you’ll know by now that, over the years, I have changed the technique of washing my wig, and all that depending on the excellent advice I get not only online, but also from the wonderful person who sells and conditions most of my wigs. And then, of course, I get to exchange ideas with fellow crossdressers and transgender people who have not managed to fully grow out their hair. We compare techniques, exchange tips and ideas, and in general try to figure out what the ‘best’ method is.

Over time, however, I came to realise that there are a lot of ‘myths’ about wig washing that simply aren’t true any more. They might have been true with earlier technologies of wig manufacturing; because wigs (especially human hair wigs!) can be very expensive, it means that hairdressers (and the community of wig users in general) tend to be conservative, that is, it’s best to advice to be extra careful than to risk ruining a good wig forever and getting an angry customer (or losing a friend!).

Anatomy of a wig

Over the years, I have owned several wigs made of synthetic hair (some of which of extremely high quality) and two wigs of human hair, one of which I have given away when it was some 15 years old, but still relatively well preserved. Human hair wigs last way longer, and that’s one of the many reasons why they are expensive. They are also much more fun to play with, because you can style them in any way you wish (synthetic wigs come with a ‘fixed’ cut, which has been established by the manufacturers, and the synthetic hairs keep the ‘memory’ of that cut), although, yes, it also means taking some more time to get them styled first (while synthetic wigs just need a brush and are ready to wear!). Washing them, however, is pretty similar, and, in fact, I have noticed that almost everyone out there who wrote a tutorial for washing wigs does not differentiate between human hair wigs and synthetic ones.

Synthetic wigs can have their hairs made of different materials and techniques, the most advanced and sophisticated being a Japanese invention, Kanekalon. It’s not a ‘new’ product, but rather something that the Kaneka corporation invented precisely 60 years ago and has been developing ever since. The current generation of Kanekalon synthetic hair fibres is ultra-light (as light as human hair) and heat-resistant; it’s so perfectly manufactured to resemble human hair that even experts (I mean hairdressers!) have a hard time figuring out the difference; the only good test is to set the fibres on fire, because plastic burns differently from human hair and smells differently too — but of course you’ll destroy the fibres that way!!

Kanekalon-based wigs can pretty much be styled like human hair wigs using heat; and, because they are heat-resistant, it also means that they can be washed like human hair wigs. But there are still a few differences to take into account! Also, a lot of brands claim to use ‘Japanese fibre’, giving the impression that they are using Kanekalon, when in reality they are using some cheap substitute ‘made in China’. Now, Kanekalon is not the only player in the market; there are a lot of high-quality synthetic hair fibres out there, some of which are close enough to ‘pass’ as Kanekalon fibres (or even human hair!). For a lay person they might really be undistinguishable. I do have an older wig which was sold as being ‘100% human hair’, but the price is definitely not right for a real human hair wig. When feeling those fibres and comparing it to the human hair wig I’ve got, the difference is so minimal that, with my eyes blindfolded, I might confuse both — that’s how good some synthetic fibres are these days! That’s why I have no qualms to recommend to new crossdressers to invest in a good, high-quality synthetic wig: nobody will know the difference, and they are much easier to maintain, because they keep the style even after washing and heavy brushing (although you can change the style with heat on Kanekalon wigs!).

Why use human hair wigs then, if the difference is imperceptible? Well, I have told this in the past, and I will repeat again: in general, human hair wigs, with proper maintenance, will last much, much longer. At the rhythm I wear them, a good quality synthetic wig will last me 6-12 months — after that, the ends will be so split, feeling like raw straw, that the wig is not useable again. A human hair wig, if properly maintained, can last a whole decade. That, however, really requires a lot of tricks, some of which I will reveal today.

Human hair wigs are also less irritating, at least to people who are susceptible to allergies; you will perspire less under a human hair wig than under one made of plastic, even if it’s a well-ventilated one (as is commonplace today among the better class of wigs). Loose, stray hairs will not irritate the skin as much — it’s just human hair, after all, even if it’s not your hair. And, of course, you can have way more fun in styling them, although I guess that you will be able to accomplish the same results with a Kanekalon wig — the main difference is that you might not need any heat to do some simple things with a human hair wig (I use rollers!), while even the best Kanekalon wig will need huge amounts of hair spray to be tweaked into the style you wish — or you will be an expert in manipulating all those heating tools to accomplish the same result.

So, yes, there are advantages and disadvantages for each type of wig.

Chemicals and why they matter

Now, the first lesson you might get when washing your wig for the first time is that you have to pay extra attention to what products you buy, because they might affect the wig (or even destroy it). Twenty years ago, when I first started to wash my wigs, I was told never to use any product with alcohol (that means no perfume) in it — the main reason being that alcohol will dry out the wig, and both synthetic and human hair wigs are already ultra-dry. But several chemicals might also interfere in the way the wig hairs have been manufactured, which meant being very careful with what one would buy — it often meant ordering from special shops, retailing to hair salons, selling products specifically for wigs and hair extensions. Such products are usually expensive, but the advantage is that they also come in large bottles.

While this is understandable for synthetic wigs, is there any need to be careful with human hair wigs as well? The answer is ‘yes’. Even though the raw material for a human hair wig is, indeed, human hair, only those with virgin human hair have ‘untreated’ hair. Virgin hair is often more expensive and comes in very few colour choices, except for European hair (which is used only by the top of the top of the luxury brands, since it’s insanely expensive) — this is because the most available kind of human hair comes from India and is therefore mostly black or at least a very deep and dark brown, and mostly straight or with a slight wave; some comes from China (Chinese hair is stronger, but also thicker, which can limit what you can do with it) or Vietnam (similar to Chinese hair but sometimes slightly cheaper), which is also black and completely straight; and finally, Brazil also exports plenty of human hair, which is often also very dark and very curly.

Thus, to get any other shade, virgin hair needs to be bleached first. This is a process that uses much more aggressive chemicals than what is used in salons for natural hair, since it is something that will be mass-produced in a large factory, without the fear of harming anyone. The bleaching process naturally also damages the hair much more than it would damage one’s natural hair, but since human hair wigs are not supposed to last forever, they know they can go extreme with that bleach.

Then a dye is applied to the hair. Again, this is a much stronger — and chemically way more powerful — kind of dye than what is commonly used at salons. It will not go away even with lots of washing: the older human hair wig I had, which had a copper red, remained with pretty much the same shade and colour after 15 years. My current wig has not changed its colour in the past two or so years even after the frequent washing (every other week or so), while dye from a hair salon usually fades after a few weeks, or at best after a few months.

Naturally enough, such aggressive treatment will weaken the hair, and that’s why it goes through a few more chemical processes to keep it in good condition for a long time. It’s also possible that some hair will go through special chemical ‘baths’ to make them more (or less) wavy, for instance. But due to all these manufacturing processes, the end result is not exactly natural hair, and that is one of the reasons why processed human hair seems to be so similar in texture and properties to high-quality Kanekalon fibre: both kinds have been through complex chemical processes until they are finally weaved into a wig. Both are the results of heavy-duty industrial manufacturing.

And here is where the first ‘myth’ is born: because processed human hair (the more usual type) has already undergone so many aggressive chemical treatments, washing it (and maintaining it in general) ought to be done very carefully in order not to destroy the whole hair.

This might have been a real issue decades ago, when industrial processes were quite different, but… I have found out that there has been some exaggeration in the ‘fragility’ of modern-generation human hair wigs. They are much stronger than what the sellers claim. Perhaps they are only shielding themselves to avoid lawsuits, I don’t know — with human hair wigs costing up to something like €5000 (!), it’s clear that manufacturers do not want their customers to spoil the wigs after the first washing and sue them!

So, how ‘careful’ should we be with a human hair wig? Well, careful enough: what you should keep in mind is that a human hair wig ought to be treated as having very dry and damaged hair which has undergone the equivalent of many bleachings and many dying operations. That means that it’s fragile, yes, and just grabbing the first bottle in the supermarket might not be the best choice.

Fortunately for us, real women also have dry hair, and they also bleach it repeatedly, and also dye it — often in low-quality salons who don’t know what they’re doing — and they get their own real, natural hair very damaged. And this has made a whole industry popping up into existence for dealing with so-called ‘dry and damaged’ hair — exactly what we need to take care of our human hair wig!

How low-quality synthetic wigs ought to be washed

First, a recap of the old method of washing wigs:

1. Fill a basin with cold water and dilute a handful of shampoo in it. Use a shampoo without perfume and without alcohol; ideally, a product designed for wigs and hair extensions; if not, use something for ‘dry and severely damaged’ hair.
2. Brush your wig carefully but vigorously, making sure that it does not have knots anywhere.
3. Very gently place the wig inside the water, making sure that it retains its shape even after being immersed in water — that is, if it’s a long wig, don’t separate the many strands, but try to keep them together.
4. Slosh it very gently around, still making sure that it maintains the overall shape — if it doesn’t, you’ll get a lot of tangles in the hair, and it will be a mess to untangle it (and very likely you’ll loose a few strands in the process).
5. Wait for 15-30 minutes. So, no rubbing, no vigorous scrubbing, like you would do to your own hair. No, the wig is supposed to be left in place and let it soak the water and shampoo.
6. Now rinse it by filling a basin with fresh, clean, cold water, and immersing the wig repeatedly into it. This will probably take a long time (more on that later).
7. Repeat step 1, but this time with conditioner. Again, select a conditioner for ‘dry and damaged hair’, without alcohol, etc.
8. Go through the remaining steps. You’ll notice that the conditioner takes way more effort to get out of the hair; you’ll need a lot of more clean water! And it’s very important that you get the excess product out of the wig, or it’ll look terrible after drying out.
9. You might wish to add a hair mask after the conditioner. Or replace the conditioner with the hair mask. Your choice! I usually do both, unless I’ve not got enough time, then I just do one of them. Note that the quantity will be pretty much the same in all cases, i.e. for long hair, about a handful of product. Hair mask works better if you rub it into the hair, however, but because this is supposed to be ‘dangerous’ to do, just let it get absorbed slowly.
10. Do not hair blow the wig; if you’re really in a hurry, you might have no other choice, but then use just cold air to dry it (yes, it will take eternities; but heat might damage the wig…). Instead, what you should do is to place the wig very gently — again, making sure that it’s still in the same shape! — on top of a towel, cover it with a second towel (or use a long one folded in two), and gently tap on the wig with the palms of your hands. Do not rub the wig, as you would do with your natural hair! The tapping is actually very efficient and will set loose a surprising amount of water (in fact, I have tried the same method with my natural hair, and, yes, it works even better than rubbing and scrubbing with the towel; the difference is that you ought to rub your scalp once in a while — it’s a kind of massage! — because it’s good for it; that’s why we learn as kids to vigorously rub our scalp and hair).
11. Comb the wig very carefully, starting with the ends and slowly working towards the roots, but be extra-careful at the top, so not to damage the wig cap. Use a wide-toothed comb, like in the picture; I personally prefer a wooden comb than a plastic one, because wood will not accumulate as much static electricity.
12. Put the wig on a stand (you have one of those, right?) and let it dry naturally. If it’s a very long wig with dense hair, it can take a few days…
13. After it dries, it’s highly likely that you’ll need to comb it again.

All right, if you look it up on the many sites on the Internet, you’ll see a few variations on the above method; the differences, however, will not be huge. For instance, some might suggest using warm water instead of cold one; not hot but mildly warm, because most shampoos and conditioners are designed to work at around 40-45ºC or so, which is the water temperature used by most people when taking a shower.

Also, there will be not much difference between the techniques used for synthetic wigs and for human hair wigs. The only exception is the so-called ‘microwave restoration’ method for human hair wigs: basically, you put a lot of hair mask on the wig, place the wig inside a plastic bag, and microwave it. Sounds crazy? Yes, but there is some science behind it: the mask (or eventually conditioner, it should work as well) will get heated and penetrate the hair fibres much better, while not damaging the wig in the process. Why? Well, it’s due to physics really. Microwave ovens essentially heat things up by getting water molecules to vibrate at much higher frequency (the higher it is, the ‘hotter’ it becomes). Because all our food is made of essentially water, this works well for heating food. But all hair products contain  a lot of water molecules as well, so it reacts quite well to microwaving; while natural hair, by contrast, doesn’t contain that much water (as said before, human hair wigs behave as ‘dry and damaged’ hair), so it will be much less affected by the microwave oven itself — which means it won’t be damaged in the process. In other words: you’re heating up the products used for hair treatment, which work better at around body temperature, while not heating up the wig hair itself and therefore not damaging it.

Skeptic? Take a look:

For the record, yes, I have tried this out on what was sold to me as a ‘human hair’ wig (I have no way of telling if it is or not), and it made an impressive difference — the hair was silky and shiny as never before, not even when it was brand new! There was just a catch: my microwave oven is not big enough for very long hair, so, unfortunately, there was a bit of hair that was ‘folded’ (I didn’t notice it when placing the plastic bag inside the microwave oven), and, because even the heated-up conditioner/hair mask will also heat the wig hair to a degree (just not as dramatic as, say, a curling device), it was enough to get a permanent kink on the wig, which was a shame, since it was otherwise wonderful.

The microwave technique ought only to be used with virgin hair, because one never knows what kind of treatment it went through to get the current colour; it’s plausible that water-based dyes have been used in the process, and, of course, these will be heated up by the microwave as well with unpredictable results: with luck, nothing happens; with bad luck, the dye might fade, or smudge, or somehow chemically react with the hair and damaging it permanently, I don’t know (and I don’t want to experiment!).

Vintage hairdressing: the benefits of rollers!

A much more peaceful form of ‘treatment’ is using hair rollers. These can be used both by synthetic wigs and human hair wigs, although, because synthetic wigs have ‘memory’, the effects on human hair wigs will be dramatic.

There is actually a lot that can be achieved with hair rollers. You might have noticed that they have different diameters. The larger ones are mostly used for creating volume; the smaller ones are used for creating waves and (possibly) fixing some split hairs.

If you only wish to add more volume, this is the easiest thing to do: just get separate strands as close to the top as possible, and roll them up, from the sides and behind, and that’s it. The wig should dry with the rollers applied, and it’s best if you can wait one day until you remove the rollers. They might give the wig a slight wave (it depends on the kind of human hair you’ve got), but the more visible aspect will be the illusion of more volume. Synthetic wigs will not benefit much from this technique.

You can also get slight waves or curls by using the smaller rollers. These are usually applied at the bottom layers of the wig, so that the curls are more visible that way. If you roll the strands in the front laterally or diagonally, you’ll achieve the same kind of curls as with an iron, with the difference that no heat is applied. They will not last long but they will look great (and natural!) while they last.

Nothing forbids you to use the smaller rollers all over the wig to get it wavy all over; it works to a degree. But if you wish more permanent curls — the kind that will last at least a whole evening going out dancing! — then the trick is to hair-spray them while they’re drying, and just removing the rollers when the hair is totally dry.

Again, using this technique on synthetic wigs will have not much of an effect, although if the fibre is good enough, the hair-spraying technique should work well.

Now, to fix split hairs, the trick is to use the smaller rollers just at the tip of all the strands. In other words, instead of rolling the strands up to the roots, you just roll them one turn or so. This works on both human hair wigs as well on synthetic ones, and you can repeat it as much as you wish, it won’t damage the hair — rather the contrary. Of course, again, we’re just creating an illusion that the hair is not split, by placing the ends ‘artificially’ together, letting them dry all close to each other with a gentle curl at the end. Sometimes that’s enough. On a very damaged synthetic wig, however, there will be not much hope for such extreme cases: the fibres are completely broken down, and they will not look better just by curling them with rollers.

On human hair wigs, however, there is still some hope left: using serums specially designed for split hairs. What they do I have no idea, but I’ve noticed that all of them include paraffin, or at least a paraffin derivative. Paraffin, of course, is a subproduct of petroleum, and not everybody will want something like that on their wigs (or natural hair!), but if you have no qualms about paraffin, then it might be just the product you want: it will coat the hair strands at the very tips with a thin layer of (invisible) wax, enough to ‘close’ the split end, and hold on to whatever moisture is inside the hair (which will be not much on a wig). It will also protect the hair against future splitting; this is particularly useful on relatively long hair (shoulder-length or longer), because it will be constantly rubbing against clothes and chairs and whatnot, and be subject to splitting much easier. Paraffin helps to protect the hair for longer periods.

The way I apply it to my human hair wig is simply by placing a little bit of the serum in my fingers, slip them through the last 10 cm of the strand or so, and rolling it up. This will give good results on human hair wigs; I have no idea what happens on synthetic ones because I haven’t tried it out!

I have also asked around about any side-effects from frequent usage of paraffin-based serums on human hair wigs, but it looks like not many people have written about those, or that I haven’t been thorough enough in my searches. The truth is that people use those on their natural hair, and have done so for years, and as far as I know, they haven’t had any problems; then again, natural hair grows, and you can always cut the split ends — an option you don’t have with a wig (unless you’re fine with shorter hair, of course!).

Sandra’s Ultimate Wig Washing Technique (Breaking All Rules!)

In the past few months, my wife and I really had to cut our costs to a bare minimum, and that meant saving money to get my regular wig maintenance by doing it myself at home. For the past months, I’ve noticed that the wig was needing more frequent washes, which is usually a bad sign (perspiring like crazy is also not necessarily good for the wig; alas, I cannot do much about that on hot days… and that means washing the wig more frequently, too). And it got more tangled as well — yet another bad sign, namely, that the ends were starting to split so dramatically that they would entangle themselves with the nearest strands, making a mess out of it.

I do own a detangling comb which works quite nicely, but there are limits to the miracles it can achieve. Sometimes you get such strong knots on the hair that the strands are simply ripped apart — there is nothing you can do about it. Yes, I use a few sprays to help to untangle hair, but… as said, there is a limit to what you can do.

A month ago or so, something terrible happened — something which I had only encountered a few times before in my life as a wig owner, and it meant either sending the wig straight to my specialist wig hairdresser, or, well, throwing the wig away. Basically, after carefully soaking the wig in cold water, and swirling it around very gently, suddenly almost all strands get tangled together — you basically get what I call a ‘soaked rat’: a huge mess of incredibly entangled hair, so much, in fact, that you have no wig any more — you just have a ball of tangled hair.

This happened perhaps half a minute after placing the wig into cold water. I did brush it before dropping it in the basin, just like I always do. I made sure that there were no visible tangles. But… for some mystic reasons… sometimes you get the ‘soaked rat’, no matter how careful you are.

The last time this happened to the very same wig I took over two hours to untangle it; I lost some hair strands in the process. But this was worse. Much worse. I had never seen a wig so dramatically tangled before!

Incredibly frustrated, I started the long, painful process to untangle strand by strand, as far as possible. I got some reasonable progress, until I stumbled upon four mega-knots, which would use up half of the wig’s hair or so. These seemed to be absolutely impossible to untangle, no matter what I tried. I was getting desperate. My wife wondered what was taking so long, and took pity on the ruined wig, or what I thought that was a ruined wig, and tried to help me out.

She quickly came to the same conclusion as I did: that some of the knots had to be ripped apart, there was really not much to be done about that. I was just hoping that enough strands would remain to make the wig still wearable. And fortunately that was the case. Sure, the wig lost some of its volume, but after a couple more hours, it was untangled — with lots of hair missing.

Well, the truth is that I had no other choice. I couldn’t even afford some professional maintenance, much less a new wig. So I had to be content with whatever I managed to salvage from the ‘soaken rat’.

For a few days, things worked out fine, the wig was still acceptable for wearing. Then I went through a few crossdressing sessions where I perspired like crazy. I tried to avoid washing by using the dry shampoo and the dry conditioner I had. This worked to an extent, but soon it became clear that something more dramatic was needed.

I’ve been using Schwarzkopf’s BC Repair Rescue Sealed Ends for quite a while (the prices around here are higher than on Amazon!), but that’s something you shouldn’t use too much, which soon became sort of a Catch-22: if I use it thoroughly (especially on rollers, as described before!) then it was clear that the hair would look ‘as new’. However, possibly because of the paraffin, or the way it interacts with the hair (I don’t know enough about hair products to tell), it also meant that the wig would need to be washed sooner — or I’d get a ‘wet look’, with thick, weighty hair strands (although healthy-looking ones!). I prefer that to a looser, lighter look where all the hair is split, of course, but I yearned to get the wig light and shiny again.

By sheer coincidence, because the Schwarzkopf serum/cream is slowly running out, I came across a much cheaper product I had never bought before: the Pantene Expert Collection Pro-V Hydra Intensify Extreme Hydration Serum (for some strange reason, I couldn’t find it on Pantene’s official website; perhaps it’s a product ending its lifetime…). Because it was so much cheaper, I didn’t give it a second thought. Sometimes it’s good to change products once in a while. So I gave it a try on the next time I wore the wig and… there was really a ‘wow’ moment. The results were insanely better than I got with the product from Schwarzkopf! And somehow the hairs also acquired a new glossy shine which they didn’t have before (more on that later!)

Still, there was no way to further way to delay washing the wig. So, with a sigh, I thought, oh well, either this will work, or it will be the last day of my human hair wig — and I would have to fall back to an old synthetic wig I’ve got stored for an emergency.

So what did I decide? To break all the rules. After all, what got the wig tangled in the first place was that immersion in cold water and the gentle sloshing around. Once it got tangled that way, I never managed to untangle it — not with the conditioner, not with the mask, not with the untangling sprays I’ve got.

Well, my mind worked the following way: this particular wig is undoubtedly made of human hair; it comes from a very respectful Italian brand specialising in wigs for women who underwent chemotherapy, and was sold by my wig hairdresser, who is also honest about the things she sells at their salon. It might not be made of the most expensive human hair out there (it’s not expensive enough for that), but I can assume that it’s made of the finest quality Indian Rémy hair. Sure, it was blanched and dyed, and probably got a few extra layers of chemicals as well; but, in essence, it’s nevertheless human hair and responds well to treatments designed for extremely dry, brittle, and damaged human hair.

So I should wash it like I wash natural hair.

Right? It just seems logical!

Well, maybe it’s not, but after carefully combing the wig to make sure it had no knots and tangles,I decided to wash it the ‘normal’ way. And this meant using the shower head set to a ‘normal’ temperature (around 42ºC or so), holding the wig in my hand and letting the water flow naturally, from the top of the wig to the ends. And to make sure the hair didn’t get tangled, I was constantly combing the wig with a wide-tooth comb.

Next came shampooing. As said, I use a shampoo for ‘dry and damaged’ hair. Here I was a bit more careful: starting from the top and slowly working a lather down to the roots, I didn’t scrub the hair vigorously, but merely let the shampoo flow naturally to cover the whole hair surface. Apparently you ought to do it on natural hair anyway. Again, I used the wide-tooth comb to make sure no strands got tangled. So far, so good: the hair seemed to be properly washed and shampooed, and I had zero tangles in it, so it was time to rinse it, and apply conditioner.

In the past, even when the wig was relatively new, and when I did wash it the ‘recommended’ way (i.e. just gently soaking it in cold water in a basin), I noticed that once the shampoo was off the hair, it started immediately to tangle, especially down at the split ends. But this didn’t happen this time. It remained tangle-free! Why? I can only speculate that the combination of using the shampoo at the water temperature it was meant to be used and the wide-tooth comb to make sure no nasty knots popped up, made a whole world of difference.

Next it was time for the conditioner. Unlike the shampoo, it’s not meant to be used on the roots, so it’s supposed to be applied only from half-way until the ends. I don’t know if that has something to do with the way the conditioner interacts with the delicate roots or the scalp itself. Wigs, however, don’t suffer from the same issue, so I tend to apply the conditioner almost to the top.

Modern-day conditioners act very quickly, a minute or so is usually enough to get it ‘activated’ (or whatever happens to conditioners while you wait that minute). When using cold water, however, things are different; again, conditioners are supposed to be ‘warmed up’ to body temperature or thereabouts. This is why some wig washing tutorials say that you should let the wig be soaked into water with dissolved conditioner for several minutes. This eventually works, but now I start suspecting that the conditioner will not get totally activated that way. I don’t know, it’s just the way I would chemically design hair products: for storage, they are usually stored at ‘room temperature’, i.e. something between 20 and 25ºC; for activation, even if you shower in cold water, at the very least the hair (even long hair) will be close to body temperature. What that means is that hair product manufacturers have a margin for storage versus activation — if I were a chemical engineer designing such a product, I would make it only get activated at around 30ºC or so, and put a label on the product to store it ‘outside direct sunlight’ or ‘not close to sources of heat’.

No such labels or warnings are on the products I use, so I can only speculate that this is the way they work. They can also be activated — ‘cured’, I believe that would be the word — just by contact with air, or any substance contained in hair (which would be harder to do, I guess, but not impossible). Whatever the actual chemical mechanism is, the truth is that most people do not wash their natural hair with cold water and let it soak the products by putting them in a basin. Instead, they put the products on their hair and let it stay there for a while.

Needless to say, I continued to use the comb over and over again, making sure that no strands got tangled, even though that is highly unlikely when applying conditioner (part of its action is to detangle hair, after all). Still, combing the hair also helps to distribute the product more evenly.

After that, it was time to rinse the wig again, using the comb once more, and apply the hair mask, which is pretty much applied just like a conditioner. In fact, some people tell me that it’s overkill to do both a conditioner and a hair mask, but that’s what I have been doing for years, so I stuck to my routine. Again, because the hair mask was applied on warm hair (i.e. warmed up to body temperature or so), I didn’t wait for as long as I usually do (sometimes even an hour!) – the mask is supposed to reach the peak of its chemical activity after a few minutes.

And then it was time to rinse once more. Conditioner and hair mask take a lot more water to remove properly, and it’s not so easy to figure out when all the product is removed, since it is supposed to leave the hair soft and shiny, with a smooth texture. I just basically ‘overdo’ the rinsing – my wig hairdresser tells me I use too much product anyway – but always, always made sure to properly comb the wig all the time. At the end of the whole process, I had a perfectly washed and cleaned wig with zero tangles, knots, or any such irregularities – exactly what I wanted!

It was time to place the wig inside a towel, covering it, and tapping it gently to release the excess water. And after that, you either let it dry, or you place your rollers (which is what I did!). It looked much better while wet, compared to what had happened last time I had washed it, and of course this time there were absolutely no tangling, but I was curious about how it would look like when dry…

Surprise, surprise: it never looked so good! Seriously! To give it the finishing touch, I added the Pantene serum and combed the wig with a super-extra-fine metal comb (it’s supposed to be a comb for my cats!), since that would make the strands visually very fine. And then I had one of those ‘wow’ moments: it had been months, or years, since the wig looked that great! It looked better than new – well, minus the issue of having lost so many hairs over the years, especially on the last wash, but… the ends didn’t seem split, the wig was glossy and shiny and super-light, like I had never seen it before!

It was so good that the volume and extra curl from the rollers even survived to a second day (usually, after my vigorous combing at the end of the day, the curls will disappear, even though the extra volume might hold out a few more days of wearing). In fact, I normally store the wig after spraying some dry shampoo on it (it will help to get rid of the dirt and sweat accumulated over the day), but this time it was not even necessary. The next time I used the wig it was still shiny, glossy, with a wonderfully silky and smooth texture, and still looking ‘as new’ without any split ends, nor the extra-dry and damaged look I always get at the hairs of the back (they are the ones more often in touch with abrasive surfaces, like the back of the car seats, and obviously the clothes as well). Seriously, this ‘treatment’ really made miracles, and I’m now very curious to see what happens next time I need to wash the wig! One thing is for certain: I will use lukewarm water from the shower head again, and make sure I keep constantly combing the wig as I apply water and the products…

Caveats

There is, of course, a catch with this technique: it works only on straight hair, or hair with a natural wave (which seems to be the case of my own wig). If you have styled your wig with curls or extreme waves, then the constant combing under water will very likely make it straight again. In that case, you might not have any other choice but keep the wig soaked inside the basin of water, and hope that it doesn’t tangle… even though you might try out using lukewarm water instead of cold water, to let the products get activated.

Also, I have no way to know if I was merely lucky and didn’t destroy my wig in the process; or if with repeated washing using this technique the wig will have a much shorter lifetime than by using the traditional method. And, obviously enough, I have no idea if the same technique will work on synthetic wigs, even those made of Kanekalon. All I can say is that normal shampoo will work perfectly on good-quality synthetic wigs (if you pick a shampoo for dry hair, that is), since that’s basically just to take the dirt away. Conditioners and hair masks… well, those are supposed to go deeper than the surface, to repair things beneath, inside the hair itself. If it works or not on synthetic fibre, I have no way to tell. Consider only that natural hair is, by definition, dead tissue (at least the visible part of it) — it doesn’t have any biochemical activity inside it anymore. So, in theory at least, it’s not much different from synthetic fibres — whatever products you put on your hair cannot rely on any biochemical activity inside the dead hair cells (unlike, say, skin products), but have to rely on its own chemical properties. On the other hand, natural hair is basically keratinised dead cells (as the cells at the follicle die, they are covered with keratin to stick together) — keratin being one of the many proteins made by our body; while Kanekalon is a sort of modified acrylic, that is… a form of plastic. Clearly, what will work on an organic protein will possibly not work on a plastic; the chemistry is way too different for that.

