The agony and the ectasy: Why women are willing undergo painful beauty treatments

Tweezing, extracting, waxing -- all of these procedures hurt, a lot. Yet a fairly large majority of women are willing to pay a stranger to wax their bikini lines (and more), pull out hair from their faces and squeeze blackheads out of their skin.

As this article from an Australian newspaper discusses, we ladies are willing to suffer to look good. The author mentions that a number of women have even been sent to hospital in beauty-related disasters including waxing incidents gone terribly wrong. I've accidentally ripped on bits of skin after missing a tiny hair while trying to tweeze my eyebrows and it hurt so much it brought tears to my eyes -- and yet I kept on plucking.

I suppose you can't put a price on beauty but who exactly do we do all of this for? I've gotten facials and body scrubs and waxings before dates with boyfriends and they've never noticed. I bet most men don't. I think the real reason we do all of this stuff is because it makes us feel prettier and prompts us act sexier and more confident and that is what the guys notice.

Do you go through painful beauty treatments and if so, who do you think you do it for?