Female sexuality in the 90s, according to Daedone, was often overdramatized, both in private and in its cultural manifestations, untethered to the deep commitment and spiritual intensity that had long been a part of the ultimate act of human intimacy. “Freud actually said anything that is exaggerated is exaggerated because it hasn’t been integrated, and female sexuality often operated in an automatic way—like L.A.,” Daedone says, laughing. “The surface of it was out there, the show of it was everywhere apparent, but there wasn’t any depth to it. There was this arched-back, moaning sort of sexuality—you had all the symbols of it. But, as is said in semantics, you didn’t have the actual referent. In the 80s and 90s you experienced the liberation of the idea but none of that had been actually integrated into our bodies.”

As Daedone suggests, letting nature take its course has served the species just fine since well before the Stone Age. But, the bottom line, Janea now says, is that “the sex is better.” To her way of thinking, less hair means better friction for both partners, more exposed nerve endings, more skin-on-skin intimacy. Some clients, says Janea, often show up weeks early for follow-up appointments, which tend to be about five weeks apart. “They say, ‘The wax is aphrodisiac.’ Or, ‘I need to wax for my new boyfriend.’ I say, ‘I just saw you. Come back in five or six weeks.’” (And oral sex would become the Brazilian wax’s killer app. “[A Brazilian] heightens the pleasure and sensuality in every place,” insists J Sisters customer Dani, a marketing executive in her fifties, who requests that her real name not be used. “You just have the tongue and the intensity of the movement, without any barrier. And the intensity of the orgasm is definitely longer.”)

The rest, as they say, is history. The J Sisters, though unsuccessful in trying to trademark the phrase “Brazilian bikini wax” in the early 90s, consider it their creation. Indeed, a decade later, Jonice would field the call (she doesn’t recall the exact year) when a man telephoned for some background, saying the term “bikini wax” might be added to the Oxford English Dictionary. “When they called to ask for the definition”—Jonice hits her head to mimic her stunned reaction—“What can you say? I told him, ‘What? Its real meaning? It produces a better orgasm!’”

A lot has changed since that wax over the fax machine. Mothers and daughters now visit salons to “get done” as a sort of bonding experience. Beauty venues have devised waxing tactics that are more user-friendly (meaning: less painful). But for the J Sisters, the standard preference remained the original, back-to-the-roots basics: 90ºF wax applied to the entire business; cloth strips tugged with furious force for 10 minutes; $75 a visit.

The salon, over time, would cut back on requests for designs (a mate’s initials, for example) and radical dye jobs, but they welcomed the hardship cases that other spas might refuse: the heavily pierced; the gorilla-like men recommended by their dermatologists. Recently, a bride-to-be, four days before her wedding, arrived from Germany—by limo, straight from J.F.K.— just to have a wax. “She take the car service back to the airport,” Janea says in disbelief. “Don’t even shop!” Clients would range in age from 17 to 82. And all because of Janea’s little brainstorm.

Or was it?

The Brazilian bikini wax, it so happens, wasn’t immaculately conjured one night in a bubbling vat. The practice in some form or another, actually dates back to Cleopatra’s day, at least, and sculptures from ancient Greece depict females, unlike their male counterparts, without genital hair. Closer to our age, there has been a rich if checkered history of the southerly tonsured. In the 1950s and 60s, ever-shrinking bathing attire triggered ever more aggressive shapings and shearings. Athletes, male and female, fearful of stray follicles that might impede performance or mar appearance, began to embrace the paste. Actor George Hamilton says he admired the work of top L.A. hairdressers in the 60s and 70s, such as Gene Shacove, one of the men who inspired the 1975 movie Shampoo. Shacove, recalls Hamilton, would have his female clients (many of them movie stars and showgirls) stand “behind a sheet with a cut-out pattern down below for what they wanted the shape to be—waxing, snipping, and coloring—so the hairdresser didn’t see their faces.” California waxes were “more modest than those in New York [in the 1960s],” insists Tommy Baratta, the restaurateur (and Jack Nicholson confidant), who started as a shampoo boy for New York hairdresser Larry Mathews—also on 57th Street—before venturing out on his own.