(Note to self: why don’t hair fibre manufacturers produce strands of synthetic hair made out of keratin? There are many industrial patents to extract keratin out of chicken feathers, for instance — that’s where most of the keratin for the cosmetic industry comes from. Surely there must be a way to produce fibres made of keratin using an industrial process; the resulting fibres should have similar chemical properties as natural hair, and, as a bonus, it should be much easier to apply extensions to natural hair: keratin, after all, bonds together to form hair filaments, so you could theoretically bond synthetic keratin hair to natural hair… oh well. Maybe I should buy a chemistry lab and file my own patent )

In conclusion: wigs made of human hair underwent many chemical treatments (except for virgin human hair), but they still retain a lot in common with natural hair. It is therefore not stupid to assume that the way we wash and maintain our natural hair also applies to human hair wigs. In particular, we ought to recreate the same environments in which we apply certain products to our hair; possibly they are meant to be gently warmed up to body temperature before becoming active. Soaking wigs in cold water with a dissolved product may be the only solution for cleaning low-grade synthetic wigs, but higher-end human hair wigs ought to respond better to washing and maintenance in exactly the same conditions as natural hair.

In fact, I wonder if my old crazy idea of taking a shower with the wig was so crazy after all. I did that a few times before I got scared by the idea of applying the least heat to a wig. But now I’m not so sure if washing them in the shower isn’t actually a good idea — perhaps to try out next time!

The crossdresser’s checklist

Every time I go out, I naturally observe what my friends are wearing, and, of course, what cisgender women look like these days. And there is a simple checklist that every crossdresser — at least those who wish to go out and enjoy themselves — must do, namely, what to take with you:

• Wig (unless your own hair looks good enough!)
• Bra
• Handbag
• Female shoes (even if they aren’t very noticeable as such)

I know one or two exceptions to these, but they are rare. Notice what is lacking from this list! (And no, I’m not counting the underwear, because you cannot see that!)

• Female attire (some just wear unisex clothing, or even some male attire that is not too ‘male’)
• Bra padding/breast forms (a lot of girls are happy with what they have, or just wear 2, 3 or even 4 bras at the same time)
• Makeup (a lot simply go without makeup — seriously!)
• Jewelry (totally optional)
• Shapewear (most people I know will go ‘huh? what?’ at this point!), artificial nails, false eyelashes, etc.

Ok. So, naturally, each one of us has different styles, different tastes, different ways of expressing themselves, and, obviously, it also depends on how comfortable you are. A typical example: I have good friends who will be as comfortable on top of their 15+ cm-high stilettos as I am when wearing flats; so what is ‘comfortable’ for someone is not necessarily comfortable for someone else!

There are a lot of reasons for the way people dress as they dress, and it would take ages for me to go through each of those reasons. Let me just say, as a way of introducing the subject, that for some girls it is fundamental to have a ‘natural’ look, and that mostly means not wearing anything that a cisgender woman wouldn’t wear — the exception being, of course, the wig, for those who don’t have hair who looks good enough (or don’t have hair at all). After all, women who had to cut their hair for some reason (usually related to chemotherapy…) will also use wigs; and African and Japanese girls, of course, love their wigs So wearing a wig is ‘fine’. Anything else (sometimes even makeup!) is just ‘being artificial’.

I can certainly accept that, especially on my country, where the ‘natural look’ is still favoured (except when going out clubbing!). However, there is a catch: most genetic males do not look even remotely like cisgender women. So, unless you’re very happy in being ‘just another man in a dress’, and you’re not undergoing hormone replacement therapy or cosmetic surgery, there is only one option left to look great and relatively passable as a woman: use all tricks of the trade to change your body.

My own shortlist for that is:

• Breast forms (optional: some tape to produce outrageous cleavage)
• Corset (there is no way for me to get a flat belly otherwise! — and it helps with overall curviness as well)
• Hip pads
• Some form of shapewear (more on that later)
• Optionally: fake eyelashes, artificial nails

Those last two are really ‘optional’ for me, because I have average-sized lashes which look good enough with plenty of mascara; and as for the nails, when I can grow them a little above average, then I love to paint them

I have already written a bit about my choices of breast forms, corsets and hip pads. Today, as said, I’m going to talk about hip pads once more. But first I have to re-introduce Sandra’s Law of the Shapely Body!

Sandra’s Law of the Shapely Body and how I have come upon that ‘law’

We have to turn back the clock some 20+ years (see, I told you!). Back then, I felt I was the only person in my own country that was a crossdresser (and all my friends tell me that they had felt exactly the same!). Fortunately, we already had the Internet, and I already learned that there were lots of crossdressers around the world. Millions. But I had no one to talk about it; I didn’t know anyone personally. So, of course, what I did was browse the ‘net in search of information.

And I came upon one of the many nice companies catering to the desires of crossdressers (some are still around!). Basically, they would gather all kinds of ‘tricks of the trade’ — wigs, breast forms, all sorts of lingerie, padding, even clothes ‘designed to fit a man’, heels in extra-large numbers — and put it on an online catalogue from which you could order everything you needed to ‘start becoming a crossdresser’. There were some instructions (but never enough!) and sometimes you got a few comments and reviews on forums and mailing lists, so you could pick among the existing companies the one that suited you best. Because we all felt back then how small the community was, it was rather easy to figure out where people were shopping for their items, and what experiences they had.

I remember that I bought one of those ‘crossdresser starting kits’. Ok, I know, in retrospective, I was a bit naïve and fell for the marketing stunts; but you must remember that there was nobody I could ask for advice. All I knew was that I wished to look like a woman, but my body simply wasn’t the right shape: no boobs, no waistline, no hips, too tall, too short hair (and thinning!). I needed to figure out how to get all these things without major surgery!

The first hip pads I owned were made of foam. They were insanely expensive for something that you could do on your own in the comfort of your home; but, at that time, I still lived with my parents, and therefore I needed to buy everything ‘made’, not requiring much preparation, so I was happy that the ‘starter kit’ included those hip pads (as well as a horrible wig which gets me the shivers just by remembering how ugly it looked).

There were lots of problems with those hip pads. They didn’t look nowhere near ‘natural’. And, of course, even beneath some pantyhoses, they would not easily stay in place — the worst thing, of course, was sitting down. After some wearing, they would start to flake, crumble, and finally be gone forever. Not good. That’s why I turned to Classic Curves International and bought a Veronica 2 from them.

Now, at that time, I was still struggling with proportions. What I mean by this is that even though I had some lovely hips and bottom, all the rest was simply wrong. And I couldn’t understand why.

Because I had been told that a cup C is about ‘average’ for women, that’s the size of breast forms I first bought. What nobody told me was how those ‘averages’ are calculated. And by then I had no idea that the cup size changes with the band size (waist size). So a 34C would be considered quite busty, but a 42C would be ‘almost flat’. Well, almost. It would register as some bumps And because that was pretty much what I was wearing at the time, it looked so wrong. But I was ashamed to ‘go bigger’ and become completely unnatural that way…

Then, of course, there was the waist problem. I was a bit influenced by the theories that corsets would somehow ‘deform’ your body and give you terrible health problems. Well, yes, this is actually quite correct, if you go over the top (like women did in certain periods of time). But as a matter of fact, a good corset will also offer you a nice back support, force you to move with a much more healthier stance, and, as a side-effect, it might even flatten your tummy and shrink your waist (if you wear it correctly for an appropriate period of time every day).

Back then, however, I was a bit scared of all that, so I just bought a waist cincher. This is basically a frilly underwear garment made of a strong, elastic material that is supposed to flatten your tummy and even give you an appearance of a slimmer waist. Well, perhaps. It never worked for me. I still wore it, perhaps more for the psychological need to be doing something about my figure…

So at some point I had to go and do some research. And this kicked me back even further… to the 1950s.

Consider the ideal female body in the 1990s: slim, tall, flat as an ironing board, no hips, and no waist to speak about. This is what supermodels are supposed to look like — because that way (I have learned!), designers will require the least amount of fabric to make their clothing! Unfortunately, a way to cut costs has produced dramatic health issues in lots of women — not only on the models themselves, but on all other women trying desperately to look like models so that they could wear the same clothes…

It’s unfair, but let’s face it: most women do not look like that. They have completely different proportions. And this was quite well understood in the 1950s. Those glorious pin-ups are not ‘slim and flat’, but they are curvy. That doesn’t mean they needed to be overweight! No, not at all; they just needed to have the curves in the right place to look awesomely sexy. And this is where Sandra’s Law of the Shapely Body comes in.

Start with the ‘ideal’ figure of the 1950s: the 90-60-90 body (36-24-36 for you Americans) — that means 90 cm at the breast line, 60 cm waist, 90 cm hips.  Now, obviously enough, most people (women or men) will never achieve that kind of sexy body — no, not even with surgery! So it looks like this is not different from what supermodels are doing today (and lingerie models still stick to those magic proportions). Or is it?

Well, there is a trick, of course. You don’t need to be 90-60-90 to look perfectly curvy and sexy. No — what you need is the following:

• Same breast size as hip size
• Waist line 30 cm (about 12″) smaller than the breast/hip size

That simple, huh? Oh yes. This is basically playing around with optical illusions and a sense of proportion. Small women, for instance, with 70-40-70 measurements, will look as gloriously sexy as average-sized women with 90-60-90 measurements; and of course the same will work upwards as well — if you are extra tall, then you can easily get away with measurements like 120-90-120 and still be seen as curvy and sexy!

It’s strange, but it’s how it works. We were conditioned to look at ‘big breasts’ and ‘wide hips’ as desirable attributes in female partners, because it will mean that they will have easier child births (and be able to feed them properly afterwards). But the proportions need to be correct as well: too wide hips with tiny breasts means that the birth will go well, but the baby will not get enough nourishment; narrow hips means lots of birth complications (potentially leading to the death of both mother and child!). Obviously, in the 21st century, we don’t need to worry as much as at the time we dwelt in caves, but… those proportions are firmly etched in our brains.

One could ask oneself what is so special about 90-60-90 that works out as ‘curvy’, while other proportions do not — either you look ‘fat’ or ‘too slim’, but never ‘curvy and sexy’. I have no idea, and I can imagine that researchers in the field of human proportions, ergonomics, and aesthetics will have no clue either — all they can do is number crunching and come out with averages.

Great so far! But — you might be saying — most people (much less men!) do not have such proportions, either. Men, for instance, usually have the same size at all three points, and tend to get the waist size increasing over time (unless they work out ). Women vary so much in the three measurements that it’s insane to believe that they will ‘fit’ in the 30-cm-rule!

That’s ok. Fortunately, since immemorial days, clothing technology has come with a solution for all this — and it’s called shapewear. Note that I’m going to bundle a lot of items in the overall concept of ‘shapewear’, while the contemporary clothing industry has a much more narrow interpretation. Namely, an online dictionary that I’ve just searched for says:

Shapewear, n.: women’s tight-fitting underwear intended to control and shape the figure.

Naaaah. Too simple. First, it’s sexist, because it implies there is no shapewear for men (and of course there is!); and secondly, it says that the underwear needs to be tight-fitting, which, in most people’s minds, reads as: extremely uncomfortable.

No, I say! I would propose a much more ambitious definition of shapewear, and this is what I will be using today in this article:

 Shapewear, n.: underwear and accessories intended to control and shape the figure.

See? Much better that way!

So, back to the Law of the Shapely Body. How do we apply it? It’s very simple:

1. Start with one of the three measurements (possibly one you cannot physically change in any way). We’ll call it the ‘base measurement’.
2. If the base measurement is the hip or the breast, shrink the waist line to 30 cm below that.
3. Expand the other measurement until it’s the same as the first one.
4. If the base measurement is the waist line, expand both the breast and the hip measurements until they are both 30 cm larger than the waist line.
5. If the breast measurement is smaller than the hip measurement, use a bra with padding; in the reverse case, use a minimizer bra

Ok, this is usually what women do, or rather, what they did in the 1950s. Usually they would start with the hip measurements (which is harder to change with shapewear!). Then they would get a corset to slim the waist to 30 cm less than the hips… but in many cases, they might just need a waist cincher, or some girdle with an elastic band, etc. Finally, they would get some padding in their bras (and get specially designed bras as well) to increase their size to the hip size. If they had been born with extra-large breasts (compared, proportionally, to the hip size) they would use a minimizer bra. Simple.

Now, we who have been unlucky to have been born with XY chromosomes and developed as men, we have a problem. Well, several. Let’s start with a few…

Short guide to a Man’s Shapely Body

Obviously, every man has a different shape (just like every woman!) so this means that a lot might not apply to you. For instance, if you’re well below average height for a male, are quite skinny with narrow shoulders, then it’s very likely that you won’t even need to try to look shapely and curvy — you should go straight to the supermodel look instead! In fact, a surprising amount of my crossdresser and transgender friends are exactly like that; they are thoroughly envied by cisgender women as well as their peers

But the ‘average male’ will be taller, have broad shoulders, and, most importantly, a huge chest volume, which causes a lot of shaping problems, because if there is anything that you cannot disguise is the chest!

So for male bodies (especially those with broad shoulders and large chest) you might be better off starting with the chest size as your ‘main’ measurement.

Unfortunately, this will lead to further complications. For instance, my chest size is about 100 cm. That would mean reducing my waist size to around 70 cm — which is way, way too small for someone of my overall constitution: it could seriously damage internal organs! And that’s assuming it’s possible at all: after all, an underbust corset will start compressing your ribs at the top, before it has any effect on the waist, and that will just reach a limit — until you wish to break a few ribs in the process!

Clearly this approach is not quite right. After all, most men will be flat-chested; that means that those 100 cm do not take into account that you will most certainly need to add the size of the breast forms inside a bra on top of that. Also, remember what I said before: getting ‘average’ breast forms will just look strange on a wide male chest — they will just be small lumps way too much in the centre of the chest, and almost no women look like that at all!

Here is a tip about breasts that most men have no clue about: breasts actually start just below the arm pits, and they go up almost to the collarbone. Seriously. You might not notice that on petite women with perfectly round breasts (natural or with implants!), but even on them, that’s how the breast actually attaches to the chest area. Remember that it’s just ribs beneath that area, and because you need to expand your chest when you breathe, this area is actually not very good to ‘attach’ breasts (because beneath it everything is constantly moving — and the ribs are good for stretching skin, sure, but not that great for holding massive lumps of glands and fatty tissue). Nature found a way to ‘graft’ breasts to the chest using clever attachment points!

What this means for males shopping for breast forms is that it’s not enough to simply select a cup size and expect it to look great. You have to make sure that you measure those breast forms first. And this is actually harder than it sounds, because so few manufacturers actually give you the size in centimetres (or inches), but practically only the cup size, which is totally irrelevant for our purposes (and, coincidentally, for most women as well, especially those that are outside the 34-38 ‘average’ range of female chest sizes — the ones used for ‘standard’ cup sizes).

A typical example: as said, I measure about 100 cm at the chest. That’s 50 cm in front, 50 cm in back — well, you get the point. A good rule of thumb, therefore, is to get a triangle-shaped breast form which is ±25 cm wide — that way, it will fit nicely under the armpit (as it should) and go all the way to the middle of the chest. If you do a simple calculation this will almost certainly mean getting close to 1kg of breast forms for each side (mine actually weight 750g each), just to create a proportional-looking breast form. That is most certainly not a nice, average C cup! It’s more DD or even E (depending on overall shape and manufacturer, of course). And we’re not going to talk about projection and similar effects, because most of these will depend on the bra (I might write a tutorial about that one of these days — I read a 250+ book used as a textbook for bra manufacturers, and you would be shocked to see the sheer amount of mathematical formulas needed for calculating how a bra’s cup should be shaped for each particular case — i.e. push-up, balconette, minimizer, or the 1950s-style ‘bullet bras’ — and what kind of ‘effect’ is expectable in each case).

I have to admit that I took almost 15 years to convince myself that this is, indeed, the case. For most of my crossdressing days, I wore far too small breast forms (and bras) for my overall body shape. Let’s face it: I’m a big girl. I’m much taller, much wider, much larger than the average woman. To keep everything in proportion, there is really no choice but to get larger breast forms as well — and I’m not even talking about breast fetishism at this point, but merely sticking to proportions…

Now, if you do get breast forms in the size, shape, and volume I described, this will add some extra 20 cm or so to your breast size (i. e. taking into account the size of the breast forms, as opposed to the chest size, which is measured just below the breasts). This means that you will start with a whopping 120 cm of breast size — ugh!

But it also means making things much, much easier at the waist line: now you just need to go down to 90 cm! And hey — there you have it — a 30 cm difference between waist and breast sizes, exactly what you wish to get!

90 cm is not much if you’re an average male, which will have 100-100-100 measurements: so you just need to get 10 cm off your waist. That’s nothing! Any corset will easily help you to achieve that — and many males might even just do some training to get those abs strengthened, and that might be more than enough.

If you have a belly — like I do! — then it means a stronger corset But remember that for the average 100-100-100 measurements, compressing the waist from 100 to 90 will not have any impact on internal organs. With a belly you’re basically compressing fat. Sure, there are limits — if you have a waist of 180 cm (i.e. being as wide as tall!), corsets will never do the trick for you. I’m sorry: such a waist will definitely need a diet!

Because I mentioned stronger corsets… well, you get all sorts these days. As mentioned, the waist cincher is usually just a very strong elastic band — it will work to get you a few centimetres off your belly, and make it a bit more flatter, but that’s pretty much it; you will not get 10 cm off your waist with a cincher. The cheapest kinds of ‘real’ corsets use plastic whalebones. This makes the construction also much simpler. The problem is that those corsets were designed as a ‘gothic’-like kind of garment, often used over the clothes, and the manufacturers expect women to already be correctly shaped, so the corset will just accentuate the curves they already have. Plastic whalebones are pretty much useless when you really, really want to shape your waist correctly!

Then we come to the ‘regular’ corsets. These are meant to be worn under clothing, and they may be either very plain and simple (never meant to be shown) or quite lacey and sexy, with very intricate designs and patterns (these are meant to be shown off!!). The best kinds, of course, are custom-made, and cost something like a second-old car; the cheaper kinds will be standard sizes (always hard to understand) and never fit as well as a custom-made one, but, of course, because they are mass-produced, they will be cheap. Contemporary corsets are usually made of a very strong fabric (known as cotton duck canvas) which will resist multiple washing and remain stiff and sturdy (also, whalebones will not poke through it easily), although you can also get them in leather (mostly for the fetishists, since leather is too hot to wear regularly) or satin (looks much nicer, but will not last as long as a cotton canvas corset). Some cheaper kinds might even use other, synthetic materials.

For people like me, who hate exercising and therefore will need to hide a prominent belly — a typical side-effect of someone of my age — you are better off with a so-called waist training corset. This is a far sturdier version of the ‘regular’ corset, and it usually features way more whalebones (twice as much is normal), made of strong steel springs. These are interesting because they have a certain ‘memory effect’: once you lace yourself correctly, the corset will stay there, keeping everything in place, and modelling your shape — while ‘regular’ corsets might need some adjustments or even fail to create a sufficiently curvy appearance. I know because I’ve tried many different kinds over the decades

Waist training corsets are actually an interesting byproduct of the corseting industry. The theory behind them is that if you use them long enough, your body will keep the shape given by the corset. Yes, I’m not joking; this is the assumption with which they are manufactured. They come from a long tradition of corseting where this effect was desired — young girls, at around puberty, would start wearing training corsets to ‘train’ their waist to remain small. By adult age they could actually wear less stiff corsets because their body was already properly shaped.

After the decline of the corset around the 1970s (although most women had already given up the corset a decade before), its purpose was limited as a ‘decorative’ accessory, or as exceptional shapewear for a special occasion — like getting married. As a consequence, the ‘waist training’ aspect was dropped in favour of a more decorative look and more ‘comfortable’ wearing. In other words: the corset stopped being used as a daily undergarment to be limited to very, very special occasions. As such, women’s waists wouldn’t be ‘used’ to the compression effect produced by a corset, and, therefore, they started trading off ‘function’ by ‘comfort’.

Ironically, ‘waist training’ became… a fetish. In other words: what was usual practice in the 1900s, and still common during half the 20th century, was subtly transformed into a ‘kinky’ hobby practiced by only a few — and usually delegated to the BDSM crowd, or to the sissification fetishists. After all, in those communities, you’re supposed to feel uncomfortable!

A few ‘waist trainers’, however, have absolutely nothing to do with kinks and fetishes. Instead, they admire the hourglass shape, and wish to shape their own bodies that way. This is accomplished precisely as it was in the 19th century: by wearing a training corset every day for a relatively long period of time (some ‘extreme’ waist trainers claim they wear the corset all the time except when taking a shower! — yes, they sleep in it). As said, this actually works, if you are persistent enough; and yes, it works on males too. After so many years of wearing waist training corsets, even if only for a few hours per week, I do notice a slight change. It’s very slight, but there are slight curves where there ought to be none. Fortunately, nobody notices those, because of my belly

Waist training is supposed to be a progressive activity. In other words, you don’t start lacing up your corset as tight as you can, until you stop breathing… and try to keep it as long as you can. That will almost certainly impact your health tremendously. No, you do it a bit at the time. Some websites catering to the waist training community recommend starting just with 5-6 cm less than your current waist, and progress very, very slowly towards a comfortable 10-12 cm. In fact, many corset manufacturers recommend ordering a corset with around 10 cm less than your current waist — you will be able to lace them more loosely at first, and progress over time to a more tighter fit. This is pretty much what I did — when I bought my first corset, almost twenty years ago, it only went some 6 or 7 cm less than my waist… after that, it really became uncomfortable for a long time. But for me it was enough back then — at least my belly was completely flat, and I got noticeable improvements in the hip size (more on that later).

Guess how much I can tight-lace myself these days.

You’d be probably shocked. I can go 20 cm less than my current waist — and at that, the corset will be extremely comfortable. I’m not joking. Actually, because the corset also forces you to adopt a much better (and healthier) posture, I find the corset more comfortable than not using anything. And, again, I’m not joking.

What simply happened was that some of the body fat and who knows what is inside my belly has very slowly get used to be pushed in a different place, and so, over the years, I can accomplish this feat comfortably. Let me stress that word once again: I’m not a masochist; I’m not into BDSM or extreme waist training; I’m all for comfort. The corset gets tightened only as far as I cannot notice it any more. What does that mean? Of course, because my skin is in contact with the corset, I’m aware it is there. But it doesn’t annoy me. Imagine that you are wearing your most casual ‘home’ pants — the kind that is loose, with a soft fabric, and probably just an elastic band at the top. It’s so comfortable that although you are aware of it (i.e. you’re not naked!), it doesn’t worry you in the least; contrast that with a piece of clothing that is constantly chaffing, or has an edge that pushes into the skin, or a shoe that doesn’t fit correctly — all those things can be endured, of course, but they are still annoying or even hurtful.

Not my corset. Of course I’m aware I could lace it much, much tighter — but then it would start hurting me. Or I could do like the waist trainers say, and lace it tighter 1 cm per week (or per month), just to see how far I could actually go. But that’s not my purpose at all. I wish the corset to feel so comfortable that I forget I’m wearing it — and that’s what happens in my case. And, of course, I only need to go as far as it makes my waist fit to the Law of the Shapely Body: in my case, that pretty much means sticking to something like 86-88 cm of waist and stay that way. I don’t need more.

Of course, I have always toyed with the idea of wearing the corset for much extended periods of time to train my waist to stay at 86 cm or so without a corset. I know it’s possible! But, alas, that would definitely require me to change lifestyle (and possibly gender as well!), so I’m merely happy to use the corset to get that 86-cm-waist when I dress.

You might have noticed that something is missing to comply with the Law of the Shapely Body. You’re right. It’s time to get back to the hips! Or, rather, to the non-existent hips…

Hip pads: because corsets only go so far…

The purpose of the corset, originally, was actually to keep the breasts in place. Seriously! The bra is a recent invention; while some historians claim that corsets existed at least since the Middle Ages, some are even more radical and believe that the Ancient Greece already had some form of corset back then. The ‘modern’ corset is an invention of the 1850s, and you can read those fascinating articles about the history of the corset, and how it was used to shape women according to the fashion of the day. Sometimes, shorter waists were in fashion; sometimes higher busts; sometimes wider hips. Corsets would adapt, over the ages, to these changes — and become a very flexible kind of shapewear.

The corset, in practice, would do several things at once:

• It would keep breasts in place (remember, modern bras were only invented in 1889 and popularised during WWI — women would use overbust corsets instead; the bra became very popular when underbust corsets became popular and women needed ‘something’ to hold their breasts…)
• It would, of course, slim the waist to what was currently fashionable
• In the Edwardian era, it would even push the bottom back, to give women a characteristic ‘S’-shape (which wasn’t healthy and was soon given up)
• And it would ‘define the hips’ as well

Mmh. ‘Define the hips’. Well, the theory behind it is that if your waist is slimmed and defined, then the hips would be more noticeable — so the corset would also help with the waist-to-hip ratio, by making both much more clearer: a chubby woman might have body fat from the belly down to the upper leg, so no real ‘curves’ to speak of, therefore, with the help of a corset, such curves would be made evident.

Now the problem for us who have been handicapped with an Y chromosome is that we don’t really have ‘hips that need to be defined’. In other words: the corset, by itself, will not give us visible hips to work with. That’s simply because we don’t have any!

(Correction: of course, anatomically, all humans have hips; it’s just that males’ hips are way narrower, so that it almost looks — from the outside! — that there aren’t any hips…)

One way to deal with this is with proper clothing. Naturally enough, there are women with narrow hips as well, and the fashion industry came up with the ‘A’-line cut for skirts, as well as pleated styles. These will provide an illusion of hips. If you have a well-defined waist line, but no hips, such skirts will most definitely be great for you. There are also dresses where the bottom part is cut like that, for exactly the same reason — enhance the slim waist line and disguise the lack of hips.

On the other hand, forget all about bodycon clothing, or pencil skirts Those really require hips to work.

So, what is the alternative?

This is one of the very rare cases where the fashion and undergarment industry do not have an answer. Hipless women, while not necessarily rare, are supposed to dress in a way that creates the illusion of hips. There is nothing else available.

All crossdressers learn how to ‘pad’ their first bras with rolled-up socks, or, at a later stage, with birdseed to create a more credible illusion of ‘weight’. But how do you enlarge the hips? There is simply no easy way to support ‘hip padding’ — there is no place to ‘hold’ the padding at all.

Some clever undergarment manufacturers have neatly solved the issue by creating a mix of girdle and panties with side pockets, where foam or silicone padding can be put; some are creative enough to even add padding to the bottom as well. In fact, the latter is much easier to find, since a lot of cisgender women also like to have some extra padding in that area as well.

The problem with those garments is that they never really ‘feel’ right, or even correct. They are basically two (or even four!) ‘lumps’. If made of foam, they will not even allow you to be touched in that area (assuming you want to be touched, of course!), because, well, foam does not feel like human flesh at all. It might even creep a few people out.

Designing anatomically correct hip pads is a challenge that is beyond the skill of most garment manufacturers. However, a lot of drag queens, crossdressers, and other transgender people with amazing skills have put together quite a huge amount of Do It Yourself tutorials online. Here is a particularly funny one from Robyn Withawhy. Funny, yes, but quite instructive, going through all the steps, and showing not only the amazing results you can get, but also the mess you will leave behind at your home!

As you can see, the trick to hold them in place is to use very strong elastic pantyhoses, tights, leggings, or similar garments. That way, the hip pads will keep in place even if you move around, dance… or even sit down. Not too bad — as illusion goes! — for a cheap DIY solution!

Some 15 years ago or more, however, there were not so many tutorials online — although I’m pretty sure drag queens have been doing these kinds of hip pads for ages, at least since foam was invented. It’s curious, though, that the undergarment industry never came up with anatomically correct pads.

