As a former Hot Girl©, I am all too familiar with the financial trials and tribulations of attempting to maintain some semblance of an acceptable female appearance. In fact, I wrote about my devolution from a near-$400/month hot girl budget to effectively $0 here.

I remember the most common experience all too well, and it goes a little something like this:

(a) Feel bad about self for some generalized reason, then notice (in rapid, horrifying succession) that my roots were grown out, my ends were split, my gel nails were peeling, my legs were pale and hairy, and – oh, yeah! – I was stressed.

(b) Panic-schedule a full day of back-to-back primp appointments, and add two points if taking PTO to accommodate mid-week.

(c) Attend said appointments in order: Massage, facial, eyebrow threading, cut and color, manicure/pedicure, spray tan and chill.

(d) Feel increasingly uncomfortable calculating the accumulating 20% tips at each and every vendor and swiping the AmEx with less and less enthusiasm.

(e) Go home. Sit on couch. Bask in glory of retaining hot girl status for another 2-3 weeks, and then quickly realize you feel no different.

Feeling constantly underwhelmed by the money you’re “investing” in your appearance

For me, the hair was never quite blonde enough and the nails were never quite perfect enough to justify the money and time spent. It was a little bit like how meth addicts describe chasing their first high for the rest of their lives: Nothing compares, but you’ll do anything (read: spend any amount of money in an Aveda salon) to try to achieve that high. (Are hard drug references crossing the line here?)

The idea of “self-care” has become so distorted and commodified for women in particular that it can feel like hitting the old “reset button” on your appearance has to come with a $500 price tag every time. (Anyone else think about it a little bit like starting over? Okay, the leg hair is starting to curl – time to do the hard reset on my femininity one appointment at a time.)

And I’d venture there’s even an appetite in that market to get away from the high-maintenance, high-cost extremes, as evidenced by the global success of brands like Glossier which attempt to promote (and commodify) embracing more of your natural self (although Glossier postulates that in order to be more of your natural self, you need to buy their $16 boy brow product… it’s fine, we’re making progress).

My free self-care day

While I’ve slowly pulled back my hot girl budget to a withering $0/month, that doesn’t mean I don’t still feel the sporadic repulsion at my own leg hair. I still want to take care of myself – I just don’t want to feel like a foreign car with an expensive maintenance routine that requires many hours in the shop every month.

I decided to press a hard reset not on my whole commercialized appearance once a month, but on my idea of what it means to take care of myself.

Ironically, all the appointments that I was treating as “good for me” were technically terrible for their targeted area: My nails became thin and brittle from the gel manicures. My toenails were permanently dyed yellow from the constant hot pink and red polish. My hair was thinner and more fragile from the highlighting and curling. Weren’t these things supposed to improve me?

The list below will feel stunningly simple (laughably simple, even) if you’ve got the Premium Hot Girl Monthly Membership right now, so take this as one example of something you could try instead or adapt for you.

Back to basics

1. I take a shower and wash and condition my hair. I do a really thorough double shampoo to get all the grease and dry shampoo build-up off my scalp (sexy!) and let the conditioner sit on my ends while I shave my legs.

2. If I’m feeling really naughty, I’ll even blow-dry my hair afterward. Once I’m out of the shower, I put lotion on my legs (something I basically never do, so it feels pretty luxurious in the moment) and I trim my fingernails and toenails with nail clippers. I’ll even go the extra mile with the scraper tool and clean underneath them if I’ve baked in some time for this exercise.

3. Then, I lather my face with a gentle face wash (or just water, if I washed my face in the shower) and use a Tinkle razor (yep, that’s really the name) that I buy on Amazon in packs of 12 for about $5 to shave the peach fuzz off my face. At-home microdermabrasion!

4. I wash and dry my hands, lather them up with moisturizer, and apply a thick moisturizer to my bare-ass face now that all the dead skin cells and hair has been mercilessly scraped off.

5. Last, I spend some extra time tweezing my eyebrows. I might even use the brow brush to comb them up and use my tiny sewing scissors to trim them.

And that’s it

You could spice this up a little by adding more steps, but I’ve found the more steps you add, the more products you need to buy. This is the best balance that I’ve found for actually taking care of your body, hair, and skin, without turning it into an all-out Sephora blitz that’ll probably just leave you rash-y and poor.

I love the lifetime sustainability aspect of this, and the fact that I don’t have to budget more than 45 minutes to complete the process end-to-end. Once you recalibrate your expectations for what “self-care” looks like, it’s shocking how satisfying and healthy it feels to perform this routine (free) maintenance on yourself.

And in some ways, for me, it sends the message (to my subconscious) that I don’t need to pay professionals hundreds of dollars a month to be beautiful or worthy of self-love – that I don’t need to be bleached, coiffed, tanned, and waxed into perfection to be perfect the way I am (barf, Katie, we get it). Before, implicitly, I think that was the message I was sending myself. Something is wrong with you if you don’t enact Steps (a) through (e) with perfect precision once a month and have the receipts to show for it.

Your body, your choice

This is just an example of one woman’s adaptation of self-care, and it’s been good for my wallet and self-esteem. If nothing about this sounds appealing to you, keep going to the salon. It’s your body, your money, and your choice. But I urge you to experiment – maybe just for a little bit – and see how it feels.