It shows Pedro Padilha, the family patriarch, who died in 2002 at age 86. “And had their legs open!”Ītop the grid of glossies hangs a single faded photo. “If only they were naked,” a pedicure client interrupts, completing the thought. “I meet people on the street,” she says, “and don’t remember they names. Everyone, it seems, stops to greet Janea, a tiny dynamo who has built a career out of talking intimately with women-literally dozens a day on her treatment table. And despite the harsh, clinical lighting, the mood is cozy: part East Side sleepover, part girls’ dorm, albeit one with stylists and waxers scurrying to and fro. On a wall rack, bikinis are hung like Day-Glo tinsel. A glass display case is arrayed with name-brand waxes. The waiting area has the feel of a large powder room: brocaded chairs, high-ceilinged chandeliers, faux-gold moldings. “If they’re blonde: do I look like Gwyneth Paltrow? Brunette ask about celebrity who is brunette.” But she always reassures them, “We are all the same!” “ Kirstie Alley walks around here in her bare feet.” Janea Padilha explains that in the close quarters of the waxing room, anatomically self-conscious patrons sometimes ask her to compare their privates to those of the women on the walls. “Gwyneth comes for a mani and a pedi and sits out here,” one staffer says, beaming, standing amid more down-to-earth clientele. It begins with a visit not long ago to their then still-bustling domain.
#Brazillian wax full
What was the actual spark that compelled legions of women to grit their teeth, open their pocketbooks, and begin adopting this extreme grooming statement-to the point where today a mons sans (by wax or tweeze, laser or razor, depilatory or electrolysis, topical creams or oral drugs, salon or self-administered) is now as pervasive as a pedicure? Perhaps the best way to arrive at some answers is to recount Janea Padilha and her sisters’ many-threaded tale, which has never been told in full until now. That, of course, was in their 90s heyday. After they opened their own New York salon in 1987, Janea decided three years later to introduce the Brazilian wax: a nude nether region, back and front, topped off by a frontal “landing strip,” or by a simple design or triangle, or by nothing at all. The woman who had started it all was Janea Padilha, a diminutive sixtysomething grandmother from the Bahia region of eastern Brazil-one of seven enterprising sisters (along with Judseia, Jussara, Juracy, Jocely, Joyce, and Jonice).
And having created a craze adopted by a generation of women, they began to realize that theirs were no longer the only tweezers in town. They were, in truth, victims of their own success. Soon the J Sisters faced eviction, unable to afford the rent on tony West 57th Street. Staffers abandoned ship to work in nearby salons. Workers’ commissions and wages allegedly went unpaid. But in the summer of 2016, the master waxers were suddenly on the wane. Their “technique” was featured in beauty magazines and on talk shows-even meriting a full episode of Sex and the City. Their Manhattan salon had become a shrine to models, socialites, and Hollywood stars. For 25 years, the J Sisters, the mysterious Brazilian siblings who brought the Brazilian bikini wax to America had ruled the cosmetological cosmos.
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