Enter Classic Curves International. 22 years ago, Espy Lopez, herself a crossdresser, put her website online. Yes, really, it was that long ago. I have reviewed her products extensively over the years; and she is one of the most funny and helpful sellers I have ever talked with over the Internet. As a crossdresser, she knows exactly what is wrong with all those garments with pockets for hip pads. She also knows that every person is differently shaped and that when it comes to hip pads, one-size-fits-all solutions will simply not work. Instead, by asking you to do precise measurements (and she asks for a lot of them!), she will calculate the exact shape that will fit you correctly — allegedly, using high-tech computer-generated imagery from some kind of CAD software she uses to create the forms. She offers them in foam or in a special gel — not the usual silicone, because her pads also enhance the bottom and are supposed to be sit on, and silicone is not very good for that, it can easily rupture (that’s the same reason why you shouldn’t sleep in your silicone breast forms).

Espy’s solution is next to perfect. Her garments last long — years, in fact. They are custom made products, and, as a result, they are expensive. Nevertheless, her company is a success story, and she can proudly boast about having had Caitlyn Jenner as a customer before she underwent surgery and hormone therapy. Her products — the Veronica — look very convincing beneath clothing, and it’s hard to get anything that comes close to her solution. I hope she is filthy rich by now, having helped out so many crossdressers and other transgender people

Nevertheless, the Veronica has a few issues — not many, but a few. The first has nothing to do with Classic Curves International or the quality of Espy’s products: people change their bodies over time. Yes, they get fatter (and sometimes slimmer). Because the Veronica is a custom-made product, it means you need to change it often, as your body changes. It’s like bras: after getting a custom-fitted bra, you cannot expect it to last forever, even if the bra is of the highest quality — because your measurements will swiftly change over time. And of course not even the best fabric out there will last forever. Elastic bands, after intense use, will lose their elasticity.

Although Espy sells the garment itself with the pockets separately from the pads (note that not all pads work with all garments…), it’s still a considerable investment. If you wish to look good all the time, over the years, prepare yourself to cash out a lot of money. Which is a pity, really, because Espy’s garments last so long and are so well designed. Also, they are not that hard to mend, even for someone like myself, who can only sew by hand — but I’ve been mending my Veronica all the time

You might ask why it needs mending at all. Well, it’s like this: you are supposed to wear the Veronica over your corset. The Veronica has a very strong elastic band at the top, but it simply is not enough to pull your belly in — not if it is so prominent as mine Espy is aware that a lot of people will wear a corset with her garment and this is something you have to note down on your measurements. The problem, of course, is that corsets have edges, rivets, and the occasional whalebone poking through — which naturally will start ripping apart the Veronica. Well, not immediately, of course (the garment is very sturdy!), but eventually accidents will happen. And while the early Veronicas were made with a plain silky material, the newer ones are lacey (a super-strong lace, by the way), and lace, well, gets caught on all kinds of edges and such — and is harder to mend properly.

So in the past months I have considered seriously buying a new one (Espy has recently launched a new version, the Veronica 6… which was very tempting!). The gel pads I have are also showing a lot of wear — again, not Classic Curves International’s fault, but rather my acid perspiration, which will easily corrode silver (yes, I’m not joking), so after a few years, it’s really eating (and staining) the pads beyond the ability to wash them (note that foam pads cannot be washed — when they start flaking it’s time to buy new ones anyway — but the gel pads can be washed very easily).

My wife, however, gave me her critical assessment, and persuaded me that the Veronica I had was simply not realistic at all. It’s no wonder. When I first sent my measurements, I had less body fat at the bottom — so that meant I would use the gel pads differently (even though the Veronica has pockets to keep the pads in place, there are several ways to place them inside — either enhancing the hips or the bottom, according to your wishes and needs), and had them designed for that. Now, however, that will give me an insanely huge bottom. I know that a lot of people love big bottoms (myself included!) but this was really going over the top — so I placed the pads more to the sides, and even did some custom stitching to keep them better in that position. However, now they don’t look so realistic as before. And for some reason it has been incredibly hard to keep them symmetrical (again, not the garment’s fault, but it must have to do with the way I wear them!).

Because at this stage I’m looking for a more natural look, and trying to avoid the pitfalls of the ‘drag queen’ look, it was time to search for alternatives. Note that this has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of Classic Curves International’s products. I still love them. I still think that Espy does an awesome job for the whole community, especially for those who are not talented and skilled in designing their own padding. And I’m absolutely convinced that there is no way you can get away with the one-size-fits-all cheap garments that are sold for a handful of dollars on AliExpress and eBay and Amazon — you really need something custom-made as Espy does.

But are there really credible alternatives?

DressTech’s reply to the demand… and how to use it with Spanx®

A few years ago, I came across a competing product from a small company called DressTech. They have an endearing story to tell:  Judi, a cisgender woman, has been helping out the crossdresser community for ages; Diana, a crossdresser, is an engineer and industrial product designer. Together they addressed this issue of creating hip pads that do truly look convincing enough to ‘pass’ — and, not unlike Espy, they quickly figured out that the shape of the hip pads matters quite a lot, as well as the material they are made from, and this, of course, requires manufacturing abilities beyond the skills of the average DIY enthusiast. And it also means working with the king of illusion materials: silicone.

I had skipped them for years because of one simple thing… yes, they do provide the hip pads, in three sizes and four colours; yes, they seem rather nice, as the following video shows so well:

… but the video also shows the issue: you need to wear some strong tights to keep these in place.

That’s ok, in fact, for most inhabitants of the Northern Hemisphere, especially at very high latitudes In my country, however, I only wear tights half the year — roughly from October to May, and sometimes not even that. Even though compared to other Mediterranean countries Portugal is rather cold-ish (and more wet — that all comes because the main weather influence is the Atlantic, not the Mediterranean or the hot, dry air that sometimes blows out of Northern Africa), we still get a few nights when it’s around 30ºC at midnight. They are rare, sure, but thanks to global warming and all, they are not that rare. The point is that for well over half a year, all my tights, pantyhose, stockings, and whatever leg underwear I might have, will all neatly get folded and stored inside a drawer and wait for colder days.

Worse than that, I perspire like crazy. Seriously. I believe it’s the German genes I’ve inherited from my mother — I should be more happy in a more colder climate Or maybe it’s just hormones playing havoc inside me — not that I’m doing therapy, but hey, yes, men also go through some hormonal changes during their midlife, and I’m supposed to be on my early middle age anyway… also, the fatter I am, the more I perspire… or maybe it’s a medical condition of some sort that my doctors haven’t yet figured out… anyway, whatever the cause, the truth is that the least physical effort will make me perspire like crazy, and the hotter and more humid it is, the worse it gets. Actually, during the summer, I hardly can get my breast forms attached to the breast; if it wasn’t for the bra to ‘catch’ them, they would drop to the ground washed by a sea of perspiration. And yes, this will ruin most makeups, but I only use extreme waterproof ones, with a lot of special tricks for oily skin that fix the makeup in place even if I perspire my own body weight in water. In fact, I think I could take a bath with my makeup and it would survive! It has to. I cannot stop the perspiration; the makeup simply has to stick. Oh, and I did mention that my perspiration is so acid that it corrodes silver. Don’t forget that.

So I naturally wondered how in Hell those hip pads would stay in the same place in my case. Granted, I do not perspire as strongly on the legs as I do on the upper body, but if you saw the Veronica’s gel pads after a few years (and remember, they are inside a pocket, which needs to get thoroughly drenched with acid perspiration before starting to corrode the gel pads…), you’d be shocked!

Browsing through the site, a few ideas were given to keep those pads in place. First of all, the company owners claim that the pads are ‘slightly sticky’ so they will at least be easy to position; then you just need to put some kind of tights or shapewear on top of it to keep them in place. Hmm. Well, as you can imagine, this put me off for several years.

But I decided to give it a try. Now, most shapewear you get in common shops is simply not strong enough, or may be itchy, or not the correct size/proportion, or, well, not necessarily comfortable at all. It really depends on so many factors. And I’m assuming that you are not quite willing to go to a shop and try them all on to see how good they are! Especially because shapewear may count as ‘underwear’ in most shops, and that means that you cannot try them out before buying, but have to guess if it fits before making a decision…

Well, of course, and then there is Spanx.

There are so many reviews online about Spanx that it’s hardly possible you haven’t come across the brand before — especially if you are based in the US. It’s what Hollywood celebrities and Michelle Obama use beneath their clothing to give them perfect curves. And what can be a better advertising than that? If it’s good enough for Hollywood celebrities, it’s good enough for me.

I don’t exactly know what is so special about Spanx, except that it comes in three ‘strengths’ (from gently keeping things in place to what they call ‘figure sculpting’), a lot of sizes, and an insane amount of different configurations — from things that look like oversize panties, to girdles, to full bodysuits (well, you get the idea), for maternity, and who knows for what else. Their selection is huge. That might be the reason why it is so well-known in the US. Or, perhaps, because it’s really the best kind of shapewear there is. The truth is that pretty everyone who owns Spanx shapewear will swear by it.

In Europe, Spanx is not so common, and I wonder why not (maybe we Europeans have a competing brand? I have no idea…). They have a few scattered shops in Europe, and there are a handful of online sites that carry Spanx products as well, but it’s not something you can easily find or buy. There is not a single shop or supplier in my country; that means online shopping, and there the problems start.

Spanx had an early terminology for its shaping strength, and a lot of product lines for each strength. Most explanatory articles all over the Internet are still using the old terminology and the old product lines, which apparently they had for a long time. Unfortunately, they changed everything — I don’t know if it happened this year or the year before — and that means that you don’t get easy clues about each item’s strength. The product lines were also renamed, or, rather, they changed the product lines altogether — and that also means that the individual names of each item have changed as well! — so it’s very, very hard to correlate the new names with the old products, unless you get pictures to compare! To make things worse: European suppliers seem to still use the old names (even though they are selling the brand new ones) and strength terminology, and, of course, they have far less choices than Spanx’s main site — they only store the bestsellers (and not every online shop has the same selection, of course).

For me, this meant way more time researching about Spanx than about DressTech. DressTech was easy — they sell through Amazon, and that means I can use my usual account, apply some discount cards, and it gets shipped really easily and quickly to me. In fact, because I wanted to have both the hip pads and the Spanx shapewear arriving at the same time, and expecting things from Europe to ship much faster, I ordered the hip pads first and spent a few more days trying to make sense out of Spanx’s product line. Eventually I found a supplier in the UK which carried the item I wanted and ordered it from there — it arrived after the hip pads, because Amazon, those tricky guys, shipped it first to their Germany warehouses, from where it’s just a small hop to Portugal (comparatively speaking). If I didn’t have a huge problem with customs (not their fault… it’s an incredibly long story, so I’ll skip it. At the end of the day, what matters is that I (finally) got the Spanx shapewear, and I could at last try it out with DressTech’s hip pads!

One final note on Spanx (maybe I should do a separate review on that?): when wearing it for the first time, I understood immediately why the celebrities adore it: you almost don’t feel it. Seriously. The material is very soft and pleasant to the touch, and while it certainly is quite elastic (it’s supposed to be the sculpt strength, after all!), it does not chafe nor hurt anywhere. In fact, you will not even remember you’re wearing it at all — yes, it’s that good. No wonder it’s such a success. But, more importantly than that — at least for me! — it’s that it gives me much more flexibility. Seriously: the Veronicas are great, but they slightly hamper movements — you will always be aware that they are ‘there’, and some movements are not possible (or rather hard to do inside a corset and a Veronica) — like something simple as bending down and tying your shoelaces (or putting on those sandals which have a buckled band to keep the feet in place), or, well, crossing your legs. The Spanx allows all that and much more, to the point that yesterday I was un-buckling my sandals and completely forgot that I was wearing the Spanx; usually I have to remove the Veronica first, then the corset, and only then I can bend down. So… wow. It gives you such a freedom that is unbelievable!

I opted for a nude colour. As it happens, it’s almost precisely my skin colour — and the same colour as the DressTech hip pads! That means that it will be completely unnoticeable under normal clothing (i.e. anything but very dark or even black colours). One slight disadvantage of the Veronica is that it’s white. The early Veronicas were even made in a shiny fabric, so they would be visible under dark colours; the Veronica 5 is a matte ‘dirty white’, so it’s much better but… not ideal for most circumstances. Especially because I have a black corset. The contrast is too big; some clothing combination let the undergarments show through — even if only in pictures taken with a flash!

The Spanx I bought has also a nice feature: it comes with two attachments to the bra. These are very small loops that have hooked ends (similar to the ones used on some wigs), so you can make the top of the Spanx stay in place immediately below your bra line (there are other versions of the Spanx that include the bra itself, which is even more convenient — however, one must take into account that Spanx was designed for women who, on average — and even on larger sizes — have shorter torsos than men. With the unit I bought, things are different, because you wear your own bra and just add the loop attachment — which can be positioned in three different lengths. The idea is to keep the top edge of the Spanx undergarment as high (and as close to the bra) as possible. In my case, the higher the top hem of the Spanx, the more it will cover the corset underneath! And this is important, because the corset I have is noticeable under very tight clothing — you see all the hooks and protrusions and the laces and so forth (I once bought an item which had some sort of ‘cover’ so that all these things are not noticeable, but, unfortunately, its whalebones were simply not strong enough).

So now is the time to come to the tricky part: actually wearing the hip pads inside the Spanx!

Now, so far in my crossdressing life, I just used two kinds of padding: simple foam padding, which is very light, and relatively small, and therefore easy to ‘insert’ into tights; and the much larger (and heavier) pads from Classic Curves International, which are inserted into special pockets of their girdles, something you do before putting the girdle on. As I mentioned months ago, the gel pads from Classic Curves International are really heavy — because they are supposed to simulate ‘real flesh’, they are about the same weight as human flesh. And that’s a lot — about 7 kg of extra weight to be carried (distributed among the two legs).

DressTech’s pads are made from silicone as well. They are very smooth and anatomically shaped from the exterior or outside side (see picture). They feel very realistic as well — and its colour is almost exactly the colour of my own skin — and, of course, they are very heavy as well!

Their shape is different from the Veronicas. Although DressTech’s hip pads have a slight projection towards the buttocks, it’s really just a hip enhancer — the Veronicas tend to emphasize both the hips and the bottom (and you can slightly reposition them inside the pockets to either go for ‘bigger hips’ or ‘bigger bottom’). In my case, however, that’s exactly what I want — as said, I have a rather good looking bottom, not exactly in the same class as the Kardashians or Jay Lo, but good enough to be naturally passable. Nevertheless, the slight projection also aids to ’round up’ the buttocks a bit, and make them look much more female-y. And also don’t forget I’m wearing the Spanx on top of that — the Spanx has been specially designed to lift and give more volume to the buttocks, and boy, it really does its job quite well!

These hip pads are also much longer than the Veronica’s. The instruction sheet that comes with them says that the upper part should be placed at the level of the navel — which makes a lot of sense, since women’s waists are far above the male waist, and the pads will taper towards the anatomically correct position (if worn properly, of course). This means that the lower part will come a long way down the upper leg. And yes, that means no micro-skirts or hot panties — but DressTech is aware of that and also sells a version that is much shorter and designed for you who wish to go for clothing with the hem a few centimetres below the navel Just take into account that the longer version of the hip pads is much more realistic (unless you have perfectly female-y legs, of course), because it not only enhances the hips correctly, but it also adds more volume to the upper part of your legs, which is what most women also have — it helps in maintaining the illusion!

Now… putting them on… is a challenge. Not that wearing the Veronica wasn’t a challenge as well; in fact, it was slightly worse!

The first step (so they say in the flyer that comes with the pads) is to put your shapewear on. Then you roll it down — pretty much to the end, in my case — until you can align the pads properly, so that they are in the correct position (the top edge being at the navel height, as said). Allegedly, then you roll your shapewear up again, do some eventual finishing touches, and that’s it!

Does it sound too easy to be true? It is. While the surface of the hip pads isn’t as tacky as it is claimed somewhere on their web site, it does provide a certain measure of friction — enough, in fact, to keep them in place (once they are correctly positioned), so far as you don’t perspire crazily as I do (and, even so, I maintained them in place — you’ll see why in a moment). But ‘keeping in place’ doesn’t mean that they will actually stick to your legs/hips while you roll the Spanx up. Not even close! So I wonder how people manage to get them properly in place. Also, the Spanx will really keep them firmly in place (I’m really amazed how well it works), so this means that if you actually do not position them properly, it’s rather hard to get them back in place (it’s easier to start from scratch…).

I found out that it’s slightly better to do this lying down on the bed! I’m serious! At least that means that I can more easily keep them a little bit in place, roll the Spanx up a little bit as well, and so forth, until finally it’s done. Whew! It’s not easy. I guess that with practice I will manage to do this much quicker, but, for now, it’s a nightmare…

Because I’m wearing a corset, my navel line is obviously behind the corset. So I had a problem: what to do? Wear the pads under the corset — and risk getting it marked forever with the strong whalebones — or over the corset, like I did with the Veronica, thus not risking anything… except perhaps a little less realism? Or is it actually more realistic that way? You decide — take a look at the picture. My wife most definitely complimented me (after I put a dress on, of course!) and said that it looked way better than before. And I checked my measurements: 114-87-114. Not perfect, but not too bad, and at least breast and hip measurements are the same. I could be slightly thinner… but that means getting rid of my belly

Having the pads over the corset has a couple of advantages. The first is that if people wish to ‘feel’ my hips to guess if they are real or not, they will not touch the corset, but just the silicone (yes, many people are very curious to see if what I have is real or not, and I tell them to touch it … which only confuses them more, and make them ask me if I’m on hormones or underwent surgery…) The second advantage is that at least the corset will not have any perspiration — meaning that it provides sufficient friction to hold the hip pads in place (even though human skin has better friction than a corset’s fabric…).

What actually amazed me is how well these work when sitting down — I was almost expecting that they would fall off or at least bend in awkward (and unnatural) edges. Nothing of the sort: they actually bend realistically, or, rather, when positioned correctly, they will follow the natural curves of the body and stay in place exactly where expected. In fact, I have been observing some curvy women sitting down: because they have extra body fat on their hips, this gets naturally pushed to the sides when they sit down. Surprisingly, they look as if they were wearing pads, not I! Amusing, but true.

Did I mention that the hip pads are heavy? Yes, they are — about the same weight as the Veronica’s gel pads, in fact, which is not surprising: both are simulating the extra body fat that males do not have on their hips, and this is about those seven or so kilograms. Of course, when worn in place, you do not feel the extra weight at all (the same, in fact, happened with the Veronica). One major difference between DressTech’s solution and the Veronica is that, thanks to Spanx, I have a much higher degree of agility. As mentioned before, I can bend down and even forget that I’m wearing the hip pads. Even nicer than that — now I can cross my legs! Seriously! I have avoided doing that for years, because, well, if you’re a bit overweight (which is my case), crossing one’s legs just feels awkward; and while wearing a corset and the Veronica, it was next to impossible anyway. But with the DressTech hip pads firmly in place thanks to the Spanx shapewear, there is no problem in crossing the legs. Well, you have to pay a bit of attention: if the skirt is too short, the edge of the Spanx (and the tip at the lowest end of the pads) will be visible! Something I didn’t need to bother with while wearing the Veronica, since I would never cross my legs anyway…

While walking on heels, as every good girl (and gurl) knows, one ought to place one foot in front of the other — that looks most gracious, because one’s tights will rub against each other, and women, of course, are always making sure that nobody can look between their legs at all times, even when simply walking. Because you’re also supposed to have your skin smooth in that area (meaning: no hair, please!), the rubbing is actually extremely pleasant — and it works as a reminder that you’re doing it properly. Well, one thing I missed when using the Veronica was this feeling — the Veronica, by some reason (related to its design), did not allow me to walk that way. I could ‘fake’ it, though, and it would look almost exactly as the ‘real thing’, even if it wasn’t.

But Spanx, of course, was designed for women, and it fully allows you to walk exactly like one — no chaffing, no need to ‘force’ anything, it works as naturally as if you weren’t wearing anything at all (in fact, Spanx, just like the perfect bra, is not even noticeable when worn — and that’s exactly what you want from underwear!). The DressTech’s pads will move freely — and stay perfectly in place while walking like you should. In this particular aspect, it’s not DressTech’s merit that I can walk correctly again, but rather because I’m using Spanx. I wonder if the same will happen if I used ‘normal’ tights? I will only be able to tell during winter, of course, but the truth is that I don’t think I have any tights or pantyhoses or any kind of similar garment that is so close-fitting as Spanx (well, except for the Veronica, obviously). It’s therefore highly likely that I will stick with Spanx and just wear tights over it.

You can see on the promotional video for DressTech that the model (I believe it’s Diana herself) wears her panties over the tights, because, from a distance, it might look as if her hips are ‘real’. And, as said, she is not wearing a corset, but a fancy waist cincher (more than enough if you just need a bit of flattening). Now this is naturally how you need to wear for a sexy, kinky session in front of a webcam — or, who knows, with your lover In my case, because I do not intend to show my underwear ever, I actually wear the panties under the Spanx. Theoretically, some websites even say that you don’t need to wear anything under the Spanx (it’s opaque, after all); it even has a convenient flap at the bottom for doing your thing in the bathroom (otherwise, it would be a mess — it’s not so easy to take it off in a hurry!!). But because I still have to deal with my male genitalia, at least the panties will keep them in place, pretty much invisible under everything. I’m not an expert in tucking, actually — I found out that, for the kind of clothing I wear, there is really no need to do extreme tucking, of the kind that needs duct tape to stick everything in place! I can understand the psychological aspect of doing that, though; because you can look down between your legs and not see ‘anything’, exactly as a normal, biological, cisgender woman would do. What I can say is that the combination of using panties, Spanx, and a dress or a skirt on top of everything will be more than enough to hide your package — no, there will be no ‘bulges’. Remember, the Spanx was designed to eliminate any ‘bulges’ (even though they had rolls of fat in mind…), so it keeps everything quite flat anyway. I guess that when wearing pants things might require a few more tricks. I don’t know; I look horrible in pants, so I never use them. On the other hand, I have to admit that I looked ugly using the Veronica; will DressTech’s solution make any difference? I’m curious to figure it out!

Concluding thoughts

Some of my friends wonder why I have the patience of wearing so many layers of clothing and underwear when nowadays it’s far more common for women to opt for a much more casual look, with loose clothing (that never seems to fit, at least visually) — so am I not wasting a lot of time, and, especially, money, on things that in reality nobody is going to see?

There are two possible answers to that. One I have explored on my previous article on hyperfemininity: the problem that many of us transgender people have is that we simply have the wrong shape. Even if one might argue that women come in all lots of shapes — which is certainly true, and there is even some evidence that women’s shapes vary much more than men’s — it’s also true that there are a number of right shapes for women. While we have a wrong shape. So either we assume that freely, or we will have to do something about it to conform to one possible female shape. As explained on that article, I’m too big, too wide, too chubby to change my shape into the look of a slim supermodel. No matter what I do, or what I wear, I will never look like that — I have the totally wrong build (and skeleton!) for that. On the other hand, chubby women can easily become hourglass-shaped, curvy women, if they only use the right tools — and that’s exactly what I’m doing: turning my unacceptable and visually unpleasing male shape into one possible (and acceptable) shape for women. This is why I get so many comments about if I’m taking hormones or if I have done any surgery: visually (and you can even touch it!) my body does not seem to be shaped as a male, but it seems that I’ve really started with some kind of female-ish body and just happen to wear the ‘right’ clothes. I’m amazed that so many people never notice that I’m wearing a corset — it’s something that, somehow, never crossed their minds! I believe that this comes mostly from a general lack of information about shapewear — because it has gone out of fashion for a few decades, and only making a comeback in the past few years (with new technologies to achieve the same effects), most people (male or female) are simply unaware that such things exist at all, or that they actually work that well. I always cringe when I hear cisgender women complaining about any of their bodily features, and that they cannot change them even if they go to the gym every day because they are just wrongly shaped, blah blah — they would all benefit from an introductory course in shapewear! (But of course I must keep silent while I listen to their complaints…)

And this leads to the second point: building up one’s confidence and self-esteem. It might actually look like I’m somehow using a ‘crutch’, something to ‘hide’ behind, and unwilling to let these things go and truly and completely embrace my body, and just present myself as I am — one overweight, unshapely guy with a big belly in a dress.

Well, I’m fine with those who aren’t bothered with that at all; secretly I envy their courage, as they flaunt their beer bellies which are impossible to hide under a dress (no matter how large it is), and still manage to walk around in their heels in unshaved legs — and are absolutely impervious to anyone’s comments. It’s great to have such confidence! And, of course, they are contributing to the abolishment of ‘gender presentation’ — after all, who said that you can only wear a short dress if you have no belly and nice legs? Anyone has the right to do so!

True! But I’m not at that stage, and, to be honest, it’s not even my own personal path. I’m fine with a somewhat binary gender (as I’m fine with a gentle overlap between genders), not the least because it’s more easy to deal with in our society. And that means, at least for me, that my overall presentation has to somehow ‘fit’ into mainstream mental images of what a ‘woman’ or a ‘man’ ought to look like. Just like most of the women, my shape isn’t perfect (but, then again, very few women can actually boast of that, either). But I know that I can get a little help here and there from the shapewear industry to come closer to one possible female shape which actually is not very different than mine. After all, there are tall, large-framed, overweight women out there; most are curvy and need just a little help to get a hourglass figure using Sandra’s Law of the Shapely Body. Then they just need to pick the ‘right’ clothes for their body type, and they will simply look gorgeous — even if they are practically the opposite of what the fashion industry is doing with their supermodels.

Well, I can come close to that, too. I’m also tall, large-framed, and overweight. Some things (like a corset) I can do exactly as women do, to come closer to a more visually pleasing silhouette; other things require a bit of padding here and there. Once I do all that, though, I most definitely get a boost in my confidence and self-esteem. I know how I look like beneath the layers of clothing; but I also know that a lot of women do not look even close to those so-called ‘perfect shapes’, and also need a little help to get there. I might need a bit more than ‘little help’ — but I can ‘get there’, too. And sometimes it works so well that I actually scare myself: recently, I met a friend at a mall, and while I got out of the car in the underground parking and moved towards the escalators, I was absent-mindedly fussing with my hair and dress to put it all in place (you know how it is: after having sit down for some time, you need to pull the dress or skirt down because it has ridden high, etc.). This, of course, is something you ought not do in public, and at some point I suddenly became aware of someone appearing on my peripheral vision. I immediately stopped with the fussing and fidgeting, pulled myself straight, and, while facing the person, I noticed that it was a woman, at which I was a bit more relieved — since women tend to be a bit more forgiving! Then I noticed that the woman was actually much to my style and taste, rather tall and curvy, and she had the most wonderful dress, which, in fact, was… exactly like mine…

And yes, I laughed hard as I finally noticed that I was facing myself in the mirror and didn’t even notice it! I know — this is something that happens a lot with beginning crossdressers, who might be shocked at what a little makeup, a wig, some shapewear and a dress can do to their overall look. But one would expect that an old hand like me would still get so easily fooled. And the truth is that I don’t. But it happens very occasionally. And every time it happens, I get a boost in my confidence: being one of my hardest critics (my wife is #1), if I can’t even recognise myself, I’m well along the right path!

That’s why I keep using all those little tricks. They give me the confidence to walk in public, in the knowledge that I’m doing as much as I can do to look presentable and acceptable — at least in my own eyes. And that, after all, is what matters.

The Closet Transitioner

Most countries in the world still require a ‘real life test’ before one qualifies for transition (although individual country legislation might vary — in my country, for instance, you can immediately change your name and gender once you begin transition, to make the real life test somewhat easier, in those situations where you require identification).

During the real life test, the person undergoing transition is expected to enact the gender role with which they identify — before hormones and surgery will change them forever in an irreversible way. For MtF transexuals, this means committing to living full time as a woman, 24h/7, without looking back, and going on with one’s life — proceeding in their job (or getting a new one), doing house chores, dealing with all issues as they appear, while presenting themselves as a woman, all the time. Of course, there is always help from psychologists during this real life test — they’re not abandoned at all! — but it is expected that they learn to deal with all the issues by themselves.

The real value of this real life test might be questionable (and that’s why some countries, or at least some doctors, don’t require them). I have written in the past that I found it rather brutal: after all, unless one has been born with the body of Andreja Pejić, who was pretty much androgynous when she started her transition, most transexuals will look like ‘men wearing dresses’ (and very often, for late onset transexuals, ‘ugly old men wearing dresses that don’t fit’) for most of the time of the real life test, since the hormones, when they kick in, will not have much of an effect at the beginning — when it will be hardest on the transexual!

Therefore, many activists are in favour of abolishing the real life test altogether, or making it optional (and not mandatory).

