Bye-bye Brazilian!

Now that we have gone as far as the tabula rasa, can a case be made for the return of the unpruned pube? Is the bush administration making a comeback? "I do not think the thatch is back," says nurse Katherine Mooney of Vancouver's Pine Free Clinic. A specialist in birth control, sexually transmitted diseases and pregnancy counselling for 25 years, she has confronted many a mound. "It is now all or nothing. In years gone by, a semishaved woman was commonplace, but now it's full growth or clear-cut." Laurence Sabbah, on the other hand, who owns the trendy Parisian beauty salon Cocooning, avows that the eternal triangle is back. "We don't do the ticket metro much anymore because it has become quite vulgar," says Sabbah. "Most of the time they want the triangle. They don't like the rectangular strip because it's unnatural. We've gone back to the triangle because that's what nature gave us."

While French women have gone back to a neater version of the way God made us, New Yorkers are still holding out for pubic artifice. Christine Chin's eponymous Manhattan spa is filled with A-list clients. "Usually they want a regular Brazilian, which is the teeny, teeny diamond-some like it diamond-shaped, some like a strip half an inch wide and one and a half inches long and otherwise totally clean from front to back," she says. "I think the Brazilian is the most popular. Women just want to feel clean. Their boyfriends like the clean feeling. But I do have 20 to 30 percent of my clientele who like baby. And when you do baby, you never go back to hair."

Perhaps even more extreme than the eradicated muff, though, is the growing trend in novelty pubes-pubic hairstyling options that include dyeing, stencilled waxes, beading and sequined stickers for down there. London's Pout beauty boutique carries DIY pube-styling kits. Chin says that she does a lot of heart-shaped pubes around Valentine's Day, and once did an M for a client. And, of course, there is the famous Gucci ad with the G-shaped lawn. "Somebody once asked me to do an Eiffel Tower, but I don't think I did a very good job," says Sabbah. "I had to sketch it out first before I did the wax and it was hard to balance it out. I had to trim it afterwards with a pair of scissors."

It's safe to say, though, that novelty pubes remain a radical fringe movement, with most opting for a tasteful diamond, triangle or rectangle. But whatever the shape, no one is just letting it run wild down there anymore. Nobody except the cotton-briefs clientele. "They don't like the pain," says Chin. "They're a little conservative, a little old school. You can tell by the panties they're wearing -- they look like shorts. The clients who want Brazilians are always in G-strings. And the ones who want a baby don't wear anything. Artistic people you can never predict, but I'm never surprised."

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