There is, however, an alternative: instead of presenting themselves as ‘ugly men in dresses’, and assuming they have someone to take care for them, they just stay at home, hidden from everybody, while the hormones are making their magic. Sometimes this means spending 2-3 years at home, only going out of the front door for the regular consultations with the psychologists. Because, as far as I know, and unless they have some reason to suspect otherwise, psychologists will not really check up on people in transition — i.e. they don’t ‘follow’ them at home or at their job to see if they are doing what is expected of them — it’s not hard to live as a recluse for a while and only go out in public after years on hormones and a few surgeries.

This is a bit like cheating — but at the end you’re only cheating yourself. The reason for that has only been made apparent to me very recently. The real life test, even though it’s pretty much announced publicly to be ‘a test to see if the transexual is able to cope with their new role in society’, is actually about something quite different: it’s a test, yes, but to see if the transexual is able to cope with transphobia and discrimination.

Let’s be straight here. Psychologists care little if MtF transexuals know how to apply lipstick or not, or if they know how to sit at a table in a restaurant, or if they know how to walk on heels. Nothing of that is truly important for the real life test, ok? In the case of those transexuals (especially late onset transexuals) who had crossdressed well before they considered transitioning, knowing how to present in public as a woman is something that you can take for granted: those people have already done that, probably for years, and have a pretty good idea on what they need to do to ‘look like a woman’.

No, the problem here is that many MtF transexuals (I will not make generalizations) truly believe that they will ‘become women’ (in the physical sense; not in the identity sense, since they were always women) after transition. Some might even be bold enough to believe (based on the Likes they have on Facebook) that they already look like women, they just need a bit of hormonal boost to the breast & hip area (to stop using falsies) and some surgery on their plumbing to truly, utterly become the woman they always dreamed to be.

This is, by all accounts, never going to happen in 99% of the cases.

You see, people like Andreja Pejić are extremely rare. Only very few people assigned to the male gender at birth will have androgynous enough bodies to ‘look like women’ when going out in public. The rest of us, well, we’ll always be ‘men wearing dresses’ — and there is no amount of hormones and surgery that will change that, because we cannot change the skeleton beneath our skin and flesh.

Just being tall is a handicap. Tall women catch the attention naturally; they cannot be inconspicuous, because, well, they ‘stand out’ (literally!). So you cannot be a 1,80m tall trans woman and think you can evade being carefully looked at. You will be carefully noticed, no matter how you dress. You can have a good body figure, perfect hair, perfect makeup, and the best designer dresses in the world, and hope to evade the eyes of strangers in public — but you cannot avoid the simply fact that you’ll be large, and catch attention that way.

If you are exceptionally beautiful, with thin, delicate bones, and an androgynous face, well… even on top of 1.80m (plus heels!), you might pass. People might think there is something wrong with you, but they will not really know what it is. However, such transexuals are just a tiny minority. Yes, they are the ones that put videos on YouTube and have spectacular Instagram accounts wearing haute couture in fancy places. And that gives the rest of the transexuals the idea that they can also be like that.

Welcome to reality, dude. Or rather, dudette. In real life, not all women are beautiful.

They’re not ‘less women’ because of that, of course! But — and here is the point — no matter how ugly a woman might look like, she will still be a woman, and she will be seen and perceived by everybody as a woman.

While most MtF transexuals will look like… well, tall, ugly, old men wearing dresses (or pants, or whatever they wish).

So the real life test is mostly about dealing with that: understanding that no, you won’t pass all the time. People will know that you’ve not been born with a female body. They will notice. Small details, yes, but we humans are very good at picking up clues from very small details.

Most people, of course, will ignore you on the streets (because, well, most people ignore most people). Some will notice you, and giggle, or whisper behind your back. Kids will point at you and ask their mothers: ‘Mommy, why is that man wearing a dress?’ loudly enough for everybody to stop in their tracks and look at you. Conversations will suddenly stop when you approach people; others will become nervous in your presence and avoid you. And, yes, you will meet transphobes — people who will tell you in your face that they ‘hate perverts’. Some might threaten violence. Some might even perpetuate that violence. Of course you have the law to protect you — all cases of transphobia can be denounced and are treated as crimes in practically everywhere in the Western world. But that’s very nice to say when you’re at a supermarket queue and suddenly get yelled at by someone who insults you publicly.

So, yes, during your real life test you will be humiliated, exposed, yelled at, suffer from all kinds of transphobia coming from the most unexpected directions. These will not ‘go away’, even if you progress through many changes caused by hormones and surgery. In a sense, they might even become harder to bear: at the beginning, you might be expecting to be ‘read’ (because the hormones haven’t started to work their magic yet), and be a bit more tolerant. But as the months pass, it will become harder and harder to accept that there will always be someone that looks at you in an awkward way, which you will interpret as having been ‘read’ (and it will very likely be the case).

Many transexuals, during their real life test, simply give up because it’s too hard on them. It’s not really that ‘living as a woman’ bothers them. Scrubbing the floor might not be glamorous, but at least you will be doing it as a woman and not as a man; most transexuals entering the real life test will already be mentally prepared to do these things knowing fully well that the glamorous side of their womanhood will be just a tiny fraction of their actual lives. But what will be harder to face is the constant transphobia. You can look them up on Facebook — glamorous trans women, already having a perfectly female appearance, except… for one or two minor details… which they claim (and often very rightly so) that will make people ‘read’ them, and this means getting treated differently from other women.

The real life test is not quite about ‘learning to live as a woman’, because society will not really see you as a woman. The real life test is actually about ‘learning to live as a trans woman’, which means something different: it means being able to tolerate transphobia and discrimination every day, at many different levels, from simple eye contact to outbursts of violence — and these will happen every day, for the rest of your life. It matters little how many hormones you take and how much surgery you do: there will always be someone who will ‘read’ you, and if that person happens to be a transphobe (which is likely!), you will have to endure their humiliation.

Therefore, it makes little difference to face transphobia with or without hormones. Indeed, bracing yourself for the abuse and humiliation during the first days/months, and being able to endure that, means that possibly you will have it more easier by the end of the real life test, as the hormones are finally changing your body to resemble somewhat a biological woman. Probably. Possibly. You might just be unlucky and need more time. Or, well, there will be no amount of hormones that will shrink you, give you wide hip bones, and hands with fingers proportioned like a biological woman.

You have just to accept that.

Now consider the case of those who live in seclusion, either with their family, or in a ‘sisterhood’ of other transexuals, in a small, friendly, cosy, and most importantly, safe place, where you are fully accepted. You, as a MtF transexual in transition, decide to spend the first years mostly at home, letting the hormones work, bracing yourself for any eventual surgeries… but refusing to go out in public before you (and your friends and family) start seeing real changes on your body.

And, in the mean time, of course you will enjoy your life as a ‘woman’ — in your ghetto, of course — and spending 24h/7 in the gender role you identify with is pretty much all you wanted.

But finally, after some 2-3 years, you will believe that you’ve been magically transformed to a woman, and go in public just to face your first transphobic reaction — without the benefit of having done the real test correctly. So… it will come as a huge shock… after waiting for so long… taking so many hormones, waiting for them to have an effect… doing a lot of cosmetic surgery… prepping and preening yourself up… you still get ‘read’ and experience transphobia and discrimination??

No wonder that many start seriously to question what the heck they have been doing with their lives in the past few years!

Unfortunately, I know a few cases that are like that — and I have read about many more who did the same. They thought they could ‘evade’ the real life test, to ‘cheat’, to try to do it the easy way. They also believed that they could ‘look like a cis woman’, and their deluded perceptions made them believe that all those hormones and surgery truly and miraculously transformed them in the woman they always wanted to be. But that is not how others perceive us. They will know. Not all will know, but as the old saying goes: ‘You can fool all the people for a short time, or you can fool some people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time’.

The real life test is mostly for the transexual to stop fooling themselves. It forces them to look at the wide world exactly as that wide world will look at them: as a pervert who somehow has acquired a few extra secondary sexual attributes here and there to get better sex. That’s how most of the people will look at transexuals. Some will be tolerant, in the sense they will still believe you to be a pervert with a mental disease and a sexual paraphilia, but they will have absolutely nothing against it. Those people will treat you well. They still won’t accept/respect you totally as you’d wished them to treat. And, of course, a few will be educated and learned enough to understand what transexuality truly is, and be truthfully accepting and respecting you. But such people will be a tiny minority!

So — no cheating on the real life test, because you’re just cheating yourself. It’s far better to ‘fail’ the real life test — give up on transition, because you simply cannot deal with transphobia — and somehow rethink your options, than to ‘cheat’ and suddenly figure out that you’re not mentally prepared at all to face the world, not as the woman you are, but as the trans woman — the ‘fat ugly old man in a dress’ — that society perceives you to be.

Not everything is glamour

Recently, when going out with some friends, a few of which are starting their first baby steps towards transitioning, they appear at the spot presenting themselves as males. They usually have a few excuses for that. One, for example, said that she had a cold, so she didn’t dress as a woman (although she had some unisex items of clothing on). I said that half the population in the world routinely get colds, and they still go out presenting themselves as women. She understood that perfectly, but when she has to blow her nose, her makeup is ruined and she becomes as complete mess. Again, I told her that women have to deal with that all the time, and eventually they simply don’t put any makeup… Here my friend became defensive, and I decided not to push the matter further.

Others simply tell me that ‘they were in a hurry’ and couldn’t get dressed in time. Another told me once that she didn’t dress because she broke two nails, and so couldn’t paint them, and, as a consequence, she simply didn’t care to dress at all. I told her that when this happens to me I just wear false nails; at which she replied that she wanted to be ‘all natural’ and that wouldn’t work for her. Even explaining to her that the whole reason why women wear those false nails is because not everybody has ‘perfect’ nails (no, they weren’t invented for crossdressers and transgender people!) was of no avail — she simply refused to dress unless she was perfect in every detail.

Once I remember that a friend of mine came with her wig completely out of place, and I told her so. She got very angry, saying that she did her best, but she was in a rush, so she might have not put on her wig correctly. I told her that once she transitions (and, as a male, she already has male baldness which will not be reverted with hormones, so it’s highly likely she will have to wear a wig all the time) she might have to ‘rush’ a lot of times out of their home, but, as the woman she will be, she will nevertheless have to check that her wig was in place.

Another example: a friend of mine, also claiming to ‘be a woman’, and spending all her time at home dressed as one, once asked me how her makeup was. I told her in honesty what I thought: that as a mature woman (she’s 50-ish) she shouldn’t wear makeup in the way a 9-year-old does. I believe she has one kind of age fetish — that’s perfectly fine for me, why not, I have my smoking fetish, which is as strange to her as her age fetish is strange to me — but I nevertheless told her that if we were going out to eat on a public restaurant, she should be dressed and wear her makeup as a woman her age, not as a 9-year-old — in other words, if you want to go out with me, please leave your age fetishes at home. She got angry at me, telling me that her makeup was not a ‘child look’, but rather an improvisation of what she could do with the little makeup she had, and, once she got a good job, she could afford much better-quality makeup from the top brand names, and then her makeup would be perfect and everybody would look at her as the woman she is.

Well, that was just delusional of her, of course, so, again, I didn’t press the issue further…

A more typical case are friends of mine, who, when we walk around in public, either get angry with comments they get from males crossing us on the street, or, by contrast, get very, very anxious and ask me if I saw how they were pointing to us and whispering and giggling. To be honest, I generally do not pay that much attention, and often I can be truthful and say that I hadn’t noticed.

However, when I do notice that, I simply tell my friends that this is good practice for their real life test. Once that starts, they will have to deal with it every day. I think that many of them are still truly believing that they will become such beautiful women that their real life test will be easy-peasy — it’s just while they are still not taking hormones that they will attract nasty comments from guys and/or whispering and giggling. Oh well. I wish them good luck…

Another friend of mine also recently started her transitioning. She told me that she had deeply reflected over the issue, and decided that all her problems, including her depression, were caused by gender dysphoria (with which I would mostly agree), and so she was considering very seriously to do the transition. Since she is still quite young, and has a reasonably androgynous body, and a not-too-masculine face, she might have very good results. Also, she has a talent for fashion as well, which definitely helps a lot! So we went out and I told her that she would need to start practicing being in public, since sooner or later she might have to start the real life test and experience, in the flesh, what it means to present ourselves as female. She was both excited and terrified, mostly of what people were going to say. And yes, while we window-shopped at a mall, she was constantly looking at everybody else, trying to gauge their reactions, wincing when they giggled or pointed at her, and so forth (I was completely absorbed looking through the sales section so I honestly have no idea what people around me were doing or thinking ). After 40 minutes or so, she said she had enough; it was overwhelming, too much, she wanted to go to a ‘safe’ place (by this she means a LGBT-friendly environment), which is what we did.

I think I have many more examples like these, and, of course, I’m pretty sure that I will come upon many others. Now let me be clear on a point: of course I’m self-conscious, and often anxious, when I’m in public (more on that on the next post!). And even though I usually am enjoying myself so much that I pay little attention to what other people are doing or thinking, sometimes, of course, I also catch people looking at me (or rather, looking up to me ) and not always with a kind, respecting look. I’ve no delusions about the way I present myself, and I know pretty well that I don’t ‘pass’ — but I also don’t care.

As said, I will explore this in a future article, but my point here is that if someone is seriously considering transitioning, it’s not enough to claim to ‘have always been a woman inside’, or to have a closet full of women’s apparel, and being masterful at doing makeup. All that is pretty much irrelevant when, well, you have to stand in a queue for the supermarket. Or, in my case, standing in a queue in the middle of the night to wait to blow on the alcohol meter during a police stop. You can ‘look’ as glamorous as you wish; but how do you react to others when you’re outside the comfort zone?

I think that the problem of many crossdressers-becoming-transexuals is that we tend to live in the world of glamour (remember Felix Conrad’s Glamourpuss theory on my previous post?). All the time we spend as women we are in our most lovely dresses, with our best shoes, in our fantastic makeup that took us hours to do, and so forth. We spend our free time in pubs, bars, restaurants, at the theatre, going to the movies, and so forth — in short, spending good time with our friends, mostly in places where we know we will be well treated. And, of course, we get a boost to our self-confidence, and a strong feeling that women have so much more fun than men (yes they do!) and that life as a woman is so much better than life as a man (no it isn’t!) that, well, we are pretty much convinced that we can live our lives as women as well as we lived our lives as men.

But when we start stumbling upon the ‘unglamorous’ bits of reality, it’s time to reflect if that’s really what we want to be. A woman’s life — like a man’s life, like everybody’s life in fact — is not all about glamour (except perhaps for Paris Hilton and the Kardashian clan — but nobody among my friends is at that level ). It’s wonderful to be a woman when we’re surrounded by glamour — and there is no equivalent feeling for males in our society, so it’s perfectly understandable (for me at least) that many males simply prefer to ‘be women’ because women do, indeed, have access to experiences, emotions and feelings that are not available to men. However, for those who are in transition, it’s fundamental to keep reality in check: no, it won’t be a glamorous life all along. You will regret being in a mini-skirt and high heels with cascading long hair when you’ll have to replace your first tire — and no, you won’t ‘pass’ to be able to stop a kind gentleman to help you out. In fact, you might freak out anyone kind enough to slow down to help!

Women get colds, women get dirty, women have to do house chores, women have to go shopping, they have to go to doctors and appointments, and on top of that, they will also have to work. None of those activities (well, except for work in the fashion industry…) is ‘glamorous’. There will be no excuses for you, once you transition, to ‘look perfect on all occasions’, because you will never look your best if you have a cold and have to wash the windows and scrub the floor. Again, unless you’re Paris Hilton, and have a legion of employees to do all the dirty work for you, while you relish in a never-ending succession of parties, you will see that life as a woman is nothing like the moments you spend with friends in bars, pubs, restaurants, or going to a mall. There is so much more to it — and none of it is exactly ‘glamorous’.

‘Magic Mirror on the wall, who is the fairest one of all?’

Common to almost all crossdressers and some transgender people I know is the delusion that they will one day be the ‘perfect woman’.

After much thought, I wondered from where this delusion comes from. And I guess that it was a friend of mine, who routinely does workshops for beginning crossdressers, who pointed me in the right direction. She usually gives those crossdressers their first complete makeover. Many might have played around with women’s clothes, high heels, even worn a wig or two, but… the magic of makeup was an arcane art beyond their abilities to understand.

And here my friend is quite helpful. Being a crossdresser herself, she knows most of the tricks of the trade, and understands those ‘special requirements’ that people with a male body will need to disguise most (like the bluish undertone of the beard area…). She also has her house crammed full with all sorts of clothes and shoes in all sizes and formats, so there will almost always be something to wear for everyone.

She loves to do those workshops because of the results. In most cases, those crossdressers will not even recognise themselves on the mirror. Their reactions — she tells me — are varied: some start laughing hysterically and cannot stop. Others open their mouths in admiration and seem to become catatonic as it slowly — very slowly — dawns on them that, yes, this is really your face in the mirror. Some simply start crying — finally seeing in the mirror a reflection of the woman they always knew they were — therefore ruining their makeup, but that’s ok, because they can see their ‘inner woman’ finally becoming ‘real’. Others still cannot stop touching themselves, and the mirror, making sure it’s not a dream.

Whatever the reaction, the complete makeover, for the first time, is guaranteed to incite a reaction. And there is something that goes ‘click’ in their heads: women are beautiful, but with some magic, I can become a beautiful woman as well.

There is some truth in that. After all, the whole cosmetic industry exists explicitly for the purpose of making women more beautiful, or at least to make them feel pretty (which is not quite the same thing, but near enough to be easily mistaken!). As said before, the number of really beautiful women is not that high. Most, in fact, will be plain. Some will be ugly. Here is where makeup, the proper hairstyle, and the correct dress cut will help: disguising the bad bits and enhancing the good ones will truly make wonders. That’s the whole point! All women (and many men!) want to ‘look their best’. And they can achieve it with some tricks — sometimes, a lot of tricks. The good news? Well, most of the tricks that work so well on ugly women will work as well on ugly men!

I think that this is what creates the illusion that, given the right tools (which can go beyond cosmetics, of course; it also means hormones and surgery), anyone can be beautiful. In fact, I’m fond of quoting the very sexist (even misogynist) remark:

There are no beautiful and ugly women; there are only rich and poor women.

the point being that, no matter how ugly a woman is, with the right amount of money, they can ‘buy’ their beauty. This, of course, only works to a degree; nevertheless, it can work. You can do some miracles, especially if you start with reasonable attributes, or at least something that surgeons — and makeup experts — can work with.

As a consequence, some MtF transgender people also believe that this is a choice they also have. Well, as said, it’s true up to a point. You can look ‘good’ — in the sense that you can ‘show off’ your best features, and, through them, fascinate your audience — while at the same time downplaying your bad bits to a point that nobody notices them.

As always, I will bring up (yet again!) my mother-in-law as an example. She is not what we would call a beautiful woman. In fact, she is at the lowest grades of being ‘plain’; she easily slides in the ‘ugly’ category, especially when considering only her face. But that never stopped her to do some surgeries to become thin enough to be able to wear anything, dress exquisitely well, and have an impeccable hairstyle that enhances all ‘good bits’ of her features. And she has shoes to die for. (Sigh!) Combine that with a lot of charisma and high intelligence, and, even though she might not be a head-turner (if you look at her face), most people will instantly agree that she is an elegant and attractive woman. This is because you will perceive her as a ‘whole’ person, and not look at those ‘bad bits’ (on her face, mostly…) which show her plainness.

That’s one of the many reasons why she is one of my role models: she shows how even a plain-faced person can be a beautiful woman. It’s just a question to know how to pull it off.

So. Ugly women are nevertheless women; ugly women can also look sexy and great, it’s just a question of knowing how, and no, it doesn’t involve buying the most expensive clothes and makeup that you can put your hands on. But — and here is the point worth repeating — they are not ‘lesser women’ just because they don’t look like Uma Thurman or Angeline Jolie. Yes, it’s true that the mainstream media tend to overstate the ‘need’ to look beautiful — and this naturally makes the whole world believe that they have to work on ‘becoming beautiful’. After all, if you had a choice between Fiona the Ogre or Fiona the Beautiful Human Princess, which one would you prefer to be?

The truth is that many transgender people I know are still at the ‘ogre’ stage but they believe that somehow, as if by magic — a magic called ‘hormones’ or ‘surgery’ or ‘lots of makeup classes’ — they can become truly beautiful women indeed.

I’d say that half the population of the world, at some point of their lives, also thought that way, but soon got over it

Like all support groups, many MtF transgender communities are very affirmative — they encourage each other in pretty much all areas, not only in choosing clothes and applying makeup, but to learn how to walk in public in high heels without stumbling. As part of this encouragement and support, there are some ‘soft lies’ that are commonly exchanged across the community — like saying ‘you look great’ (when you, in fact, do not). It is meant to be a compliment to encourage others to come out of their closets, lose the fear of being seen in public, gain confidence and raise their self-esteem. And, yes, it is also an honest compliment when someone finally learned how to put their wig right on their heads, or mastered the art of walking on stiletto 5″ heels, or figured out that ‘less is more’ in applying foundation to their faces, and so forth. There are so many tiny little things to learn — which for half of the humans in this planet has taken all their lives to learn! — that mastering even just a handful is a big achievement for many. And such achievements — showing that it is possible to learn and progress towards becoming more feminine — ought to be encouraged.

But of course one has to keep a reality check. The face that is staring you out of the mirror, after the makeup techniques have been mastered, will still never be perfect. But that’s ok: half the population of the world has the same issue, too. MtF transgender people are not different. They just have to accept that!

Some, unfortunately, go a step beyond — they start truly believing that they are ‘just like a real woman’ and ‘truly beautiful’. Well, of course, beauty is in the eye of the beholder; but there are still a few universals in aesthetics (like the many ratios that a ‘perfect’ face is supposed to have — and such ratios have been experimentally validated and hold true across ages and cultures). Such beliefs are actually harmful, in the sense that sooner or later there will be a huge disappointment, when the mirror stops reflecting our wishful thinking and show us as we truly are: people deformed by male hormones at birth who happen to have all the wrong ratios for a female face — which can be corrected to a degree (with hormones and facial feminisation surgery), but… there are no miracles. You either have the luck to have been born with a gorgeous androgynous face, or, well, you won’t be able to fool anybody but yourself.

Instead of searching for the ‘perfect woman’ in your own face, it’s far better to accept the face that is staring out of the mirror. That’s what three and a half billion human beings do every day. You can do a lot with your face to improve it (starting with a smile — as Marilyn Monroe so well put it). You don’t need to ‘aim for perfection’ but merely enhance what you have best, and downplay what you dislike. Half the world does exactly that.

The advantage of thinking this way is that one will never feel somehow disappointed. One thing that makes me cry, out of frustration, is seeing some utterly gorgeous trans women, who are a man’s wet dream (after they have transitioned), but who, somehow, for some reason, truly don’t feel comfortable in their new roles, and de-transition back… Yes, I know, I’m being very frivolous and superficial, after all being a woman it’s not only about looking great! But, on the other hand, these cases (and sadly many more) seem to be exactly about that: people who transition, having convinced their doctors that they suffer from severe gender dysphoria, to be able to enjoy their new lives as women… and shortly thereafter realising that living their lives as a woman is not what makes them happy at all.

ThirdWayTrans is a good example — his blog is very insightful, as he explains how a certain traumatic condition in his youth was incorrectly diagnosed as severe gender dysphoria. He transitioned at age 19 and managed to live two decades as a woman, but the feelings of gender dysphoria still persisted. Eventually, TWT figured out that s/he could never fully transform his body (no matter how many surgeries he’d have) and his female role was becoming more and more artificial. After consulting with doctors, the main reason for the feelings that were mistakenly diagnosed as ‘gender dysphoria’ were recognised as trauma, he got treatment for trauma, and detransitioned back to male.

Such examples show that the quest for becoming the perfect woman will utterly fail for those who are still reaching out for that impossible dream. There is a limit to what surgery can do, but more importantly, there is a limit to how much you can enjoy ‘being a girl’ if you truly aren’t one — even if you do look gorgeous, there will always be something missing. There will always be the dream of the next surgery that will make you wonderful. But somehow, that seems not to happen.

Consider the story of ‘Maria’, who wrote a few years ago about her experiences as a trans woman on Susan’s Place, a very popular (and ancient!) forum for transgender people. Maria explains how hard it is for her to live her life as a trans woman because she simply cannot pass (and after some failed surgeries she made things even worse). So after months and months of abuse, of trying very hard to pass, she frustratingly appeals to the community at that forum — because for her the only choice right now seems to be to detransition. She also claims that she knows of many MtF transexuals, some of which having done gender affirmation surgery, who simply ‘gave up’ pretending to pass as women and present themselves as men. Beneath their clothes they still keep their female body, which allows them to easy the feelings of dysphoria. But they gave up the dream of living as women; it was simply too hard for them.

In the UK, in spite of the tabloid media’s insistence to the contrary, detransitioning is actually a very rare event. Of course there are a few exceptions, and those are the cases that the media picks up. Overall, however, all transexuals who went through the UK’s National Health Service seem to be well-adapted to their new role in society, and are, in general, much more happier than before, in all aspects — even if they’re not exactly contestants in beauty pageants.

I believe that the reason for that is mostly because of good counselling and an extensive real life test. When looking back at the life story of ‘Maria’, something immediately caught my attention: Maria apparently went ahead with her surgeries and hormones, and then started her life in the role of a woman. Well, she never mentions what she did during the real life test. Did she have one? She claims to have ‘tried hard to pass’ for a whole of three years after transitioning. But wouldn’t it have made more sense to have started with her role as a woman before she had those surgeries? Maria might not be at fault and she’s probably just a victim of bad counselling. She seems to be a very intelligent person and most definitely had not plunged deep into the abyss, blind-folded. She claims having read a lot about the subject, of consulting many doctors, of asking the doctors’ patients about the results, and so forth. She made careful, well-informed choices. But at the end of the day, what she complains mostly about is that there was a big delusion, mostly coming from the community, that gave her the idea that she could ‘pass’, and, therefore, she could live a life as a woman. Not as a transexual woman, but as a woman.

While I’ve definitely not seen enough examples to be able to state an elaborate opinion on the subject, I have this nagging feeling that a lot of disappointment comes from this delusionary aspect that the community tends to create (with the best of intentions!) that we could ‘pass’ and have the lives of beautiful women after transitioning. Of course I’m not blaming the support and encouragement. I’ve seen how different my crossdresser friends look like after they had a more serious makeover, made by people who knew what they were doing — compared to their first times out in public. Some of my friends have a natural good taste in women’s clothing and dress exquisitely well — and therefore ‘pass’ so much more easier. Some have great figures (for women) and can pretty much dress anything, which also allows them a much wider range of choices, namely, choices that will not ‘stand out’ in public. Some, being looked at from the back, with their perfect hair, would very likely pass anywhere in the world, even on bright sunlight. But see them from the front and… well, it’s impossible to confuse them with cisgender women. They just believe very strongly in that fallacy; and even when some actually look at themselves in the mirror and are being honest to themselves about the way they look, they still believe in the ‘miracle of hormones’, that they somehow will turn them into the perfect woman. And, of course, the community encourages them to think that way.

I think it’s more than time to start being more honest with those who are in transition. Of course that all encouragement and support should be given — and we definitely need a lot of that! But we should also be careful in how much delusionary thoughts we put in other people’s minds. Unfortunately, in many cases (if not all!), we’re being delusional about ourselves as well — and that means we will fail to provide the right kind of encouragement to others, simply because we are too irrational and emotional about our own image in the mirror.

To conclude…

The other day I got to answer a question on Quora from someone who asked if she could be transgender at age 62. The most simple answer is one given by Jamie Young (an author of several crossdressing e-books): if you ask yourself if you’re transgender, you probably are. Cisgender people never question their gender identity; it’s only transgender people who question it.

I believe that it’s a huge step to finally accept that one’s transgender — I think that it’s one of our first, and most intense, struggles. It’s because it is a struggle with oneself, and which takes place inside us. It shatters us, it defies everything we have learned and experienced in society, and we rebel against the thought. But eventually we will have to accept that we’re transgender.

Then comes the next step, which is to ask what to do about it. Here, I think, we have both to blame and to praise the Internet. Information about transgenderity has never been so easy to access as nowadays, in many languages. Thousands of communities world-wide provide online resources and a way to get in touch with them if you wish to know more.

But unfortunately there is also a negative side to the amount of information. Although, compared to other fields, transgender issues are in general correctly described and explained (if you stay away from websites from religious fundamentalists, that is), there is a certain bias in the information as it is presented, because, even though a lot of hurdles and obstacles are described, they seem more trivial and unimportant than the end result — which is to become a supermodel or an actress or at least someone worth to be praised for their looks. This is what we constantly get from websites, blogs, YouTube channels, Instagram boards, you name it… we’re swamped in a world of beautiful trans women, who describe their transition in very brief two lines, while they go on ranting (and vlogging) about every new pretty dress or hair styling they did, in excruciating detail. It’s hard not to be fascinated, and believing that such a perfect image of a woman could be attainable by us as well.

This creates incredibly high expectations — so high, in fact, that a lot of transgender girls try to skip their real life tests, want to jump straight into taking hormones and doing surgeries, and, without even a second thought about how they will continue their day jobs as lorry drivers or construction workers, sign up with surgeons to get them breasts the size of watermelons.

There is nothing wrong that the access to all those medical procedures is much easier today, and, thanks to competition world-wide, the prices for surgeries has been coming down as well. However, I constantly see cases of people blindingly entering transition, sometimes without any real need, but most importantly without proper counselling — and their blogs, vlogs, or channels suddenly go silent after a while. It’s not only about regret — it’s just that the real hard facts of life as a trans woman finally catch up with the dreams, illusions, hopes, and expectations, and they shatter them utterly and completely.

At this stage, there are a lot of options. Those who had the benefit of good counselling, before and after transition, will simply embrace their new lives with open hearts, reduce their expectations, and deal successfully with all issues and obstacles, seeing them merely as challenges to overcome. By then they feel less the urge to be in touch with the community; in fact, many sever all links with the transgender community, because they don’t want to associate with them any more.

Others had not-so-good counselling, or tried to avoid counselling and used some loopholes to Get Transition Fast, and now suddenly start to understand that it’s not as rosy as the Internet (and many support groups) painted it. It’s tough if you’re not rich and androgynous enough from the start, so that you might end up not only with a gorgeous body, but will also have enough money to do all surgeries. Unfortunately, only a tiny number of transexuals are in that category — but they are, by far, the most vocal on the Internet. Not necessarily as activists, but rather as individuals attracting a lot of attention because of the way they look so great, which distorts the actual reality — which is that most trans women will never be treated by others as ‘women’ but merely as ‘trans women’. Some will accept that and go on with their lives. Others, by contrast, will not be able to deal with the transphobia and simply give up because it’s way too hard for them to present themselves as women in an intolerant society.

So I think that we’re doing everybody a favour if we lower their expectations. There is a fine balance between giving support and encouragement, and telling people how truly gorgeous they are, and how well they pass, so that they start to believe in that delusional dream. Sadly and unfortunately, transgender people are fond of praising each other. It’s very hard to find that balance. A friend of mine, for example, is very honest with the comments she makes about how other transgender girls look like. More often than not, they feel offended and never talk to her again. But my friend is actually right: she is simply being very sincere, but that’s not what transgender people want to hear.

MtF transgender persons only want to hear about how beautiful they are as women, both inside and outside. And they want to hear more about their transitioning choices that will make them even more beautiful, so that they can finally pass, be accepted, and continue their lives as the women they have always been. But sadly they are unwilling to listen to those very few who are sincere in their opinions, trying to pull them away from their delusions.

And it’s not just the community that does that. I have very often felt that even my psychologist would prefer that I transition as well — although she knows perfectly well that I can only start thinking about that once all my other mental conditions — especially depression — are properly treated and finally cured. The theory behind that, I think, is that transition is really helpful in reducing gender dysphoria, and therefore all other conditions (like anxiety and depression) that go hand-in-hand with gender dysphoria will simply disappear. It’s no coincidence that a lot of transexuals start feeling much better once they start with hormones — they become more relaxed, more easy, more happy — and this applies to both MtF as well as FtM transexuals, the latter being quite strange, since testosterone is supposed to make a person more aggressive, more irritated, and so forth. The only explanation is that there is a strong psychosomatic component associated with taking hormones, which is rooted in the idea that finally that person is ‘doing something’ about their gender dysphoria, that merely taking the first steps will go a long way in reducing symptoms.

At some point, however, transexuals in transition will need to face reality. And here is where their former preparation (counselling, real life test, etc.) will be put to the test. Will they be able to face reality and deal with it? The good news is that most transexuals are very well prepared for their future lives and they are able to deal with their new lives; in fact, we almost never hear the stories of those who, thanks to their counsellors, quickly realised that they weren’t in the right path. My friend Cristy, referred on my previous article, is one of them: one session of group therapy with transexuals in transition was enough for her to realise that this was not her way (and she could afford it if she wished!).

I decided to go crazy: I’m a contestant on a competition held by Ondatex, a Portuguese/Chinese clothes brand, operating their own network of shops in the Lisbon area, as well as their own website (http://www.ondatex.com). It was easy to join the competition: all I had to do was to send them one of my photos, wearing one piece of clothing bought at their shops. And now, until February 8th, anyone is able to vote on the contestants’ photos — all it requires is a ‘Like’. The contestant with the largest number of «Likes» on their photo wins (they get a voucher to buy some clothes at one of their shops).

Of course I’m aware that this is a very basic advertising stunt to raise brand awareness. Obviously I know that the ‘Likes’ mean nothing: each contestant will naturally ask all their friends to vote for her. The brand knows that perfectly well — they care little about the quality of the pictures, or about the model poses, or even what piece of clothing they choose to wear! All that matters is the amount of ‘Likes’.

Why did I choose to participate? It was a devious plan: Ondatex has no issue with transgender people participating. Personally, I’m not aware of any contest in Portugal having ever been won by a transgender person. So this would be the perfect chance to show that we are just like any other persons: in my personal case, I’m vain like any other woman, I love the same clothing that they buy, and I go to the same shops (btw, Ondatex only sells original pieces ). If I win, this event would give the transgender people in my country some visibility — as well as showing that this network of clothes shops, like many others, have absolutely no problem in having transgender people as customers.

Therefore I’m doing something I never did before: I’m asking for your vote. You have to follow the link below and put a ‘Like’ there:

https://www.facebook.com/1389190381322969/photos/pb.1389190381322969.-2207520000.1454330967./1684585925116745/?type=3&theater.

That’s all. There aren’t many contestants, so I have a pretty reasonable chance to win It’s not even the prize in itself that is meaningful, but it’s a question of principle; and if there are a lot of ‘Likes’, maybe the brand owners consider the contest a success and do it again in the future. And maybe next time we get more transgender people to participate!

I thank you all in advance. If I win, I promise that I’ll share the prize with some of you, and together we’ll plunder the clothes racks at one of their shops

Big hugs and kisses!

Now, before you ask, let me say that I’m not taking any kind of hormones (plant-based, synthetic or natural) and I’m not having surgery. That might become an option in the future, and I’m not saying I won’t do it, but right now, I’m not doing anything of the kind.

This all started some months ago, when a friend of mine showed me her boobs. I was really impressed, since she’s 60+ and ‘grew’ them without surgery or hormones, in about a year or so. She has something around a C cup or so, which looks delightful inside a push-up bra — because she has actually something for the bra to push against (unlike rolled-up socks or even silicone prosthetics), she achieves a very convincing effect, which would get genetic women green with envy (as well as most crossdressers!).

How did she do it? Well, she used the well-established scientific principle of using negative pressure for expanding soft tissue (which has been awarded at least one patent). Translating into plain English: if you use a vacuum pump to ‘suck in’ the breast tissue, it will expand, eventually promoting actual skin growth and breast enlargement which becomes permanent.

Methods of promoting breath enlargement

In this day and age, the media put a lot of pressure upon women regarding their breasts. Having adequately-sized breasts — which almost always means ‘bigger than what you have born with’ — is promoted as being ‘desirable’ according to the current fashion trends.
The simplest procedure to achieve that is, of course, inserting implants. Breast augmentation surgery is the most popular type of cosmetic surgery. It’s relatively simple to do, the procedure is well-known, the effects last a long time (at the very least, ten years), and the results are, in general, very good.

It’s also expensive, and, of course, all kinds of surgery, even the most common ones, carry a certain amount of risk.

An alternative to silicone or saline-based implants is ‘autologous fat implants’, a fancy name to explain a two-step procedure. First, a liposuction is made (usually at the belly or similar area where too much fat has accumulated). The extracted fat gets purified and centrifuged, and injected in the breast area. The results are usually quite good, and since it’s fat that has been produced by that person, there is no risk of rejection or of any other complications — one’s fat is one’s fat. Even if the fat somehow dissolves or leaves the breast area, well, it’s just fat — it will be processed naturally by the body (it will only mean that a new surgery will be required…). The resulting breast augmentation will also look much more natural — after all, they will be augmented with plain, normal fat, and not any kind of device or unnatural substance. As an added bonus, of course, the liposuction will also mean a flat belly For some reason, this sort of breast augmentation is not as popular as using silicone or saline implants. I guess that the technique might be more complicated, not mastered by as many surgeons, and therefore more expensive.

For transgendered people, there is a further alternative: hormone therapy. By reducing male hormones (chemical castration) and increasing female hormones, the body will enter a state similar to a female puberty, and it will naturally develop breasts. This, of course, takes time; about the same time that it takes for a genetic woman to develop breasts in their puberty. And the results are not predictable: they depend mostly on genetics. If all the women in your family are flat-chested, it’s highly likely you will be flat-chested too, no matter how intense the hormone replacement therapy is. Some people, however, might have ‘good genes’ and develop rather large breasts after 2-3 years.

A much slower method is using phytohormones — a generic term describing a lot of plant-based substances which have similar properties than human hormones. ‘Similar’ in this case means that they can actually bind to the same components that human hormones can, and produce similar effects. There are quite a lot of plants which have such substances, probably the most common being isoflavones in soy (which actually has been shown to produce some unwanted effects in genetic females, like messing up with their menstruation cycles). Popular herbs that contain phytohormones are fenugreek, fennel, red clover, and a few more. The advantage of those herbs is that they can be combined to produce an extra effect. And there is the ‘queen of phytohormones’ — pueraria mirifica, a herb that is so rich in phytohormones that it should be taken on its own and not combined with other herbs.

Herbs are usually taken either in capsules, or creams to rub in your breasts. Infusions might also work, and there are also some skin patches (not unlike nicotine patches) which release a constant stream of phytohormones through the skin.

Herbs are wrongly promoted by the cosmetic industry as being ‘100% natural and 100% safe’. Neither claim is true. In almost all cases, the herbs have undergone a manufacturing process of refinement, sometimes extracting the relevant phytohormones or the active principle in the herb. The only ‘natural’ part of the process is that those phytohormones are not synthesized. In clinical HRT, it’s not unusual to use synthetic hormones: they also bind to the same places as natural hormones, but are hundreds or thousand times more effective than phytohormones; and because those molecules are synthesized, they can be engineered to have less undesirable side-effects than natural hormones. Herbs, by contrast, have ‘natural’ phytohormones, with all positive and negative aspects.

The claim of being ‘100% safe’ is also untrue. This claim is mostly based on the premise that the concentration of the active principles — phytohormones — is so low that it won’t have much effect on one’s overall health. But also because the effect is so low, it’s very likely that it won’t have any desirable effects at all. It just means that the harmful effects are diminished because of the low concentration.

The implication that ‘what is natural is safe’ is also a typical fallacy of the industry. In fact, most drugs available from pharmaceutical labs have a ‘natural’ origin — the active principle just gets refined and isolated, while all other harmful effects from a ‘natural’ product are eliminated in the procedure. Also, by contrast, tobacco is a natural plant, containing a natural substance, nicotine (which is present in everyone’s nervous system — it’s the basis for one of the three major neurotransmitters). And we all know how harmful that particular plant is. Nicotine is highly toxic and a poison even at low concentrations: so, just because nicotine is ‘natural’, it hardly qualifies as being ‘harmless’ or ‘safe’. It’s neither!

Nevertheless, herb-induced breast growth is very popular, because the industry has persuaded that this is a ‘safe’ procedure. But it also has risks — the same risks, in fact, as natural hormones or synthetic ones. The main difference is that because they will have such a low effect, things will take much longer to work in a desired way, but also the harmful effects may take much longer to manifest themselves.

Because everybody is different and reacts to phytohormones differently, sometimes you can achieve the same effects as with using natural human hormones in about the same period of time. A few friends of mine have noticed some considerable effects after a few months (usually 4-6), growing one or two cup sizes in that period. Some people have written good handbooks on the dosages and eventual health risks, so it’s worth reading a bit about the subject before blindingly rushing over to the Internet and ordering some product.

Hormone-induced breath growth is permanent, even if you stop the treatment. You will only be able to get rid of your breasts through surgery. That’s worth having in mind before you start such a procedure!

If hormones are not your thing, and surgery is too expensive (or the risk is too high), there are still two alternatives left. The first is the so-called ‘chi breast massage‘. It’s very easy to do, and allegedly it’s inspired by traditional massages done in the Far East to promote breast growth. Even if such a massage, by itself, might not make a huge difference, it won’t hurt to do it combined with other methods (I’ll expound on the theory why this might help the process later on).

And finally, last but by no means least, there is ‘negative pressure for expanding soft tissue’, or, more popularly, vacuum pumps. Let’s take a closer look at that.

The theory behind vacuum pumps

Since the dawn of the Internet, vacuum pumps have been offered by all sorts of spammers and scammers as a means to ‘enlarge your penis’ (and, once women started using the Internet as well, to ‘enlarge your breast’). Many people have discounted such claims as being pure quackery. By the mid-1990s, however, doctors and medical researchers have started to look more closely into this field of study.

We know that skin is not only flexible, but that it can be pushed and pulled to a reasonable degree, and its growth can be promoted — within limits. With young skin, or at least skin that is well hydrated and in good shape, the results are reasonably good. As we age, or neglect our skin care, the skin loses much of its flexibility (and gets wrinkled!). In general, however, most breast augmentation surgeries will not add dramatic changes in size. The skin will be stretched for a while over the silicone capsule, but it will adapt to the new size, and become smooth as before.

Complications started to arise with the constant demand made by women on larger and larger sizes. Also, transgendered people demanded to go from basically a flat chest to C or D cups. Especially with late-set transexuals, this might be a problem — adult males have, on average, a far larger chest area, and a D cup, or even a C cup, requires a huge amount of skin to be stretched to accommodate for the large implants (just a parenthesis: look up what bra cup size actually means — it’s not really ‘volume’, but the difference between the measurement of the rib cage and the measurement made at the nipple level. A large woman with a C cup will have a vastly larger breast volume than a skinny woman with a C cup).

Surgeons specialising in transexual breast augmentation surgery have therefore developed a few tricks. In my country, one of the pioneers in that area has invented the following procedure. First, the breast skin gets expanded, before the implant is inserted. He does that by doing a preliminary surgery, where just a ‘skin expander’ is inserted. Six months later, the skin has been successfully stretched, the expander is removed, and the final silicone implant is inserted. This allows even for flat-chested males to become fully bosomed women with breasts that look natural (taking into account their much larger rib cage).

In other parts of the world, other techniques have been developed, based on the same principle. The problem with this doctor’s approach is that it requires two surgeries, and, as said, surgery always entails a certain degree of risk. Wouldn’t it be possible to expand the breast skin tissue without surgery, and only afterwards insert the implant?

This was particularly important in the case of autologous fat implants. In surgeries with a silicone implant, the capsule is sufficiently strong to ‘push’ the skin out and force it to adapt to the new shape. With fat, things are not so easy, especially if someone wished to achieve a huge increase in size. Fat tends to ‘lose’ its shape and get distributed all over the chest area (and later, naturally eliminated by the organism) due to the pressure of the skin. So small improvements were easy enough to do, but huge augmentation was not.

In 1995, a company tried to develop a solution for this particular issue. They thought that they could ‘push’ the skin to conform to its new, stretched size first, and, once it gained its new shape, then the surgery to insert the fat could be completed. Therefore, the fat would nicely fill the space created and not ‘move around’ or lose its shape due to compression. This is the theory behind the BRAVA device.

To induce the skin to grow, they applied unbreakable plastic domes on top of the breast area to be enlarged, and applied a vacuum to it (basically, having an electrical pump sucking the air out of the domes). Vaccuum creates negative pressure on the skin: it pulls it to fill the plastic dome. After much careful research, they figured out the necessary amount of ‘pull’ to apply safely to the skin tissue, and have a computer built into their device that maintains the correct amount of vacuum. This computer monitors everything and it can even send the data automatically to the doctors following the procedure.

The BRAVA device is a clinical device; it has been tested under lab conditions, and its effects are well known, and approved by doctors as a preliminary step for breast enlargement procedures. It is a very expensive device — over €1000 — and usually clinics will buy a few and have their patients borrow it until they are ready for surgery. It is designed to be used all the time — about 16 hours per day — and worn under regular clothes. Under these conditions, breast enlargement is produced in about 4 months. After that period, the patient can opt for surgery (either with fat transplants or by using silicone implants) if they wish even bigger sizes — the breast skin tissue has now expanded and can accommodate much larger sizes safely.

By itself, the BRAVA system also promotes definitive breast growth. In many cases, patients can forget about surgery altogether, because the BRAVA system will allow them to gain one or two cup sizes on its own. It will also act as a form of breast lifting, and reshapes the breasts to make them look more regular, more plump, more round, etc. and this, by itself, might suffice in a lot of cases. The BRAVA system is rarely acquired by the patient on their own, but usually it’s bought through a doctor or a clinic that supervises the procedure, to ensure it’s used properly, safely, and achieving the desired results. As a consequence, its results are guaranteed by the manufacturer.

So that’s the scientific and technological background!

Obviously I haven’t given the BRAVA a try – that would be really out of bounds. Instead, I started with the tip of my friend: use two plungers, those types that you use to unclog the plumbing!

Plunging breasts

Plungers are cheap, but you need the type that is extendable, i.e. looks like a bellows. This is important. You buy two of those, the largest size you can get (they aren’t very large), and unscrew the handling stick.

Then use some kind of hydrating cream to gently massage your breast area. The cream serves two purposes: because we’re going to subject the skin to some stress, it’s good to keep it properly hydrated. And the cream will also help in maintaining the vacuum (sealing off the plunger).

Apply the plunger on top of the breast, and press it down so that all air escapes. Sometimes it helps to place one of the fingers over one border – for the air to escape – and then remove the finger once all air is out of the plunger.

That’s pretty much it. The vacuum created by the plunger is not perfect, but it will pull nicely at the breast tissue. It shouldn’t be too uncomfortable – the pull is steady but slight.

Just do it one hour per day or so. Some people do it once in the morning, and once in the evening. The good thing is that you can do other chores while having the plungers on – type on your computer, for instance – except perhaps for more violent exercise.

And you should see results after a few months!

Now this method has a few drawbacks. First, it’s highly likely that you won’t find a plunger big enough to fill the whole breast area. So this means that you have to start at some point and slightly displace the plungers a bit to cover a different area. After some weeks, as you see some of the growth becoming more permanent, you have to pay attention to see if all areas are growing at the same  speed, and that everything is symmetrical. That might mean just using the plunger on one breast for a while, for instance, until it becomes symmetrical again.

The other disadvantage is that the bellows part of the plunger will leave some marks, as concentric circles, which look rather odd. These will disappear after a few hours, and most likely after a good night’s sleep, but this is something you cannot do if you plan to go to the beach afterwards

And finally, you have no control about the amount of vacuum that gets generated. It’s all-or-nothing. The best you can do is to try with different brands to see if there is any difference.

But for the incredible low price of those plungers, it’s worth a try!

Now that you’ve mastered the basics, you can improve the technique. Get some cream for breast volume/lift – not one of those with herbs and phytohormones, but a ‘normal’ breast cream, which some women use every day to keep their breast skin firm and healthy.

Do some ‘chi breast massage’ at the beginning of your pumping session. No matter if the technique is worth a try or if it’s just quackery, the point is that the massage will do three things for your breasts:

• it will help the cream to be better absorbed
• it warms up the breast area, which allegedly turns the skin more flexible and more suitable to be ‘vacuumed’
• and it increases blood circulation in the breast area

The last point is perhaps the most important one. One of the explanations for the success of the vacuum pumping technique – ‘negative presssure’ – is that it tends to enlarge temporarily the blood vessels in the area, leading to better irrigation of the skin tissue and promoting its healthy growth. To grow, the skin needs a supply of nutrients, and it sounds logical that more blood means more nutrients.

At the end of the session, the breast area under the plunger dome might be reddish and sensitive. It’s time to apply some more cream (either the same one or just simply a moisturising cream), this time with a more softer massage (the breast area will be slightly tender and sore from the vacuum pumping area).

I have no idea if any of the above actually makes sense, but I definitely use that as my routine. I have two breast creams, actually, one for ‘volume’, the other for ‘firmness’. I start with the ‘volume’, chi breast massage, vacuum pumping, and then I apply the ‘firmness’ cream. Most probably, neither the massage nor the creams are seriously having an effect; but at least the skin on the breast area is baby smooth and looks very healthy, which is good!

Going up a notch

I started with the plungers because they are so cheap that if I got no results whatsoever, I wouldn’t be disappointed. And, indeed, after a few weeks I didn’t notice a huge difference (I took some pictures regularly to check on progress).

But one day, when fully crossdressing, I suddenly noticed something curious. My breastforms are tacky, having their own adhesive, to stick to the skin – it’s not strong enough to sustain their weight (each form weights 750 grams), but more than enough to keep them in place.

To get that nice cleavage line, therefore, I use the old trick of taping the breast area together, and stick the forms on top of the taped breasts.

But if my current outfit doesn’t have a low cut, then I forfeit the tape completely. And one day I noticed that I could actually bring the breast tissue together, even without tape, and, when sticking the breastforms on top of everything and holding them in place with the bra, the cleavage produced was as good as if I had used a tape. Wow! Suddenly, there seemed to be a lot more breast tissue than before. Not all bras work in the same way, but one of them created fantastic cleavage without any tape. I was impressed. Where did all that breast tissue come from? I hadn’t gained that much weight lately, so it must have come from the plungers.

And, indeed, when comparing pictures from a few months back, there was a slight difference. In terms of projection, there was no change. But in terms of volume, now I had more breast tissue to ‘play’ with. So clearly that had to come from the plungers!

Encouraged that vacuum pumping seemed to actually have some effect on my breasts (because some people report absolutely no change whatsoever), I started thinking of stepping up to the next level, and buy some real vacuum pumps.

Of course the BRAVA system was out of the question. Where would I place it, anyway? Also, the BRAVA is supposed to be worn 16 hours a day or so; I just have a few hours to do the pumping at the office, since, at this stage, I don’t even want my wife to know what I’m doing. But I certainly enjoy the nicer cleavage

A long time ago, I had come across the Noogleberry system. Noogleberry is manufactured in the UK, and it’s a manual pumping system (unlike the BRAVA, which has an electric pump). It’s very simple: a hand pump connected to a Y-shaped tube, which connects to two weirdly shaped plastic domes. It’s small enough to fit in a simple, non-descript bag (it looks like one of those bags to carry makeup), and is quickly assembled and disassembled.

What actually caught my attention was not the device itself, since it is actually pretty much similar to hundreds of similar devices. It was the community. It has a huge forum with thousands of Noogleberry users supporting each other with lots of tips and techniques. The company obviously encourages this vast exchange of information, which replaces technical support (although I’ve been told that their technical support is also extraordinary). So at least you’re not stuck with a company in China doing a cheap system with no support and having no clue how it works.

I thought a lot about this. It’s clear that almost all of those thousands of users did have good results with the Noogleberry; it’s impossible to believe that all of them have been paid to do raving reviews on a public forum!

aAnd the company neither hides the complaints from those for which the system didn’t work. Most actually just complain on the forums once and leave – and never have a chance to read some practical advice to get some results.

Results, of course, vary wildly, mostly because not everybody is very diligent with the ‘exercise’. The key to success is to be very regular. Unlike some forms of exercise, where you start seeing some results very quickly, and then it takes more and more effort to achieve a bit more, vacuum pumping means weeks or even months without seeing anything worthwhile happening, and then suddenly things might start to work. Then there might be some visible progress for a while, and it plateaux again, with no growth for a while. The key is not to give up too soon. Allegedly this mimics how breasts grow to most women during puberty as well (I have no idea); sometimes the growth might be minimal, and then, after a summer holiday, they grow like crazy, only to stop growing for several months again.

Because I saw some improvement from the plungers, at least I knew that I should expect some growth from using the Noogleberry, and maybe this growth would also be a bit faster and more noticeable. I had not too high expectations, but my expectations weren’t exactly zero, either. My only concern was to be able to be regular in the pumping: because my personal schedule is so dependent on others, I might not be able to be very regular. But I hoped that 3-4 times a week should have some effect.

Noogleberries can be bought from a few different sources, but in my case, I choose to buy them from Noogleberry’s account on eBay – they do a slight discount that way, and, depending on the location, you might get free shipping, thanks to eBay’s many agreements. I believe I paid something like €55 for it. Since thankfully both the UK and Portugal are part of the European Union, there are no more hidden costs

How it works

My first issue with the Noogleberry was: what size should I buy? There are at least four different sizes, from small domes to extra-large domes, and the problem is that they have been designed for genetic women, not flat-chested transgendered people. There is an online calculator/chart that teaches you how to buy the right size (not unlike buying a new bra!). Theoretically, one should buy a size that is just slightly bigger than one’s current breast size, so that the plastic domes get almost completely filled. As the vacuum pump start growing the breast tissue permanently, one moves from one size to the next.

The problem is that the domes are not only larger in terms of length/depth, but also in terms of circumference. Now flat-chested transgendered males have one problem here. Our chest size and rib cage is, comparatively with females, on average, much larger and wider. That means that even though we might have little breast tissue, the smallest domes will barely fit our nipples (that’s a slight exaggeration, but you know what I mean), since their circumference is so small.

On the other hand, getting a larger dome size means that not enough tissue will be ‘pulled’, and, allegedly, this means that the Noogleberry will not be working at the maximum efficiency.

I worked on a compromise. Unlike many genetic women and some transgendered individuals in transition, for whom having the perfect breast size in the least amount of time is essential, in my case I’m mostly ‘playing around’, not being overly too serious, and not expecting many results (and most definitely not fast).

So I bought the large size, because the circumference of those domes is pretty much the circumference of my own breast forms, and visually correspond to where my hypothetical breasts would be, if I actually had them. If that means that the Noogleberry will take much longer to work for me, so be it. At least the breasts will grow, from the beginning, at the appropriate size.

Needless to say, those domes are gigantic! I haven’t made the calculations yet, but I believe that each will easily take a liter of water. That’s huge! If I had breasts that large, they would be bigger than Pamela Anderson’s. I certainly don’t want them that big!

But here is the catch. One of the scientific papers quoted above shows that, in order to achieve a desired size, the vacuum pump must pull and stretch the breast tissue at around three times that size.

Why? Here is how apparently this device works. By pulling the breast tissue with negative pressure due to the vacuum, not only the tissue gets stretched, but it also swells — pretty much like you get some swelling when you get a beating (yes, you might get bruises just like if you have gotten a beating). The ‘swelling’ is a natural process by the body to deal with trauma, pulling more blood to the affected tissue.

Over time, repeating the process over and over again, the swelling becomes permanent, as the skin (and the underlying tissue) grows. Because skin is so flexible, for that growth to become permanently, apparently the skin has to be stretched to three times the desired size — because it will ‘contract’ naturally after each session.

That’s why the Noogleberry’s domes seem completely out of scale. To achieve, say, a C or D cup, the large domes actually allow the skin and breast tissue to be stretched to three times that size during each session.

Of course, after a session is finished, even with the swelling, the breast tissue will contract to a much smaller size. And over the weeks that swelling becomes permanent. But with ongoing pumping, the tissue will expand and expand, a little every bit, and what became permanent will not disappear any more.

At some point in time, even the large cups will be completely filled with the stretched tissue; when the nipples start to get crunched into the area where the valve fits, then it’s time to move to the next size.

By the way, the pump is manually operated with a single hand (it looks like the handle of some common bicycle pumps) and it has a round button which will release the vacuum, letting air in. The Y-tube will connect to a small airlock/valve on each dome: you can actually release the tube, and the domes will contain the vacuum. This allows for pumping more on one breast than the other if they are asymmetrical.

Trying it out — two techniques

When the package with the Noogleberry arrived, after unpacking it, I think that the first thing that worried me was — how do I actually hold the cups to my breasts? After all, you need three hands — two to hold the cups in place, one to grab the hand pump. Ironically, the small instruction flyer didn’t say anything about that subject, and searching on the forums did not provide any insights!

The cup’s edges are not symmetrical; instead, they are designed to follow the chest’s contouring. So the first thing I did is to recline on my chair, and twist each cup around until I found the perfect fit. Then I tried to hold both together with a single arm, and use the other hand to grab the pump. After a few false starts, a few times pumping will make the cups stick to your chest. Whew. It wasn’t easy on the first time!

Now there are basically two different techniques that can be used with the Noogleberry (or other manual vacuum pumping system): pump-and-hold or pump-and-release. Some people prefer one of the techniques over the other and get different results; others combine both.

Pump-and-hold is simply to pump, pulling the breasts into the cups until it becomes painful; then you slightly release the vacuum, and remain like that for the remainder of the session — say, half an hour or a full hour. It’s the best option if you wish to entertain yourself doing something else while pumping, like, say, working on your computer (which requires hands to be free) or doing some other kind of manual, light exercise (cooking and ironing should be fine; doing other more physical house chores will be difficult!).

Pump-and-release requires a bit more attention and a stopwatch. First you pump, again, until it starts to hurt, releasing slightly at the end. Remain like that for seven minutes. Then you release the vacuum — without taking the domes off — and wait another three minutes. Repeat again for the remainder of your session (so, for a half-hour session, you will go through this routine three times). With each subsequent pumping, it will probably pull more tissue than before.

Which system works better is a matter of speculation. Some claim that the pump-and-release method works slightly faster, because during the ‘release’ period, the engorged blood vessels during the ‘pumping’ period will be allowed to irrigate the breast tissue better, so with each new cycle, the actual skin being stretched will be more and more. Others claim that the pump-and-hold method works faster and doesn’t bruise the skin so much.

A combination of both techniques is also possible, for those who are undecided. Allegedly the best results are obtained during a 90-minute session. One starts with 3 cycles of pump-and-release, for half an hour. Then another half hour of pump-and-hold. Finish it off with 3 cycles of pump-and-release. To be honest, for me, that method is the one that definitely gives much more swelling. It also bruises the skin a lot, because I tend to overpump… and this leads me to the next point.

Risks, short-term and long-term

Using those bellow plungers is relatively safe, because they have just a fixed amount of suction, or, if you prefer, of negative pressure. All you can do is use them for longer periods, or more times per day. There is nothing else that you can do to ‘improve’ the technique.

With the Noogleberry, you have a relatively fine control over the amount of negative pressure you apply. If you apply too little, the domes will not even remain attached to your chest. But if you apply too much, the breasts will turn purple, and that means they’re starving from lack of blood — that’s an extreme case of overpumping and you have to be careful not to overdo it!

Regulating the amount of pressure is not that easy. Remember, with the BRAVA system, it’s a computer-controlled electrical pump that applies the pressure, and the settings are calibrated by a doctor. With the Noogleberry, you’re on your own.

At the beginning, it’s normal for the breasts to turn red (if they never turn red, it means you’re not applying enough negative pressure…). This redness is only temporary, and, especially with the pump-and-release technique, it’s usual that on the second or third cycle, the breasts won’t turn red any more.

But it’s also typical for us to become impatient and think, ‘if I apply just a little more negative pressure, maybe this whole process of swelling and growing will go faster…’ That’s true to a degree — but it’s very, very easy to overpump, and that means that the whole chest area will really look black and blue (or at least purple/yellow…) as if you have taken a beating. Seriously! It’s not a pretty sight. And I’m sure it cannot be healthy, either!

Because finding the right balance is not so easy, I’ve been told that beginners like me tend to overpump very easily, and get frustrated by the bruising. The best way to deal with the bruises, of course, is to stop pumping for a while, until they heal. But that means spending days or even weeks without doing your regular pumping, and pretty much wasting time which could have been put into productive pumping instead. So ‘veteran’ nooglers (does that word exist?) will know how to apply the exact amount of negative pressure, to avoid bruises, but to achieve the best and fastest result. That takes some experience!

Some nooglers tend to say that it’s possible to overpump a bit if you use the push-and-release technique; by contrast, you should be more careful using the pump-and-hold method. Also note that even though during the pump-and-hold method you technically should not need to worry about more pumping, in practice, that’s not the case. The vacuum created by the domes is good enough, but not perfect: as you move around, even doing simple things like typing at a computer keyboard, sooner or later some air will enter the domes, so once in a while you need to give the hand pump a squirt. According to some studies, it’s the constant vacuum that makes the difference.

Also, the skin gets more ‘stretchy’ over time, as it adapts to the negative pressure. This means that at the very beginning you might not be able to stretch the breast tissue more, but, after an hour or so of pump-and-hold, the tissue is more stretchy, and you can pull it in by applying a few more squirts on the pump.

To give you an idea… on my first day with the Noogleberry, at the pain threshold level (which would be the equivalent of overpumping if I let it stay that way), my own breast tissue would fill, at most, 1/3 of the dome. My domes have no markings on it (the Noogleberry site sells some domes that have a small scale, for you to figure out your ongoing growth), so I cannot be very precise with the measurements. After a bit over a month of pumping, now the breast tissue fills around 60%, or a little less than 2/3 of the whole dome. That’s how stretchy skin can be! But actually when I start a pumping session, I usually cannot go further than 1/3. It’s only after some time, at least an hour or so, that the tissue ‘gives way’ and allows itself to be stretched further. And of course it becomes harder to gain more volume — probably it will take a whole year to fill the whole dome.

Short-term side-effects are not only the swelling itself (which is a desired effect!) but mostly the redness, bruising, and irritated skin. That’s why it’s really fundamental to have the breast skin very well moisturised, before and after each session. The skin will really be subject to torture. After my first day, I was really shocked, because I feared I had ruptured all capillary blood vessels on the breast area! (I have fragile capillary blood vessels on some areas of my body…) This took a few days to subside, until I felt bold enough to try again, this time applying much less negative pressure, but doing it for extended periods of time.

The standard domes don’t have a sharp edge, but it’s still an edge, which means that after the session is over, there will almost certainly some red ‘rings’ around the breast area. Unlike the plunger, at least they will not be concentric circles! And depending on how well-treated your skin is, this will either get away after a few hours or during the night; it’s rare that they will remain longer than that. Noogleberry also apparently sells some ‘edge protectors’, made of silicone or some soft tissue, which avoids the red rings or at least limits them (the BRAVA system, for instance, is very well cushioned at the edges).

It’s also normal if the breast tissue, even if it wasn’t overpumped, to be slightly pinkish after a session, while it is swollen. The skin will also feel very soft and tender, and the whole swollen area will have a strange but nice feeling to it — more on that later!

How long does the swelling remain? This is also a matter of debate which depends from person to person and on the technique used. Some genetic women report that the swelling lasts for ‘several hours’. What this means is that they use the Noogleberry just before they go out clubbing, which turns their breasts larger and plumpier, and that situation remains for the whole night. If they can avoid the red rings and the pinkiness, that means ‘growing’ one or sometimes even two cups — while the swelling lasts! — and becoming the centre of attention during the night And, at the same time, of course, they are contributing to making the swelling permanent. But even the temporary swelling is useful on its own!

Is that claim hard to believe? Well, I, for myself, can very well believe such claims. I would say that my chest is not totally flat — the Noogleberry works better with people that have some body fat (that doesn’t mean being overweight! Just not cadaverously skinny…) — but is perhaps an AA cup or thereabouts. After a session of noogling, the swelling allows me to fill a (padded) D cup bra almost completely:

You can see on that picture the pinkiness of the swelling as well as the red rings quite distinctly. The bra is not padded with socks or anything like that; it just has some embedded foam to create a full form.

And how long does it last? In my case, I would say at least 4 hours, at least. On the following morning I still see a substantial difference in size (although the skin returned to its usual colour, and the red rings have disappeared completely); but after 24 hours, of course, they are exactly as the day before. Well, not ‘exactly’. Over weeks and weeks, there is some slight change. As said, even though the unswollen breast tissue does not ‘protrude’ like a real woman’s breast, it already has so much new breast tissue (even if spread among a vast area, therefore not really noticeable) that I can do awesome cleavage with it, even without using a tape. Here is a recent picture where I’m just using my Amoena breastforms inside a D cup bra, but no tape whatsoever:

You can see the cleavage line quite well, and no, it’s not ‘enhanced’ with makeup or Photoshop; it really looks like that — and it’s very soft to the touch, too

Will my ‘swelling’ become ‘permanent’? It’s possible, and, if that’s the case, I could easily use a push-up bra and forfeit the breastforms altogether. That would be fantastic — but it will probably require many, many months of pumping, and I’m taking a break during the summer (not because I’m planning to go to the beach — I’m not a ‘beach person’ — but because I still don’t want to do the pumping at home in front of my wife). Maybe next year!

There are other pitfalls, too. One of the things that will also grow are the nipples — not necessarily the aureola (that might happen much later, as the whole breast grows), but just the nipple, and it will project much farther. This can actually cause some discomfort, especially for us genetic males who are wearing our daily clothes braless, and will get our usual male constantly rubbing on the nipples.

Noogleberry, again, sells something they call ‘nipple protectors’. This is a small cap made of silicone that sticks to the nipples and prevent them from being expanded. A cheaper alternative is just to tape the nipples:

That way, as the breast tissue gets expanded, the nipples are firmly kept in place and prevented from expanding at the same time. Of course, some people will also want larger nipples and enjoy the feeling from having them rubbing on one’s clothes

Long-term issues, I’m afraid to say, is pretty much what every women will also be subject to. ‘New’ breasts from recently grown expanded tissue will look soft, plump, and firm, in the sense that they might project well and feel round and full. But over time, gravity will take its toll, and they will naturally become droopy — like it happens with genetic women as well. Keeping up with a maintenance routine with the vacuum pump can actually help against droopiness — say, doing a few sessions once or twice a year to keep the firmness. And, of course, special breast creams for firmness will help as well.

Then there is obviously a higher risk of breast cancer. This means doing regular mammographies just like women do, and learning how to do frequent breast self-exams. Yes, don’t laugh: males can develop breast cancer as well, and, because using these breast enlargement techniques will expand the breast tissue several times, it means a higher probability of developing breast cancer as well.

And, of course, there is another aspect: how to hide those breasts once they have grown to become noticeable?

A few of my male crossdresser friends have no real problem in having large male boobs, because they also have a lot of body fat on other places of their bodies. We are conditioned to imagine fat males having also some breast tissue, so that means it won’t be much noticeable for most people.

But if you have a good figure, and have grown your breasts by a considerable amount, than it means forgetting about going bare-chested in public places — unless, of course, you’re prepared to shock everybody. In many cases the vacuum-grown breasts will really look like ‘real’ female breasts and will be hard to explain; others might just have a growth that is not immediately noticeable as ‘female breasts’ (not without a bra, at least).

The bouncing at every step will be thrilling at first, and very exciting — or even erotic! — but depending on the size you’ve grown them, they might actually become annoying — as it happens to genetic females. That truly means getting used to wear a bra every day. If you are still presenting as a male every day, then it means avoiding tight clothes or see-through clothes. Shirts (if not too tight) actually work very well to disguise the breasts, and they don’t look as sloppy as oversized T-shirts or polos. But you will have to avoid white shirts or very light colours, especially in summer, since even a nude-coloured bra will be visible under the shirt.

Thrilling experience!

I remember writing some years ago that if I had breasts, I would go crazy by feeling the urge to be constantly fondling them; I’m truly a ‘breast person’ in the sense that I find breasts very attractive.

Of course, back then, it was only a hypothetical scenario! Now I have a tiny little more breast tissue — not really visible enough to be considered ‘breasts’, to be honest, and most people seeing me bare-chested wouldn’t really see anything different. But they already feel different to me. The extra tissue is already a bit noticeable. With a bra with elastic bands, they do jiggle a bit when walking — not much, but enough to be perceptible! When sleeping on my side, I can feel the breast tissue from one breast touching and covering the other. So yes, all those slight changes in my body are quite noticeable to me, even if nobody else will notice the difference!

And it’s true that during the few hours after a session I’m constantly fondling and rubbing them They’re incredibly soft, and rubbery to the touch, in a way that silicone isn’t; they feel great, like breasts from a young woman — which, in a sense, that’s what they are — and that naturally triggers in me the desire to rub and touch them. I feel especially gratified for holding a cupful of them in each hand — and noticing that they actually cannot be wholly cupped by my hand (and I have large hands), even days after the swelling have subsided. Some bra size calculators, based on my over-the-nipple and under-the-breast measurements, calculate my bra size to be 42D (95D in Europe), which seems absolutely unlikely, if you actually see them:

These don’t look like D-sized breasts! And, of course, once the swelling subsides, they will shrink a lot.

Here is the catch — and even genetic women do get that wrong. When we see D-cupped beauties, they usually have small chest areas. The letters don’t really mean ‘volume’, but merely the ration between two measurements. If you have a very small chest area, a D cup seems huge, because the difference in those measurements — 4 inches in the US sizing system — means that a huge volume is necessary for that. By contrast, if you have a very large chest area, then a difference of merely 4 inches is not really much and requires little volume. Also, the larger the chest size, the flatter a breast with the same volume will be — since the breast tissue will be spread around a much vaster surface area.

To make a difference that is really noticeable, then you need a huge volume. The D cup bra I showed on the other picture is really not very noticeable under a shirt — honest! Of course, if I wear a very tight T-shirt, and add my corset beneath that, then it will attract attention, even now! But I don’t do that — unless I’m wearing a jacket on top of everything — and I estimate that my current breasts will need to have a permanent growth of at least three times their current size to really become noticeable. And only then I will be able to forget about my prosthetic breastforms altogether

But they still feels great, even now They are much more sensitive than before, and the nipples are larger and more projected — they will show quite clearly under relatively tight shirts. If I bump into things with my breasts, then it also hurts much more than before, because they are so much more sensitive. And that’s just with a couple of months of pumping.

I cannot wait to see the results after a year or two

Indulge me for a moment as I step forward into the basking glow of my own spotlight

So, to make a long story short (or as short as I can): my local crossdresser group did their monthly party at a restaurant/bar in the neighbourhood of Lisbon. This has been going on regularly every month for a bit over two years. The first time the group met there for having some dinner and a few drinks there were only four members present. Last Saturday, we were around 40 or so. This is more memorable than you might think, and, as a result, I will need to frame this into context again.

If you live in North America, or perhaps even in the United Kingdom, or some liberal country in Europe (‘liberal’ in the sense that people are a bit more tolerant), getting a group of 40 crossdressers in a restaurant is nothing special. Almost every city in North America, even in the Bible Belt, has a crossdresser/transgender suppport group of some sort. They might be more or less organised, and might have existed for a few years or a few decades. Most will provide ‘safe’ environments for crossdressers of some sort — places where they can not only talk, but enjoy their femaleness in private, maybe in a bar or restaurant, perhaps in a hotel, or simply at some private residence which is big enough to hold a party. While several crossdressers might still be at a stage where they still don’t have courage to get out on their own, those who do will soon find their nearest support group and ‘gang together’, and start going out wherever it’s possible to go.

Because of the sheer size of the population of large, liberal countries, ‘crossdresser-only’ bars, or at least ‘crossdresser-friendly’ bars, are financially sustainable. Putting it in simple words, there are enough crossdressers around to allow the management to make a profit. Obviously, the larger (and the more liberal) the city, the more likely that such bars and restaurants thrive. In some cases, like the UK, the transgender community is so large that they can pool money and resources together and open their own nightclubs; in other cases, they are enough to be able to at least hire large salons (say, in hotels) and organise ‘crossdressing conventions’ and similar mega-events.

And because there is a plethora of crossdressing and transgendered types, each can have their own groups, clubs, and events. ‘Crossplayers’ (crossdressing cosplayers), for instance, will very likely go to different events than ‘common’ crossdressers. While there might be points of contact between the many communities, the sheer size of them allows separate groups to get together in isolation from each other.

In Portugal, however, the transgendered community is simply too small for that. We have no choice but to share places used by the LGBT community and other alternative lifestyles. Therefore, we live under unusual circumstances, where swingers, BDSMers, crossdressers, female impersonators, and the remaining LGBT lifestyles are bundled together under the same roof. Even on the LGB side of things — by far the largest group! — only relatively recently have appeared ‘specialised’ bars/clubs for some selected subgroups, like bears. A decade ago or so they would also have to share the same environments as all the other subgroups.

This, of course, is a mixed blessing. On one hand, some members of specific subgroups might feel ‘awkward’ towards being ‘exposed’ to someone belonging to a different subgroup in the same environment. But on the other hand, it builds bridges between the different communities, cultures, and groups, and that requires an open mind and actively practicing tolerance towards others. It also (inevitably) leads to an opportunity to learn more about different lifestyles and gender expression.

The place we went on Saturday is a good example of this. It was originally a very private place established by a retired female impersonator for swingers. Soon, however, the BDSM community, also requiring some privacy, came to the same spot. Since there is a certain amount of bisexuality among swinger groups, it naturally lead to other LGB members to join the events, even if they were neither swingers, nor BDSMers. The restaurant/bar soon added some shows done by female impersonators; from there it was just a small step for the non-fetishist crossdressers to be allowed to join those events, and sponsor their own events regularly. However, I understand that at the very beginning, the crossdressers were actually a small minority, but were very well accepted by the remaining groups, who showed exemplary tolerance towards them. In fact, those events are mostly designed for social interaction — which, in Portugal, almost invariably means eating a lot together and that is the main pretext for socialization…

As time passed, the crossdresser group grew in size, until last Saturday, where we were clearly in the majority (the space is not that big). The remaining members of the other groups certainly didn’t mind. They mingled freely with the crossdressers, sitting at their tables, and mutually taking pictures of each other. Some female impersonators — who, in general, are usually not overly friendly with the crossdressing community (mostly because of the fetishists among them) — were generous enough to give us a free show; but the show also included a genetic female stripper, which is quite unusual in a ‘female impersonator show’. Such ‘mix and matching’ of the several communities is common in that particular place, but, to a degree, it’s rather more common in Portugal than the alternative (i.e. taht each community can afford their own bar or club). Personally, I think this is absolutely fantastic — it’s a spirit of great mutual tolerance and a profound display of open-mindedness. And, of course, being a crossdresser doesn’t limit one’s choices. Many crossdressers are simultaneously BDSMers, sissies, swingers, or subscribe to any other of the many possible alternative lifestyles; others, like myself, are almost asexual and plain vanilla. Neither group minds the other and there is a real display of interest in each other’s self-expression and lifestyle.

There is, however, a catch. Non-fetishist crossdressers are plagued by fetishists who are constantly lusting after sexual partners who crossdress. As such, getting access to a place where crossdressers are present is seen as having the key to Paradise. That, in turn, violates the trust of the other communities present in the same space, who revere their privacy. This has necessarily to be maintained at all costs, and requires a serious amount of trust among members. Therefore, to allow access to such places inevitably requires going through a process of ‘filtering out’, through online interviews and personal contacts, until someone is deemed to be trusted with full access to those environments. This is perfectly acceptable: we want to keep stalkers out, for our own safety, but also to comply with the privacy of the other groups.

Such ‘screening’ and ‘filtering’ is not unusual in certain transgendered communities. The Beaumont Society in the UK is a good example of such practice. There are always events where anybody is free to come, but access to many of those events require a process of admission as a member which implies adopting a code of conduct and sticking to it. Of course this is not the only example, and different groups (even just online groups) have different sets of rules, with more or less strictness. Our own group is not much different from those — that’s why, for instance, I’m not posting things like names, addresses, or even pictures of those who were present without their full permission.

All right, this is enough to give you the overall context! Now I’m going to bother you by becoming more personal…

For several days before the event, I planned the whole outfit and routine well in advance. The shoes I was going to wear had been ordered by mail, and they came two days before the event, so I could try them out, wearing them in extended periods at the office, and walking in them to make sure I could do it. It was a slight risk to wear brand new shoes, I know, but that part of the plan actually worked out well.

Some things went not exactly according to plan. I wanted to give my hair a more glamorous look, which implies some heat and curling, which I don’t know how to do (yet) — so I went to the salon where my manicurist works. She had already asked her boss if he also took care of wigs, so I knew that to be the case. However, it seems that he doesn’t do them ‘on the spot’, but you take the wig to be cleaned/styled one day and pick it up on the next. This is mostly because wigs, even human hair wigs, are not supposed to take a lot of heat and should dry on their own. Bummer! So I had to wash it at home and put some rolls. I expected to give it a lot of combing afterwards, but, alas, that didn’t happen, so while my hair got a lot of volume and was sort of fluffy, it didn’t look quite right.

Actually, on Saturday, my preparation was limited to a much shorter timespan than I expected. I had the whole Saturday measured by the minute, and, because my wife knew I was going out, I wasn’t expecting any difficulties. All shopping was done. I woke up and started with the bathing routine, which also included scrubbing and removing the little patches of hair that the laser hair removal treatment still hasn’t destroyed. I expected to do a close shave on the face as late as possible. Then it would be time for lunch, perhaps a short nap, and do the rest of my routine. Last time I took 4 hours, mostly because of the stupid false lashes which refused to get stuck in the right place, as well as the false nails (which I still need to use while my real nails grow back, after having broken one of them last month). So I planned to start at around 3 PM with the final stretch of all preparations and be ready by 7 PM. The dinner started at 8 PM, and I expected to take an hour to get to the place — I’m familiar with the overall location (it’s near my former university and I had a lot of friends back then living in the area), but there are a lot of tiny streets which I’m not familiar with. And the restaurant/bar/club has absolutely no distinctive marks on the outside, not even the name, for absolute discretion. So one hour of driving and looking around would be enough. And no, I wasn’t even provided with the address, for safety reasons: they would tell me over the phone where to drive to, once I was near the place.

But nothing went according to plan! My wife had to spend the weekend doing some work for university, and suddenly she realised that we had picked a professional pen on Friday with the wrong colour, so she couldn’t do her assignments. So that meant we had to go out again to the same place to buy it (since it’s a very special kind of pen, it’s not sold everywhere, but just on specific stores with professional artist/architect tools). I couldn’t even do it on my own, since I might do some mistake (picking the wrong colour, wrong pen size, or wrong cartridge…).

And I had to wait. I thought we’d do that in the morning, so that she had more time to do her work. But, instead, because she hadn’t the pen to draw, she started to do the other task on her assignment, which was picking and selecting some photos and retouching them on Photoshop. Those photos would also have to be printed on a print shop in large sizes. Since the print shop carries the pen she needs, first she needed to deal with the photos, then we would go out.

You can imagine how my anxiety levels started to rise! We usually have lunch around 1 o’clock; it was already 3 PM when we started having lunch — remember, that was the time I expected to have already had a nap and hoped to be in the bathroom doing my things!

It’s not that we took a huge amount of time. 2 hours later, I was back at home running into the bathroom. But I was in such a state of stress that everything seemed to be going wrong: stockings ruined, the hair was a mess, and it seemed that I was even taking more time than usual! I could only think, ‘I cannot make it, I cannot make it, this is impossible, I have no time!’

But at around 8 PM I was finally on the last stages, so I texted the event organiser to let her know I would be a bit late, but definitely coming. I rushed out of the home, not even caring if any neighbours were around to see me. And actually I took slightly less time than I thought to arrive at the destination; it was around 9 PM when I finally found the place. Now I could relax.

One of my fantasies has always been to go to a restaurant crossdressed and be treated like a woman; this I can now consider to be achieved. Of course, this is a ‘special’ restaurant, one which fully accepts transgendered and crossdressed people, and will definitely be inclusive and not discriminative. Nobody (neither the staff nor the other clients) will ‘confuse’ your gender or fail to address you with the ‘correct’ pronoun; this is taken as granted, if you present yourself as a woman, you’re going to be addressed as one (unless you explicitly tell them otherwise!). To make things even easier, there is a unisex toilet — no need to worry if you’re going to the ‘wrong’ one

My wife always wonders what crossdressers talk about when they’re together. She always assumes they spend all their time discussing lingerie, clothes, and accessories. Of course that’s just stereotyping; we talk pretty much about everything. In fact, I was assigned a seat next to my very good friend Cláudia (whom I had visited during Carnival), and one crossdresser coming from the city of Oporto who spent the whole evening telling jokes (she’s definitely the soul of the party) — she could very well have her own stand-up comedy act, since she’s so good and has an unusually large repertoire Obviously the conversation sometimes turns to more ‘feminine’ things; in fact, it was actually fun that the first comment I got from a genetic female sitting nearby was about my boobs and if they were ‘real’ (no, if you haven’t guessed by now, they aren’t — they’re just silicone prosthesis) Someone else also wanted to know if my hair was real; to which I had to answer that ‘nothing about me is real except the lips’ (on that day, because my fingernails still haven’t grown back to my preferred size, I was using false nails as well — not even those were ‘real’ ).

I also managed to get introduced to the best-looking crossdresser I know in our community; she has a perfectly female body and natural hair. She’s perhaps my mirror image: everything in her is ‘real’, and, except for shaving, she really doesn’t need to do much to look like a woman; in fact, I was always thinking how she’s able to pass as a male in her real life

Crossdressers are constantly complimenting each other, and that is something I have had little experience with — outside the online world. Online things are much easier: I can focus the camera from the best possible angle, and, due to the bad lighting at home, most imperfections are naturally hidden. Here, at the restaurant, I was going to be under scrutiny of all angles. And to make matters worse, I didn’t have a simple way to ‘check myself out’ (unlike the webcam, which allows me to see what I’m showing to my viewers). Think about dancers always train in front of a mirror, but their performances are on stage, where they cannot see what they’re doing — that’s pretty much how I felt!

I have to confess that I must have a slight case of body dysphoria (I have also mentioned this to my psychologist). As a male, I consider myself profusely ugly in all regards; there is not one redeeming feature in my face or body which I consider positive. As a female, I’m very critical of all those features which are absolutely male in aspect and that are impossible to disguise: the biggest issue is by far my nose, but also the triple chin and the strong jawline (just to use the face as an example; I could go on with the rest of the body…). Those features are so outstandingly ugly and un-female that they are so overwhelming as to render my face an absolute disaster. So all I can do is to enhance the remaining features that are not so bad. My lips, fortunately, are perfectly female (I had huge problems with that when I was a kid!), and all I need to do with them is smile. The eyes are androgynous: not overly male, neither very female, but pretty much gender-neutral: all they need is a bit of makeup, some mascara, and perhaps some false lashes to enhance them (except for the corner, my eyelashes have a relatively decent size — I certainly know many genetic females with shorter lashes — so usually I really don’t need false lashes; but that night was special, so I added some falsies; the two sets I have are reasonably natural-looking). The eyebrows are trimmed, and, these days, women wear much thicker and more expressive eyebrows. The ugly ears are never seen under my hair, and the hair itself helps to frame the face better so that it doesn’t look too male.

So what I do is to enhance all these more positive features and disguise the jawline a bit. There is nothing I can do to make my nose and triple chin to disappear, however. And those features will always ruin my chances to pass.

Body-wise it’s a bit simpler. I have by no means a good shape, but that’s what shapewear is for! Anyone who is chubby can get away with the right padding to get a hourglass shape. Skinny types are incredibly easier to disguise and to look female, but we chubbier ones can do a reasonably good job with an hourglass shape; it never gets out of fashion and always attracts some attention. So although my proportions are not quite right — my head always seems strangely too big for my body — they are acceptable at a distance.

That’s why I usually assume that all the compliments I get are mostly out of courtesy. In fact, I have two sources of comments that I take much more seriously. Online, when I sometimes go to a ‘regular’ webcam chat (i.e. one where no transgendered people are around), I’m immediately read as a male. Sometimes there are a few hesitations, but, in general, after a minute or so, there is no doubt for others that I’m not female, and then I get all the sorts of rude comments as you can imagine.

The other source is my wife. That particular evening she told me that it was a no-no to wear a mini-dress that would display my cleavage as well. I shrugged that off, since the dress was not that mini (it reached my knees, after all) and it didn’t expose so much cleavage — it was still above the bra line. So I think that my wife was being unusually stern. Still, she scolded me for wearing things that were not appropriate for my age. I had no ready answer to that, except that currently I’m not exactly trying to look 20ish (which I don’t) but I certainly don’t want to look like an old lady of 80! Instead, I’m 45, and I have no problem in looking sexy with 45. There is a huge difference between ‘sexy’ and ‘slutty’. I wore fishnet stockings suspended from a garter belt, but fishnets by themselves are not ‘slutty’; it really depends on the rest of your outfit. And, in any case, this was not a ‘formal’ dinner (I have dresses for that as well!) but rather a prelude for a party in a bar — so I dressed accordingly.

Apparently the biggest criticism was my lack of colour. And it’s true: I tend to wear black and brown most, especially in the winter. But I promised that the next time I’ll wear a red/black dress instead, which has undergone extensive modifications by my seamstress in order to fit me well and become slightly longer (to accommodate my longer torso).

The rest, well, I have to admit that it was pretty embarrassing for me to be subjected to so many compliments; I’m simply not used to that at all.

Because the air conditioning was not working (just the ventilation), and the dining room is in a basement, this place quickly became very hot. I was not really prepared for that. It’s springtime, the weather is actually reasonably fine for the season, but the nights are still chilly. But I expected that there would be some heating (not overheating!) so I picked a relatively thin dress, and wore a black top beneath it. The black top was the first thing to go; it actually covered part of my cleavage so that meant displaying even a bit more. It was still incredibly hot, and I regretted not having used my heat-resistant Kryolan foundation. From the pictures I took when returning home, however, it seemed that the foundation still held reasonably well; other girls were unfortunately not so lucky…

Lately, when going out, I feel a certain sense of detachment. This doesn’t always happen, nor is it very consistent. What happens is that I’m constantly observing what I’m doing, and it feels that somehow my Sandra personality is pulling the strings, while that silent observer that I conventionally label ‘I’ is just put on hold and simply watches. This is, of course, not a very precise description; the silent observer does not have a ‘personality’ by itself, it just watches and observes. Now, for most of you, this might sound incredibly strange; unless you have by some chance taken some Buddhist meditation classes, then you’ll be very familiar with that sense of detachment, as you watch your own mind. In my own tradition, we train to meditate everywhere, not only during formal (silent) meditation classes — it is something you’re supposed to do all the time, even while sleeping. I will not bother you with the details on how that can be accomplished. It’s way easier than it sounds, but it definitely requires some training to accomplish. So, technically, while probably my Buddhist teachers would frown at this description of mine, while I’m presenting myself as Sandra, I’m actually ‘meditating’ on what my mind as Sandra is doing.

That is what actually makes me also absolutely calm after just a few minutes. Let me roll back time for a bit. While I was getting dressed and doing the final touches, I was incredibly stressed out. Then, because there is always the risk of being caught by the neighbours — since it was quite early, although the sun had just gone down — there is an adrenaline rush, during which I’m naturally excited but also nervous. But as the adrenaline rush fades, I tend to relax and just freely enjoy the feeling of ‘being Sandra’. After some more minutes, let’s say half an hour or so, I’m fully ‘adapted’ — for the lack of a better word — to ‘being Sandra’.

Now there is no ‘personality dissociation’ — at least not in my case, although a lot of crossdressers describe it that way. There is no real difference between what I call ‘me’ and what I call ‘Sandra’. I’m not suddenly overly feminine, or, as some describe it, I don’t ‘feel’ suddenly like a whore in heat just because I’m wearing women’s clothes. The sensation is way more subtle; let’s say that I just adopt the role that I would have developed if I had been born in a female body. I don’t really need to role-play, or to act, in order to ‘be Sandra’. An interesting aspect of the members of our group is that almost all behave precisely the same way as I do (there are a few exceptions, as I’ve observed). They don’t need to ‘act feminine’ in order to manifest their gender expression as females; instead, they simply ‘act as themselves’, and, in most cases, that behaviour will be feminine, without the need to ’emphasize’ it or ‘improve’ upon it in some way.

And, in essence, that’s pretty much what I’m also comfortable with. I’m not interested in playing a role, i.e., trying to look like someone I’m not. While my personality might have its many flaws, that’s the kind of person I opted to be. I want to be true to myself, whatever that ‘self’ is. Naturally enough, as I’ve reported on previous posts, the mere fact that I’m wearing women’s clothes and have a different shape and body proportions, will make things different. I’ve already explained how simply having long fingernails require you to manipulate things differently (or you’ll either break your nails, or drop things). The same applies to a lot of small details, all of which you quickly learn to do (often after a lot of trial-and-error!), and all of those little things tend to improve the overall feminine image, even if they are apparently trivial — like learning how to eat soup without having your long hair falling in it (fortunately, I’ve trained that a lot at home! ).

Of course, some people overdo it, either for comic relief, or because they really feel like overdoing it because they can. This is definitely true of a few of my friends, but it’s interesting to see how it’s not a widespread behaviour. As said, during the event, there was a female impersonator show, given by some members of the group. Of course that on stage, especially the ones favouring a burlesque style, there is some exaggeration, since they are doing a show, playing an act, playing roles, which are not supposed to be ‘real’ (like genetic female singers on the stage are also playing roles). Interestingly enough, outside the stage, even the female impersonators behave naturally as women do (at least while dressed). There is clearly a difference for them between the ‘show act’ and their normal behaviour outside the stage while still dressed.

Well, to finish this off, I should come up to the single moment which marked, for me, the highlight of the whole night. It’s embarrassing for me to admit that it was something very personal and quite selfish. One would assume that the ‘best’ moments were being with friends, some of which I had been in touch with for years but never managed to talk to them in public; or perhaps reviewing friends whom I had met but who are so far away that it’s rare to be able to together with them; or maybe the warm, fuzzy feeling of ‘belonging’ to a group that gets along together reasonably well, shares a common interest, and so forth. Of course all those moments were important and will be cherished by me for a long, long time.

But for me there was something else.

After having dinner, I went to the (unisex) bathroom to take a leak. When leaving the single stall, there is a common hand-washing area. There is also a full-length mirror, which I hadn’t noticed when I first used the bathroom (to get rid of the black top I had beneath the dress). So, naturally, I checked myself out, trying to tame my hair, adjusting the dress… and while I was doing that, it suddenly dawned on me that I was looking at an incredibly gorgeous, sexy woman on the mirror. I think I even gasped for an instant, shocked that for that single moment I truly didn’t recognised myself. It really felt like I was just watching someone else standing there in a curvy body and a close-fitting snake-pattern dress.

That feeling just lasted perhaps a fraction of a second — but it was truly overwhelming. Of course, every time I dress up, I enjoy what I’m doing, and for some brief moments I tend to become happy with the results, before I start noticing all tell-tale signs again, and the illusion shatters. And all the time I’m keenly aware that it’s ‘myself’, just looking female.

But that night on the full-length mirror it was a completely different degree of detachment. I totally lost the identity with that body I was watching on the mirror. It belonged to someone else — someone who definitely fascinated me. It was perhaps as close as an out-of-body experience as I might probably have, even though technically it wasn’t an out-of body experience. Perhaps the best analogy would be the sensation you have in a dream when you have a different body, and don’t even recognise it as ‘yours’, but there is still a lingering sensation tying your ‘self’ to the dream-body, even if it doesn’t remotely look like you. This was pretty much the same, the difference being that I was wide awake.

The sensation just lasted a moment, of course, but it definitely shocked me, and I was still a bit wobbly when returning to the table. Afterwards, I thought that this could have simply been a result of the anti-depressants I’m taking — after all, it does mess up with your brain (it’s what’s supposed to be doing!) — combined with the right circumstances, namely, that I had been addressed and treated as a woman for a few hours, but, unlike what happens at home, I haven’t had the opportunity to check myself out (except briefly on a pocket mirror to refresh my lipstick), and most definitely not in a full-length mirror.

So, well, it was weird. Very weird.

Of course this is the kind of experience that doesn’t make sense to anyone else (even for me it is completely outside the realm of my own experiences) but it certainly made my day (or night).

It’s fun to realise how much your mind can be influenced by the environment and what you are experiencing with the five senses…

The last time I was there was to do some restyling on my year-old wig; it was the first time I used that salon to do my hair. At this stage, I’m pretty sure everybody at the salon (which is not huge, but not tiny either) knows about my crossdressing; they also know about my wife (she did her nails there one day), and know that my wife knows, but because we both absolutely do not stand out in a crowd, I’m sure they find it all very amusing. But they treat me very well, since, these days, I’m a regular customer there. So it was also natural for my manicurist to ask if I liked the restyling that her colleague had done. On an impulse, I showed her the picture to the left; it’s one of my rather tasteful ones, with daytime makeup, so it looks rather natural and realistic. I think she was quite impressed! She even admitted that she liked to watch crossdresser shows on TV, which is rather surprising, since I never saw one (since I don’t own a TV, it means I’m restricted to what I can watch at my mother-in-law’s place).

Friday I had some fun shopping for cosmetics. I was looking for some nail polish to offer to my manicurist; she tends to be generous and, every time I do my toenails with her, she gives me the rest of the vial, something which also happened (again) on Wednesday. Well, she does not charge much, and she does have to pay a fee for using the salon, so I understand that she’s not making much money out of me, so I decided to buy two new vials for her.

Slowly, at the mall beneath my office, people start to know me (it has only re-opened last year, after having been shut down for remodellation for almost three years). It’s a ‘neighbourhood mall’ — just some 20 shops or so and a supermarket. Besides being a ‘regular’ at the salon, there is also a shop where I get my dressed tightened up. This is something I seriously encourage everybody to do, specially if you’re wearing a corset. The overwhelming majority of dresses being sold have ‘straight’ lines (or, for larger numbers, they might even be pear-shaped, exactly what you don’t want to look like!) and almost have no waist at all. But with a corset you will have a waist indeed. A belt or girdle will help, but it’s much nicer to get the dress redone by an alterations specialist. After having brought her so many of my dresses to change, I’m pretty sure that she has figured out they’re for me (I’m still waiting for her to do my fur coat… hopefully it’ll be ready by the end of the month). And there is also a dry cleaning service which I occasionally use, for those special cases where I can’t simply wash a piece of clothing at the laundromat.

Besides a regular cosmetics & perfume shop — where I just bought something once — there is also a ‘pro’ cosmetics shop as well. They obviously sell to everybody, but they tend to have more higher-end products, or larger bottles of hair shampoo, which are cost-effective for salons but not necessarily for consumers. They’re really not targetting the consumer market: they don’t even do nice packages for gifts, but just give you a simple plastic bag. Nevertheless, I do like their selection of products, and the prices are fine if you wish to buy higher quality. For instance, they have nail polish that is very hard to find elsewhere.

Perhaps the only issue I have with them is that not every salesperson is similarly informed about their products and how they’re to be used. A lot of them are still in training (this particular shop in their chain opened a year ago). They’re used to pros who go inside and know exactly what they wish and ask few questions. As such, the quality of service varies a lot. However, all of them are very nice.

Yesterday I got the ‘clueless blonde’ to help me out, which is a bit unfair description of her. The last time I got her, she had been working at the shop for a very short time, and while she was really not confident enough in recommending a hair mask, to compensate for her lack of knowledge, she gave me all sorts of pamphlets and catalogues and product information, which was generous of her. So calling her ‘clueless blonde’ sounds rather horrible, like if she were particularly stupid and unfriendly. In fact, it’s rather the contrary: she is very friendly, very open, very empathic with the clients, figures things out quickly on her own — she just lacks experience with the vast array of products that this shop carries. That’s all. Oh, and she is also gorgeous, which is a plus if you work on a cosmetics store

So after selecting two vials of nail polish, I saw that they had added two shelves, one for L’Oréal and another for Maybelline. A quick glance made me immediately notice that they were carrying ‘special’ and ‘hard-to-find’ products of those two brands. Pretty much all supermarkets around here, even the smaller ones, will have products from Maybelline; the larger ones might also have things from L’Oréal, but the choice is limited to the ‘most used’ products, which often means just some lipstick, eye shadows, and some basic foundation. Here they had much more, so I asked if they carried any highlighting powder.

A short explanation is due at this stage. As said before, I’ve done the latest online makeup course from Lucille Sorella, and learned about a plethora of new products and techniques of which I was absolutely clueless; makeup technology has definitely become incredible complex in the past 15 years! Oh sure, there are a gazillion videos about makeup techniques on YouTube for free, but I was a bit stumped at how all those products work together. Since doing that makeup course, one of the (many!) things I’ve learned is that there are basically two kinds of products these days for your skin. The first kind is used beneath the foundation. They are usually a gel, or cream, or liquid. You can go wild on them to do contouring, highlighting, and correction, because the foundation will blend them in and make them not stand so much out; your face will look very strange before applying foundation, but it works! Women who do not wear foundation can still use those products, they just have to be careful about the quantity they apply.

Sometimes, however, using those products beneath the foundation is not enough — or, more likely, you still haven’t gotten the highlighting/shadowing correctly done. So, on top of the foundation, there is the second kind of product you use: and this is almost always a kind of powder. Blush is probably the most well-known kind of product applied on top of the foundation; bronzer the second-most-well-known. But now I’ve learned that there are highlighters and shadows as well in powder. I wanted to try that out! When doing my makeup using that technique last time, I noticed that I would definitely like a bit more highlighting on the nose and cheekbones, but after the foundation has set in, that’s not possible… so, highlighting powder, here I come!

The blonde shop assistant hesitated for a second, then she mentioned ‘regular’ liquid highlighters, but I told her I wanted a powder, to place it on top of the foundation. She immediately understood what I wanted, so she showed me one sample from each of the two brands. L’Oréal is more expensive; I picked Maybelline.

But on an impulse I told her that I wasn’t just selecting it because of the price. In the cosmetics industry, American and Japanese brands have far more pigments than European brands. This has mostly to do with the market; European women tend to wear slightly less makeup (specially in the south, where the sunlight is stronger and you don’t need so much makeup — and most cosmetic products in Europe come from France, at least the best-known brands) than their American and Japanese counterparts. Americans also prefer to get ‘more bang to the buck’ — they want to apply little product but immediately see a lot of effect. Europeans are less concerned about the amount they need to apply, but worry more about the kind of stuff they put on their skins. So the brands have increased or decreased the pigment depending on mostly cultural bias; that doesn’t mean that L’Oréal is better or worse than Maybelline, their products just work differently. Another example: recently I have bought some blush from Inglot, a Polish brand which I had never used before (I normally got blush from MAC or Sephora). Apparently the Poles also love highly-pigmented products!

Anyway… this piece of information regarding pigments and American vs. European brands certainly impressed the shop rep. She smiled at me, nodding, and commented: ‘You certainly do know a few things about makeup…’

I’m sure I blushed a bit and said that I picked these things up here and there… and that a lot of practice experimenting with different brands also helped!

But inside I was certainly gloating, and my ego was almost bursting.

All in all, it was definitely something I enjoyed a lot!

And as a bonus, now when I walk across the shop front (which happens almost every day, it’s on my way to the office…), and she is doing her shift, she smiles and waves. That certainly helps to add a little more polishing on my ego; of course I know that she’s just being friendly with a customer, but it’s still nice to know that at my age I don’t strike fear and terror on women half my age…

So, well, after looking around for a new wig, and considering spending a bit more than usual — my wigs, so far, rarely last over a year… — I went back to my faithful old hairdresser and wig seller. She has somehow a knack to figure out what will fit me exactly right! Often I frown a bit at what she shows me, then I put it on, and I see that she has figured out exactly what I like!

This is a wig designed for people with severe hair loss. Because of that, the cap construction is a bit unusual, compared to what I’m used to wear. It doesn’t feature lace — apparently, people with alopecia complain that wearing lace for a long period irritates the scalp (although that is only noticeable if you wear the same wig for many days — not just a few hours now and then). So this one has a (mostly) monofilament cover with some special areas where you place the glue or adhesive, although it’s such a tight fit that I will very likely not need that.

And this time it’s guaranteed that it uses Indian remy hair, and no imitations or a mix of synthetic and human hair. That means that you can dye it and style it with heat, and wash it with all sorts of conditioners, to keep it shiny and good-looking. After some years of use, the colour might lighten, but it can be dyed again — which means that it should survive many years with some maintenance.

As you know, I’m fond of relatively long-haired wigs. Most of my early wigs were all straight, and 18 inches is what I tend to prefer (I have some shorter ones, though). The last one I bought was announced as being 18″ long but it didn’t look like that — mostly because it’s wavy, and the measurements are made with the hair straightened out. Hmm. That’s something I had not considered last year when I bought the other wig. This one is guaranteed to be a bit over 18″, also wavy, though, so I mumbled ‘longer, longer’. Well, my hairdresser suggested that I added a few extensions to it! Now that’s something I had never thought: obviously, with human hair wigs, you can add extensions. Hmm. I might consider that: after all, I don’t need a *lot* of extensions, just perhaps a few extra inches. And, of course, over time, it will be the extensions that get split ends, etc., and so they can be replaced, while keeping the original wig intact…

So much to learn. I guess that you get a lot more out of an expensive wig!

I didn’t bring it immediately back home. My hairdresser insisted that she would give it a good wash first, because, unlike synthetic wigs, which always look great out of the box, human hair wigs suffer a bit when they have been packed inside a box for some time. She’ll also put the usual assortment of clips; wigs designed for patients with alopecia are meant to be glued-on, not clipped-on. So I’m curious about how it’ll look like when I pick it up on Monday.

Did I mention that it was quite expensive? Yes it was. But I really compared a lot of prices from different suppliers, and even went to a shop of the competitors. It looks like these days prices don’t vary that much. The main difference with human hair wigs is the extra charge for styling and cap construction, and the amount of customization you wish on the wig. Online, you have way more choices, but usually human hair wigs don’t come styled. Instead, they come ‘raw’, because they’re expected to be styled by your hairdresser. Of course many online shops will also do some styling, but most of the ones who do that, will be in the US or UK, where hair styling is prohibitively expensive! (Around here, you can get a cut & brushing for as little as €30; just washing & conditioning & some hair mask will be around €20)

Because human hair wigs are usually meant for the ‘higher end’, there is much more that you pay beyond the hair itself, which, of course, is also expensive by itself. My last choice was to cut through the middleman and simply order directly from a factory in China. The advantage is, of course, that you can get it much cheaper. But there can be a few catches. The first is that you really have to trust them. I’m still confused about my last wig. It was announced to be a 100% human hair wig, and apparently, some people have complained to the factory, and they have issued a statement that they really, really use human hair. My old hairdresser thinks that it’s a mix of human hair and synthetic hair. Another two hairdressers, of whom I asked an opinion, are pretty sure it’s synthetic. So who’s right? There are two tests that you can do. The first is to use some heat: most synthetic wigs will not stand any heat and the hair will literally melt, so the problem is that applying heat will ruin them… The other test is to try do dye the hair. Synthetic wigs cannot be further dyed. Human hair can, if it was properly manufactured. So, as you can imagine, I haven’t tried any of those ‘tests’…

Traditionally, human hair is supposed to be applied in a salon. That means that hairdressers — often with special training from the supplier — will do all the measurements, recommend a certain type of hair, and let the factory manufacture the hair precisely to specs. The hair will come raw from the factory and it’s supposed to be styled at the salon. It might also get some extra dye, to match the customer’s own hair, for instance. All this adds to the cost. Even today, although there is a lot of competition, you might easily pay US$2000 for a human hair wig — even up to $5000 if you wish for European hair, the most expensive of all (I’ve also learned today that Indian hair, although it’s the cheapest available, is not that different from European hair in terms of texture and thickness — after all, we Indo-Europeans have a common genetic inheritance — even though it tends to last longer, and, of course, virgin Indian hair comes in its natural dark colour and requires bleaching or whatever they do at the factory to be able to be dyed with other colours).

Obviously you can also get ‘stock’ human hair from most suppliers, and this will be much cheaper. They will usually select a handful of lengths and volumes, give you a few colour choices, limit to the most popular cap construction, and that’s it — but it means the price can go down considerably, perhaps half of what it costs to do a custom-made solution. Because the competition is so fierce, some suppliers might offer you way more choices (a good example is Hair Direct, but there are many more) for the price of ‘stock’ hair, and sometimes even style the wig slightly.

The problem with ordering online is that you really have no idea what the final result will be. My last two choices came from factories in China. They matched the colour I wished almost perfectly. There was no styling. The texture came pretty close to what I wanted. But on the wig I bought two years ago, I noticed that it would look a bit too ‘flat’ on my head: I really needed a bit more volume on the top. So on the next year, the wig I’m usually wearing has a lot more volume and density on the top. However, they saved some costs by making the bottom part much lighter. The result is a bit weird, even though with some styling my hairdressers managed to disguise those flaws, even though if that meant that the wig now looks much shorter than it actually is.

By contrast, buying it on a shop where you can try what works best for you (and ask for advise!) might also mean having far less choices. Recently I was researching the Great Lengths brand, which has raving reviews on their extensions, but they usually don’t do full wigs. You can get ‘full extensions’, though, and those are expensive enough. However, the local representative does something clever: they launched their own brand, by using Great Lengths hair, and having it sewed on caps — thus being able to offer a reasonable selection of ‘stock’ hair. Their synthetic hair product line comes already styled; the human hair product line has less styling. Prices are in the US$1000 range, depending on length, which is reasonable for a real human hair ‘stock’ wig. However, I hated the texture when I tried it out: it looks very stiff and artificial! The reason? They use Japanese hair instead of Indian hair. Japanese hair is very, very strong, which means that it will last quite a long time, you can sleep in it, go to the beach or a swimming pool, and never fear that your wig gets ruined — and it will tolerate enough heat (perhaps not on the highest settings) from curlers and straighteners. One rule for all kinds of wigs is that you have to trade off appearance for durability. A wig that might resist everything you throw at it will very likely not look so realistic. In fact, I saw their synthetic wigs as well, and the texture was almost identical! I remember commenting on that: from the perspective of a lay person, you couldn’t really distinguish between their two product lines… so, although I was tempted at first, I gave up.

So, as said, I went back to my old, faithful hairdresser, whom I’ve been buying wigs for many, many years now. From past conversations, I knew that they also did custom wigs for their customers with alopecia and/or hair loss due to chemotherapy. So I asked for the prices for that, and what kind of hair they used. Well, my hairdresser said that a custom solution might not be worth the price — since, in my case, I’m not looking for a ‘replacement’ that looks like my real hair, and which has to be an exact match. Instead, she showed me one ‘stock’ wig from their brand, Monna Lisa. I own a few synthetic wigs of that brand. You won’t be much impressed by their website, it’s full of small typos… Monna Lisa is a Spanish brand, and they have been doing wigs for almost 60 years, specifically for alopecia/chemotherapy, and they technically always work through special salons catering to those types of customers. Now, you might not see Spain as a powerhouse in wig manufacturing, and you might be right… but the truth is that some areas of Spain are crossdresser paradises (remember the Pedro Almodóvar movies?), and they’re very, very demanding of the high quality of their products. Also, traditionally, Spanish women are among the best-dressed in Europe; perhaps only second to Italian women. So they are very demanding. And in good Mediterranean tradition, they’re very vocal about their complaints! The result is that some of my crossdresser friends in Portugal tend to do a short trip to Madrid just to buy their wigs there — it’s not too expensive — since there are so many choices and they have so much quality.

Another advantage of my hairdresser is that, after all these years, she tends to have a very good idea of what I like in a wig. I sometimes just go over to their salon just to see what choices they have. Because they cater more to elderly women, their styles tend to be a bit conservative, and the hair is usually short. But they also have quite a lot of customers from the transgendered community, so sometimes they have some special wigs in longer sizes. The one she showed me today is about 50 cm (that’s slightly over 18″) long, which is the kind of length I tend to buy. It’s in a deep honey colour, straight out of the box, pretty close to my natural hair colour when I was 6 years old, but I’m curious how it will look like after she washes and conditions it. If the colour is still too light for my taste, that’s not a problem, it can easily be dyed with a deeper colour. Unlike my current wig, this one seems to have less flaws, and its volume is more naturally distributed. I was immediately attracted to it and, although I didn’t expect to buy anything today, I couldn’t really resist…

It has a few drawbacks, of course. I’m very fond of lace wigs, because nothing looks more realistic than a lace wig (if applied properly!), but this wig has a monofilament cap. There is no ‘baby hair’, which looks always incredibly realistic (although, to be honest, it’s the one more subject to getting quickly dried, since it’s in contact with my face makeup…) on lace front wigs. The cap is also a bit tighter than I’m used to, and, unlike the lace wigs I own, it might not cover the sideburns perfectly. My hairdresser told me that there are a few tricks that can be done to overcome those limitations (e.g. cutting some hair in order to provide some coverage on the sideburns as well as to simulate baby hair), but I guess that, for now, I will start using it just as it is, and see if I get used to it.

And no, you won’t get any pictures of it soon because currently my wife’s new routine has seriously limited my crossdressing days, and I still haven’t found a way to fit my own routine into it…

Geekiness was, for most of the past 4 decades, a strictly male thing. Books and movies have been extensively written about the subject; there is really nothing new I can write about it. The computer culture, most specially the online culture, promoted the computer geek — the solitary, overweight male that spends his time in front of an all-accepting computer, forgets to socialize unless he has a keyboard in front of him, and does incomprehensible things for everybody else except other geeks. The stereotype has expanded to include gadgetry: geeks buy gadgets (since they have nothing else to spend their money on), and that released a whole gadget industry.

Geeks even claim their own genetic diseases to explain their status. The true geek, these days, fights for his right to be diagnosed with Asperger’s or at least with Attention Deficit Syndrome. If all else fails, they’ll be happy to accept the label ‘sociopath’, and are rather proud of it. They invent their own culture, their own rituals, their own lore. It can go to extremes — like in the Japanese otaku culture, which spawned a whole industry catering to their needs worth 18 billion US$ — but the interesting aspect is that the stereotype is changing. A certain amount of ‘geekiness’ is expected of most males. They don’t need to focus on computers, computer games, mobile phones, or consoles. The geekiness can be towards cars, weapons, hunting, or, more widespread, all sorts of radical sports. Combinations are certainly possible: the ultimate ‘maleness’, as depicted in certain rural southern US areas, is the sports lover who collects guns, goes out hunting, tweaks his pickup truck or vintage convertible, and has a coin-operated arcade game of the 1980s still working on their living rooms. Most probably they’re also proud of having the latest smartphone, too.

The exclusivity of maleness in the geek world has certainly eroded. Geek is the new sexy, and girl gamers are about 47% of the overall gamer population. Unlike many stereotyped images of geek girls, most are actually not horrible-looking, overweight, smartass types. Rather the contrary. They tend to be true third wave feminists: just because they’re geeks, they cannot look — and be — sexy. There are even cosmetic companies designing products just for them. And unlike their male counterparts of the 1980s, geek girls do not hide themselves in deep basements. Just today, while having a coffee, there was a geek girl next to me — she was dressed in urban chic, with well-done makeup, rather good looking — even though one might disagree with her choices of clothing — and furiously typing on her mini-tablet, probably playing a game, just like any other geek male in the food court. They’re not shy, and not embarrassed of sporting their geekiness publicly.

However, my article today is not really about geek girls. I discovered very recently that geekiness, in females, assumes a completely different form — one that is unsuspected by most males. We who hop between the gender borders are able to unlock the secrets of true female geekiness, and how the industry really appeals to them.

But for that, we have to understand the origin of the word geek. The Wikipedia lists a simple definition: ‘an expert or enthusiast or a person obsessed with a hobby or intellectual pursuit’. This covers a lot of ground! What matters to me, however, is that the ‘hobby or intellectual pursuit’ usually implies a certain degree of complexity. That doesn’t mean it has to be a high-brow thing like maths or computers. Tweaking cars is complex. Cooking is complex. One might shrug off a ‘car geek’ and assume they’re an example of male stupidity driven to extremes — until one’s own car breaks down and we have no clue what is wrong. When we open up a car’s bonnet (I had to look up the word!) and peers inside, it’s like a miniature city, with thousands of things subtly linked together, in ways that are absolutely impossible to figure out — unless you’re a car geek. Being a car geek might not make you the next billionaire, but it certainly requires dealing with insane degrees of complexity.

Gadgetry appeals to computer geeks because gadgets tend to be complex, even if they don’t look complex. The interesting thing is that geeks are getting so widespread that even simple things slowly, over time, get ‘geekified’. A TV set in the 1960s just had a button to turn it on and off, a volume dial, and a few knobs to tune in TV stations. Then came remote controllers. Today, a Korean TV set for €150 includes Ethernet adapters, several USB ports, some ports with 3 or 4-letter acronyms requiring special cables to connect to whatever strange things might be around your home, and programming just the TV set — never mind the set-up box next to it — almost requires a degree in electrical engineering. Most people stick to defaults, but TV geeks will always know what to tweak and what to do on their TV set to make sure it gives the ‘best’ image. I’ve read a few studies that show that most people cannot understand the full range of features that their home appliances actually have. But that’s ok. Most people don’t know how their cars work, either. Geeks, in both cases, nevertheless demand more and more complexity, and the industry is happy to comply.

It would be too easy to say that this feature of being in love — and obsessive — about complexity is eminently male. But I have to disagree. Females just have other complex things to be interested in: clothes. Accessories. Hair. And, most important, cosmetics.

Males have it simple. They just identify a limited amount of colours (see this old joke on a blog appropriately called Geek in Heels). Clothes have simple cuts, and just a simple selection of sizes. You can’t go wrong with a T-shirt and a pair of jeans, and that has been true for the past 50 years. T-shirts, no matter the colour, will always ‘match’ with a pair of jeans. ‘Matching’, in fact, is rarely a worry for males. Except perhaps when they’re forced to wear business suits: then you can see those males sweating with the panic of figuring out what colour their ties should be, and if it’s ‘safe’ to wear a shirt in any colour except white. Still, for almost a century — at least, until spats went out of fashion — ‘classic’ shoe colours are just brown or black.

Obviously, male attire has evolved a lot, too (I know, I was being a bit stereotypical!), to the point that we still have the classification of metrosexual, and socially allowing males to (re)develop an interest in grooming themselves and shopping has been a change of the past decades.

In 1985 only 25 percent of all men’s apparel was bought by men, he said; 75 percent was bought by women for men. By 1998 men were buying 52 percent of apparel; in 2004 that number grew to 69 percent and shows no sign of slowing.

— Marshal Cohen, ‘Gay or Straight? Hard to Tell’, New York Times, 2005

My thesis is that the complexity of shopping appeals to the geek culture, and males are allowed to be ‘shopping geeks’ as well.

Females, however, have long been that. And yes, it is a complex world. Any beginning crossdresser will know that: unlike male clothing, size is not the only important issue when shopping for clothes. The cut is also important: depending on the cut, a dress will emphasize your best features while hiding the others. The colour is not only important by itself, but it has to be matched with the skin’s complexion, hair colour, and possibly makeup (or vice-versa). But even the small details are important. Wide shoulders? Avoid sleeveless dresses; or, if you really wish to wear them, use a shawl to cover your shoulders… or wear your hair long to cover them… It goes on and on, with many, many details to pay attention to: if there is shimmer in the fabric of your dress, don’t use glittery bangles (and maybe no glitter on the eyes, either… I don’t know, I’m just wildly guessing). Sandals are cute… but you can’t wear them if you plan to wear stockings… and you will have to paint your toes, too. What is appropriate for the day is not appropriate for the night; and most certainly neither is appropriate for a wedding, an official ceremony, or going out to have some fun with friends. While a T-shirt and jeans can be worn by males from 6 to 60 — or perhaps even beyond — females have to pay attention to dress their age, or at least, to dress the age they wish to look like (if they can pull it off).

You see my point. It’s insanely complex. Start adding accessories, and the complexity increases. How many rings are ‘too many’? Why can’t you use necklaces if you are big breasted — but it’s expected that you use them if you’re not? If you have earrings, don’t wear necklaces — and what about mixing bracelets and bangles, is it allowed or not? If so, when? What colours are allowed? Are you supposed to match them at all, or not? And why does ‘matching’ sometimes mean ‘a similar colour’ while most often it means ‘a contrasting colour’ — and by ‘contrast’ that doesn’t necessarily mean ‘red contrasts with green’, as we are taught in school. Why does beige and navy blue ‘go together’, while green and orange do not?

Not to mention, of course, that at least twice a year the fashion changes, and what was ‘correct’ last season, might be ‘completely outdated and wrong’ this season. And — guess what! — major brands now have four seasons per year, twice the trouble to figure things out!

But where female geekiness truly shines through is with cosmetics.

I started playing around with cosmetics some 15 years ago. While a good observer can still (probably) figure out how to dress by observing carefully, when it comes to cosmetics, it’s like cooking — you can’t learn from a book. You have to engage in the alchemy (a reason why I cannot cook: it’s too much ‘chance’ for me). But things are getting hopelessly complicated, and let me give you a glimpse of it…

Having been raised a male, the art of cosmetics was obviously a sacred mystery to me. Of course anyone understands about lipstick, and even eyeshadows might, at least on casual observation, look easy enough: you just get a brush and some powder and paint it on. Lipstick seems even easier.

When I started crossdressing in earnest, it was clear there was much more to it. Makeup doesn’t stick too well on ungroomed skin. And quickly you learn the basics: get a foundation first. Here the problem starts — even 15 years ago, foundation would come in different colours (which one is right for me?), and different ways of application. When I was just starting to get the hang of using fingers to dab it from a small jar onto my face, here comes liquid foundation, which you can dab as well — but it’s different to apply — but usually use a brush, a wedge, or a whole selection of different tools, depending on what girly magazine you’re currently reading. Then, of course, foundation is not the simple kind of thing that you buy like toilet paper. Instead, you can get it with more pigment, less pigment, opaque, liquid, translucid, and all sorts of variations in-between. Traditionally, you finish it up with some compact power to ‘seal’ it, but then foundation started to come already with compact power in it. Compact power has been around for 80 years or so, and one might imagine that something so old and proven might just have one way of application. Not so! Here comes ‘transparent powder’ or similarly-named products, which come in jars (or perhaps bottles) and you apply it with a brush… or some sort of sponge.

Talk about brushes! My first makeup kit just had one brush for the eyes, and one brush for blush. That seemed simple enough, right? But clearly just two brushes isn’t enough — by far. Every makeup tutorial these days recommends at least a dozen brushes, but more likely close to twenty. Just for the eyes you might need some 5 or 6 different kinds, each to be used with its own technique, and each looking quite differently-shaped, as they are made for different purposes. I remembered that oil painters tend to have 2-3 different brushes and can produce masterpieces; the average woman who just needs to apply a little bit of makeup every day has to carry around a dozen brushes!

So here was my simple makeup routine 15 years ago: get a close shave. Apply after-shave. Wait. Apply red lipstick to cover the beard areas. Wait. Apply a thick foundation. Wait. Apply lipstick. Get one eyeshadow colour on the eyelids. Put on some mascara. Do some blush. Finish it all with some compact power. There! Finish! 2 brushes, 8 products, and your makeup is ready!

But clearly that wasn’t enough!

Firstly, you have to start covering up imperfections, and bring out the best of your features. That meant complexifying everything. Use some sort of concealer to cover black spots. Eye concealer to cover up dark circles. White eye pencil on the edge of the lower lid, as well as on the inner bits of the eyes, to make the eyes look larger. Then some eyeliner — either with a pencil, kohl, or, if you’re daring, liquid eyeliner. Mascara comes in different types, and up until recently, I tended to stick with two: one for increasing volume, let it dry a bit, and then add a different mascara to make the lashes look longer. If I wish to go extreme, then it means applying false eyelashes, liquid eyeliner to hide imperfections, and some mascara to make my real lashes the same colour as the falsies. Whew. But it doesn’t stop there!

My nose is too big, too wide, and slightly asymmetric. To correct that, I need to highlight the ridge of the nose, while making the sides darker. There are a gazillion products for doing that; I mostly used white eyeshadow (or a white pencil) as highlighter and merely a bit of blush on the sides. But there is more to it. Foundation can also be used to enhance the area around the eyes: so I’ve got two colours for my summer foundation (from Kryolan, which is thicker, hiding the pores, and resists to my constant sweating in the heat), and use the lighter foundation for those areas I wish to highlight. I use the fingers as my primary ‘painting tool’, which means constantly washing them!

One-tone eyeshadows? Blargh! That’s too amateurish! Real pros will use, at the very least, some three shades, and blend them together. But often you need more than that — way more. And each colour, depending on the spot it’s applied to, requires a different brush. I even have a brush to apply eyeshadow under the lower lid (a tricky spot to get there!), because sometimes it’s fashionable to do so (I haven’t checked up lately if it’s still in fashion or not).

Well… you see a bit at what I’m aiming that. You’ll quickly start accumulating more and more products, more and more shades and colours of each product, and… more and more brushes and special tools. I even have bought a tool that supposedly helps putting on false eyelashes, but I can’t use it — the falsies always get stuck on the tool instead of getting stuck to my eyes, where they belong! But I still use at least three tools to apply them — my fingers :-), an orange stick, and sometimes a cotton swab. Not to mention the tiny brush to apply the glue, and the tiny metal comb to loosen up the individual lashes and remove excess mascara afterwards…

And I’ve just described about half of my makeup routine!

This definitely falls into the domain of geekiness. It requires obsession, persistence, patience, and mastering a huge amount of techniques — and, of course, you need a ton of products of all kinds, shapes, colours, and application methods. I wouldn’t be surprised if the arsenal of tools that the average woman uses for her makeup isn’t actually bigger than what a car geek has in his garage. The only difference is the size of the tools; not the amount of tools, or the different methods and techniques required to use all of them. Computer geeks just need to learn how to type on a keyboard!

But it gets even more complicated.

I’ve signed up on an online makeup course. I’m actually a fan of Lucille Sorella and her insane amount of material for crossdressers and MtF transgendered people. Lucille is an image stylist — she’s a genetic woman — who by mere chance stumbled upon the crossdressing and transgender communities, and found out that they were in desperate need of advice and help. The truth is that, even though the basics are pretty much the same, males need some slight adaptations for typical female tricks to work on them, too. For instance, no makeup tutorial designed for genetic women will tell you how to cover your beard shadow.

Besides the uncountable amounts of makeup tutorials out there, I also own a couple of books, bought 15 years ago, when such tutorials – especially those with quality images — were not common online. They already pointed out to the massive amount of products that were available back then. I sort of got ‘stuck in time’, influenced by the techniques used 15 years ago, and so decided to ‘catch up’ with the latest trends, techniques, and methods.

Curiously enough, I felt exactly like I felt back in 1986, when, as a computer-geek-in-training, I switched over from an old Sinclair ZX Spectrum to my first PC. Everything was new and surprisingly different! Of course some things were familiar, but just at the surface. Wow! How things have changed in 15 years!

The whole cosmetics industry has gone through an entire revolution, but I haven’t been paying close attention. Now the makeup geeks get familiar with a huge array of completely new products and different ways of applying them. ‘Highlighting’ is now a product, not merely a technique. Instead of merely moisturizing your skin before applying foundation, now you use a primer. While I’ve used eyeliners in the past, and even caught up with liquid eyeliners that come with their own self-applying brushes (instead of having to dip the tiny brushes inside a pot of liquid, like before), now liquid eyeliner comes as a gel — and, yes, you’ve guessed it, it gets a new kind of brush! But these are merely details. Things get much, much more complex than that. You get foundation without the need of using powder; foundation mixed with brozers; bronzers that are mixed separately but blend in; self-moisturizing foundation; a special liquid in an aerosol spray that ‘fixes’ makeup (therefore you don’t need compact power on top of it). And tons of varieties of products, all called ‘powder’, which are used for the strangest effects: translucent powder, setting powder, and who-knows-what-else powder. Besides brushes and sponges you also get wedges to apply makeup; some of which you’re supposed to cut down to weird-looking formats which ‘help’ you out to apply it ‘more correctly’.

Eyeshadows come in such a variety of types and kinds — not merely colours! — that half the counters on a typical makeup store might just carry eyeshadows. Most are still applied traditionally, from a palette with a brush, but there is also pencil-based eyeshadow (some of which come with a cap with its own pencil sharpener), tubes with liquid eyeshadow, extra glitter to be applied, self-glittering eyeshadow… and who knows what else: special powder or cream or ‘stuff’ which you apply instead of foundation (which might be too thick for eyelids), and more products that you put on top of everything to ‘seal’ it and avoid the mess of inadvertently rubbing off the shadow from your eyes… oh well. It seems endless. And the products get to be named with sexy, geekish designations. What is a bareMinerals Prime Time BB Primer-Cream Daily Defense SPF30? And what is the purpose of a Tinted Mineral Veil? Long gone are the days where males got geekish names for their products! These days, from a casual glance, you can’t even understand what the products are for, much less how to apply them, or where they’re supposed to go, or in which order they’re supposed to be applied!

Baffled, but decided to learn more about this New Era of Cosmetics, last Wednesday I went shopping.

Now let me add a small parenthesis here. I buy most of my cosmetics from popular brands on supermarkets. I tend to favour Maybelline (like all American brands, it has strong pigments, meaning that a little application will give you good results) and sometimes Nivea (my wife’s uncle works in the cosmetics industry, and although Nivea is one of their direct competitor, he swears that their products, in general, are better than most — they just have worse packaging, or less choices, or strange textures, but the quality is great). These are easily available. Supermarkets, even the largest ones, might not carry the whole range of products. I have never seen any supermarket selling a Tinted Mineral Veil, even if they might have several rows of lipsticks and nail polish. So, for the more usual bits of cosmetics, I’m happy with supermarkets. There I can get reasonable prices and average-to-good quality products in foundation, lipstick, lip liners, eyeliners, eyeshadows, blush, compact powder, bronzing powder… and, well, some brushes too.

But for the high-tech, ultra-geek cosmetics I admit I give up on supermarkets and go straight to Sephora. Sephora carries about hundred different brands, beyond their own, and, with 1750 stores in over 30 countries, they’re a safe bet that you’ll find anything you need in terms of cosmetics. Their own line of products is reasonably good — almost all my brushes were bought at Sephora, and, recently, I’ve been using their false eyelashes as well (they’re very reasonably priced, last a long time, and I’m always surprised at what kind of material they use, because they never irritate the eyes, even when wearing them for a long, long time). While there are tons of cosmetic shops in my country, I tend to like their sales reps — they’re always very friendly and very helpful. The shopping experience is also important for me — especially because I’m aware that I will be the only male person inside the whole shop and asking a lot of things and experimenting some products as well. So I need a certain degree of confidence; as a returning customer I also get some discounts, which is always nice, too. But the main thing for me is that, no matter how crazy the product might sound, Sephora will carry it, and they will explain how it works, how it is applied, and have no problem in doing some demonstrations.

Besides being male, I have an additional handicap: language. All the makeup tutorials I have ever followed were in English. Products are named completely differently in Portuguese; to make things worse, cosmetic product types tend to change over time. For instance, mascara had been known as rímel for many decades in my country, because the first mascara ever sold here was made by Rimmel; but these days, the word máscara is slowly replacing rímel. This gets confusing since the same name also applies to hair mask! So it depends on context! For two decades at least, hair conditioners were known as amaciadores (literally: softeners) because, well, the first generations made the hair more soft; but because conditioners go way beyond merely ‘making hair soft’, they usually translate it to the neologism condicionador, which makes it sometimes very confusing, as some shops might actually shelve them separately! Almost none of my female friends use makeup extensively (except perhaps my mother-in-law), and in any case I wouldn’t dare asking them for advice anyway, so figuring out how things are called in Portuguese is always a challenge to me. And no, these days, it’s not as if you can see a picture or a drawing of something and expect to find it on a shelf! The liquid eyeliner I currently use doesn’t look like an eyeliner at all. Kryolan’s foundations are sold in sticks, like oversized lipsticks; the liquid foundation I have (for cooler days) is a small bottle which could contain almost anything flesh-coloured.

So on Wednesday I tried to be as frank and honest as possible with the Sephora sales rep. I just told her that I was doing an online makeup course in English and had no idea how those products were called in Portuguese. Obviously she was more than glad to help me out! And what I bought definitely didn’t look anything like I had ever seen on makeup tutorials — while clearly being the correct product.

For instance, highlighters. What I see on pictures is that they’re usually sold in small, flat jars, very similar in appearance to eyeshadows. Sometimes they might come in tubes. They’re applied with a brush. What I got was a self-applying brush — the whole highlighting product comes as a liquid gel embedded inside a relatively thick brush, and you just need to squeeze a tiny bit to apply it. It’s very easy to use and practical — you don’t need to store the brush separately from the product. It’s similar to the liquid eyeliner I’ve got, but even easier in principle to apply (I haven’t tested it out yet!). Besides highlighting, I also needed some contouring. Again, usually that comes in semi-solid jars. In my case, I got them in small bottles which have a tiny dispenser at the top, shaped just like a miniature soap dispenser. Cool stuff! But, of course, it requires its own brush. Duh!

Like a good sales rep, the girl, seeing that I was not simply going to buy one product and run to the exit, offered not only to demonstrate how the products worked, picked up the right shades by applying them on my face, and suggested a whole array of new products. She asked me, ‘how do you clean your brushes?’ A good question! My own wife never cleans brushes, for example; most people I asked about that just clean them every now and then. In my case, I always wash them in hot water and soap after usage and remove the remainder with a makeup removing tissue: the point being that there is often some residue left. Well, the shop rep pointed out to me that brushes are a source of bacteria, and while washing them in hot water and soap is definitely a good idea, it might not be enough. And, of course, it takes time and requires some patience. So nowadays they sell a small bottle with a cleaning agent which also acts as anti-bacterial. You just spray your brushes and use a bit of paper tissue to wipe it away. No washing, no rinsing. That simple! I love everything that saves me time — after all, I take almost three hours to get myself dressed, and at least one hour to get undressed and have everything cleaned up.

She also suggested to apply a primer before the foundation, and, guess what, there are tons of different primers… but I resisted the urge. Next time perhaps! Well, the sales rep tried to show me something else instead. Because I have large pores — a sad consequence of genetics, all males have much larger pores than females — the cosmetics industry has come up with a ‘pore concealer‘. She demonstrated the product on her own hand: it was truly uncanny. A single swipe with the finger, and the pores disappear as if by magic! I was truly astonished. Apparently, there are two kinds of products in the market (or at least that’s what Sephora had for sale). One kind is meant to be used temporarily, i.e. only when wearing makeup, and just works by ‘filling in’ the pores, and you’re supposed to remove every tiny little bit of makeup before going to sleep anyway. The other kind is a long-term ‘treatment’, which will shrink the pores. Amazing! Again, I was tempted, but my budget was limited, and I was already spending twice what I originally had intended (because, well, I also needed new eyeshadows… you’re not supposed to use the same ones for years after years, even if they’re still good, mostly due to bacteria build-up… and I think that I have my colour palette for four years now! Add to that some more brushes, false eyelashes, and, well… all these things might individually be cheap, but they tend to add up!), so I gave it a pass. Maybe when I finish the laser treatment on the face I’ll give it a try: the largest pores actually come from the follicles, and, once the laser kills them, they will naturally close on their own or at least shrink. Still, n the areas where I perspire the most — like on the nose! — the large pores are very noticeable, even under foundation and powder, so this product might be useful on the ‘problem areas’. You usually can’t see them with the bad lighting and at the resolution I take my pictures, but I know they’re there!

Anyway… the extension of this article should give you an idea of what I’m hinting at. Pretty much everything related to females, from attire to accessories to daily health care products, not to mention all the things you can do to your hair, and, of course, cosmetics in general: all of those belong to an immensely complex world, requiring an insane amount of time to get familiar with, have tons of methods and techniques to learn, which are constantly changing, as new products come out and old products get unfamiliar formats or application techniques, and women are supposed to learn all that and become proficient in them. Not all women, of course — most, in my country, couldn’t care less — but it’s astonishing to see that a huge proportion definitely takes an interest in all this. In fact, I even think that the proportion of women interested in the whole world of female appearance — the cosmetic geeks, the fashion geeks — is probably the same proportion of male geeks. The difference is not in the gender; it’s what they apply their geekiness to. Males usually apply geekiness towards tech things (but not necessarily only that; think about stamp collectors, for instance!) and that’s what usually people think about when they hear the word ‘geek’. But women, by contrast, although they might scorn ‘tech geeks’, they’re actually their own kind of geeks. It’s just that the word is never applied to their context.

I would say that it’s not unusual for a male tech geek, as a crossdresser, to quickly fall in love in this wonderfully complex world of cosmetic/fashion female geekiness. Once a geek, always a geek, even if your object of geekiness changes. So it’s the same mindset — getting obsessed with products, techniques, methods, trying to achieve something out of them — but just that the actual context is totally different. But, on the other side, the new kind of ‘female tech geeks’ shouldn’t be surprising at all. A good-looking female cosmetics geek, who delights in all these tools and products, might easily understand the appeal of ‘tech’ geekiness — since the same mindset will definitely work as well, with similar results. Geekiness is self-fulfilling. A geek is happy when the techniques, methods, tools and products that they use actually result in something pleasurable. The whole process is pleasurable in itself. This is perhaps very surprising to the non-geeks, who scorn both at computer geeks spending hours programming obscure applications, as well as women spending hours doing their makeup. As a crossdresser, I get to hear both complains from my wife (she’s slightly geeky, but only towards her own area of interest) — she can’t understand either my fascination with computer programming or with doing my makeup routine…

Still, there is one thing that every geek enjoys: learning new things. This is the advice I try to give to all my crossdressing friends (and a few transgendered ones beginning transition), who complain that they’re absolutely unable to do their makeup: don’t despair. It’s not a question of talent, but one of persistence and patience. I’m the most untalented person in the world regarding anything ‘artistic’, to my great disappointment in my teens. I cannot draw a straight line, much less paint anything. I can’t sculpt, I can’t even use software applications that require any artistic skill. Even though I might be handicapped as a male in terms of colour perception, most of the great painters in history were males, so my gender is no excuse: I simply lack any talent. When people point out that this is not true, since they see my pictures and videos, I point out that I have only start posting them in the past decade, and, even so, I deleted most of the images and videos before 2009 or so — they were simply atrociously bad! What you’re looking at, even though I still have a lot to learn, is the result of some 15 years of practice, and, of those, only the past decade has been very regular. Of course you won’t achieve perfect results on your first try! The biggest hurdle to overcome is the huge disappointment that you can’t get your makeup look like it has come out of a professional makeup artist that does supermodels. Of course it’s also easier if you can get a teacher — a wife, a partner, a crossdressing friend — but that will just give your a good kickstart. The rest has to be done by yourself, alone, in front of a mirror, and try everything you can, over and over again, until finally some things will click into place. It’s not easy but possible! Nobody taught me, and I had to learn from textual descriptions first, then came some images, and only recently some videos. Still, it’s completely different to see a professional makeup artist doing their makeup on a video, and try to replicate, on the first try, exactly what they’re doing.

Of course I’m constantly doing things wrong! You cannot imagine how many jars of foundation I’ve bought, both online and on supermarkets, without ever hitting on the ‘right’ shade. These days I know that all that effort was futile: the only way to find out the right shade is to try it out, and that’s why cosmetics shops have testers. Naturally enough, a makeup teacher might look at your face and probably guess the shade correctly after a few tries, but they will still apply it first to make sure they guessed correctly — applied makeup looks different from what is in the bottle or jar, because your own skin will absorb part of the colour as well. So don’t despair if you ‘never get the right shade’ — you will, even if you’re scared to shop on a physical shop, by trial-and-error, it just takes longer (and will probably be quite more expensive).

Always remember that genetic females, or transexuals after starting transition, are free to experiment every day. Crossdressers like me only have a few hours per week to do experiments. That means that the trial-and-error period will take much longer. Girls in their teens, when first starting out using makeup, will get a lot of help from friends and family; after a few months they’ll know what will work on their face, and, even so, they will constantly experiment with new looks. We casual crossdressers, in order to achieve the same effect, will naturally take years, not months. But we’ll get there, eventually, even if our artistic talent is zero — which is my case.

It’s small things that start to click into place. I think that in my case the first thing that worked towards building some self-confidence that achieving some makeup skills was possible came from getting lipstick applied correctly; the trick, in my case, was to learn to use lip liner correctly, even though I needed several more years to understand that the correct shade is actually lighter than the lipstick colour, and not darker! But once I got the lips fixed, I moved to other areas. There is still a lot I don’t know how to do, like disguising my nose better, or enhancing the cheekbones. And believe me, I’ve tried a lot of different techniques, but I’m still willing to try new ones. And that, I think, is what makes applying makeup so fun. It’s true that it can be daunting and frustrating at the beginning, but it gets better all the time, and, the better it gets, the more enjoyable it becomes. As a side effect, the more confidence you have in your skills, the more daring you get, and the more crazy things you’re willing to try out on your face!

Overconfidence, of course, can be frustrating at the beginning. I remember that I started doing the eye lining with a pencil, and, at the beginning, possibly because of a combination of factors — I had picked a rather lousy brand, which made the line very blurry, and I also cannot draw a straight line, which only made things worse — I was a bit disappointed. Then I read about liquid eyeliner, and how much more defined the lines become. That’s certainly true, but… applying eyeliner is very hard, if you have never done it before. My first experiences with liquid eyeliner, 15 years ago or so, were an absolute catastrophe! So, well, I gave up on the liquid eyeliner — shrugging it off as some ‘professional’ product that a beginner like me should never waste any money and time on. I stuck to pencils, then to kohl (in pencil format, although I’ve also tried, much later, to use powdered kohl — you guessed it, that requires another special brush!), and, slowly, over time, I learned a bit better how to apply it. So it was well over a decade until I dared to use liquid eyeliner again. Now I find it as easy to use as a pencil — the technology, as said, also has improved a lot! — even though I still can’t draw a straight line. But I know how to disguise that fact! That’s the whole point of the learning process: you not only learn how to use things, but how to compensate for your lack of talent.

I’ve also mentioned before how I progressed to paint my own nails. First, of course, I started with stick-on false nails, but soon I wanted to experiment to paint my natural nails as well. That took years to get minimally acceptable results. I thought I’d never achieve ‘salon-class’ nail painting, that seemed to be impossible — I simply don’t have the talent, especially when doing the right hand (since I’m right-handed!). But over time — and by practicing first on false nails for years and years! — I learned how to compensate for the lack of talent. At the beginning, I might take half an hour or more to do my own nails, constantly wiping it off, attempt after attempt. I secretly envied my mother-in-law, who took 2 to 3 minutes to do her own nails, in the living room, with two coatings, without hesitation! Then I started to understand a few important things. First, the cuticles must be in pristine condition — and mine weren’t, they were too dry, and so they would ‘flake’ or become irregular, and that meant the nail polish will get ‘stuck’ on it and ‘bleed’ to everywhere except where I wished it to be. Well, treating the cuticles was the first step. Then I learned that it’s much easier to apply polish if you have a base coat first. Gah! And the good news is that the base coat is transparent, so it’s easy to apply, even if you make mistakes, it will not show. Then I learned that the cheap nail polish brands usually have awful brushes, and this makes it much harder to apply polish properly; similarly, low-quality polish will either be too runny or too thick, and you need it in the perfect consistency to make it easy. Once I learned all that, and after years of practice, I just take some five minutes or so to apply the polish, and, most of the time, I don’t even need to do any corrections. It was at that point where I started to notice that my sister-in-law, who paints her nails once a week or so, actually does them far worse than I do; and I’ve also noticed how professional estheticians at the beauty salon also make mistakes all the time, but they are just very good at covering them up quickly! So, these days, although I still feel tempted to just stick on some false nails, the truth is that I enjoy painting my own nails so much, that I never went back to the false nails. I just groom my nails better and let them grow way, way longer than I did a decade ago.

The list, fortunately, is extensive — all small things, here and there, that take ages to get ‘perfect’, but, once mastered, they’re not only easy to do, but I’m willing to experiment further, with new techniques. I’m not afraid of ‘doing it wrong’ any more, I just see it all as part of a learning experience which is enjoyable. Sure, one day I would delight in having all my makeup and hairdo done by a professional in a salon, just to enjoy the ‘perfect’ result for a change. But I would see that mostly as a challenge: paying good attention to understand what exactly they’re doing, how they apply things, and try to replicate them as best as possible.

I still get frustrated with my hair, though. The only thing I’ve learned about hair is how to use curl rollers. That’s easy enough and gives a good impact. But I can’t do more than that. But I’m also willing to try. Unfortunately, you can’t do many experiences on synthetic fibre, and, as it happens, I finally persuaded myself that my current wig, no matter how much the company claims the contrary, is not made of human hair, or, if it is, it’s a mix with good quality synthetic hair… which means that a lot of hair techniques, all of them involving hear, are simply not possible. Ah well. Fortunately, it’s just a question of money! I’ve already lined up a list of retailers who will most definitely sell human hair. Unfortunately, money is one of the things that I lack…

I’ve actually taken a few pictures of myself, to see what Hamer would do with them, but I guess it’s too expensive for me — I’ll save the money for some new breast forms instead!

One thing that Hamer points out is that some extreme expectations (which later become a source of frustration and utter disappointment in the results) might be a delusional form of believing oneself to be ‘too ugly’ to pass as female. This condition is known as body dysmorphic disorder (BDD). I can very well believe that I suffer from at least a mild variant of that, but, of course, it is undiagnosed. BDD and GID often go hand-in-hand for obvious reasons, but the truth is that many people I know who are in transition, don’t really suffer from BDD. They’re happy with the way they look; they’re, however, extremely unhappy about their assigned gender and are taking steps to change it.

In fact, while I think I look ugly both as a male or as a female, I also think that a lot of transgendered people, many of which are in transition, look even uglier. But what always fascinates me is how little they worry about it, while I obsess about my looks all the time. So maybe I’m tackling my own issues in the worst possible way.

Clearly, if I ever went into transition, I would refuse to do the Real Time test unless I got some FFS first. The body can be successfully padded to look feminine; I worry far less about that, since I wouldn’t be going swimming during the Real Time test, but remain fully clothed until my body responded to hormones — and some surgery on top of that too, of course. But FFS, for me, would always be a must. At least, that nose, chin and jaws must go. I can live with the rest.