From the founder

I started Crybaby Wax because of a body I spent twenty years apologizing for.

The hair showed up in middle school. I had my first wax at 16, sitting very still on a salon table, certain something about me was broken and that the kindest thing I could do was keep it hidden. I was 31 before a doctor finally said the word "PCOS" out loud. By then I had sat across from three different OBGYNs who looked at me, looked at the hair, and sent me home. One told me to lose weight. One told me it was cosmetic. None of them connected the dots that were sitting right there on my face.

For years I thought that delay was my fault, or my bad luck. It is not. It is the pattern. In the largest international study of how women actually get diagnosed, nearly half saw three or more health professionals before anyone named it, and a third waited more than two years.

47.1% of women saw three or more health professionals before being diagnosed with PCOS, and 33.6% waited more than two years for a diagnosis. Source

My story is not the exception. It is the data.

Why this report exists

I built this report to put a number next to every feeling. Because being dismissed feels personal, and it is so much easier to fight when you can see that it happened to millions of us, in the same order, for the same reasons. Unwanted hair was treated as vanity, so the thing that hurt us most was the thing no one would take seriously.

And here is what finally changed. In May 2026, a global expert consensus recommended renaming polycystic ovary syndrome to PMOS, polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome, a recommendation now moving through a roughly three-year transition with full adoption planned for the 2028 international guideline. It is supported by 86% of patients and 76% of health professionals. Source

The new name says, in clinical language, that this is a whole-body condition: endocrine, metabolic, reproductive, dermatological, psychological. Dermatological. The hair is in the definition now. That is not a small thing to a woman who was told her hair did not count.

I cannot give you back the years. I can hand you the evidence, honestly sourced, that you were right the whole time. And I can give you a gentler, less painful way to manage the part of this that shows up in the mirror, made for skin that has already been through enough.

If you are still waiting for someone to believe you, start here. I believe you. The data does too.

Medicine finally renamed the thing I was dismissed for. This report is for everyone who knew, long before the name changed, that they were not making it up. Cat Smith, Founder, Crybaby Wax

PCOS is now PMOS: what changed, and why it matters

If you have been told you have PCOS, polycystic ovary syndrome, here is some news that might reframe your whole experience: the name is changing. In a global consensus process published in The Lancet on May 12, 2026, experts proposed renaming PCOS to PMOS, Polyendocrine Metabolic Ovarian Syndrome. Source

This is a recommendation, not an overnight switch. PMOS is now in a roughly three-year transition, with full adoption planned for the 2028 update to the international clinical guideline (and pending ICD and WHO classification updates). So PCOS is still the operative term you will see on your chart and in your search bar for now. PMOS is where things are headed.

This was not a quick decision

The rename was built on roughly 14 years of work involving 56 organizations and more than 22,000 responses across three global surveys (2017, 2023, and 2025), with the final 2025 survey reaching 14,360 stakeholders.

87 of 90 voters at the final consensus workshop backed the new name PMOS immediately (88 of 90 by the time the manuscript was submitted; two opposed). This was close to unanimous. Source

86% of patients (precisely 85.6%) and 76% of health professionals (precisely 76.1%) agreed in a global survey that PCOS should be renamed, citing that the old name is misleading and drives confusion, delayed or missed diagnosis, stigma, and fragmented care. Source

Why this is a big deal for so many of us

1 in 8 women of reproductive age live with this condition, an estimated 10 to 13%, or more than 170 million women worldwide. If you are one of them, you are very far from alone. Source

The rename was not unanimous, and that matters too. Some advocates felt it was a lot of effort to swap one letter for another. Both things can be true: a change most patients wanted, that still left some people understandably confused mid-transition. [from our 2026 community survey, coming soon] of you had not yet heard the name was changing when we asked, and [from our 2026 community survey, coming soon] felt the old, cyst-centered name played a part in how long it took to get diagnosed.

I spent years being handed a name that pointed at the wrong thing. I had symptoms in middle school, started waxing at 16, and was not diagnosed until 31, after three OBGYNs sent me home. Seeing medicine finally drop the part of the name that never fit my body felt like being believed, late, but believed. That is the whole reason I started Crybaby Wax.Cat Smith, founder of Crybaby Wax

Throughout this report we keep saying "PCOS" because that is still the term you will search and hear today. But we are reading the news the same way the doctors who made this change are: the condition was never really about cysts, and the part of it people have been told for decades was "just cosmetic," the unwanted hair, is finally being recognized as a clinical feature. That is the story the rest of this report tells.

Why the name change validates the hair story

The old name put the focus on the ovaries. The new one finally names the rest of the body. In proposing Polyendocrine Metabolic Ovarian Syndrome (PMOS), a consensus recommendation now moving through a three-year transition rather than an already-final renaming, the panel reframes the condition as multisystem, spanning endocrine, metabolic, reproductive, dermatological and psychological health, rather than an ovarian-cyst disorder. Source

That word, dermatological, is the one we have been waiting on. For the first time the global medical language puts skin and hair where they have always belonged: at the clinical core of the condition, not in the cosmetic margins. The data has said as much for years.

The hair is not a side note. It is a leading sign.

65-75% of women with PCOS have hirsutism, versus just 4-11% of women in the general population, making excess hair the main clinical sign of hyperandrogenism in the condition. Source

70-80% of women who present with hirsutism have PCOS underlying it. Source

Read those two numbers together and the pattern is hard to miss. For most women, the hair and the hormones are the same story. Telling someone the hair is "just cosmetic" is not just dismissive, it can mean missing the condition driving it. (Population-based estimates of hirsutism prevalence vary by how it is defined and measured, so these clinical-review ranges describe the consensus picture, not a single fixed rate.)

The genetics point at the hair, too.

A 544,513-person genomic study (20,818 cases and 523,695 controls) nearly doubled the known PCOS genetic loci from 16 to 29, reinforcing that this is a heritable condition driven by hormonal and metabolic dysregulation. Source

Within that study, hyperandrogenism, the hormonal driver behind the hair, showed the clearest genetic signal (odds ratio 1.22 per standard deviation). The thing so many women are told to be quietly embarrassed about turns out to be one of the most genetically legible features of the whole syndrome. Source

Why this is personal for me

I noticed the hair before anyone gave me a word for it. I had my first wax at 16, years before I was diagnosed at 31, after three OBGYNs told me what I was experiencing was normal, or cosmetic, or nothing to worry about. For a long time I believed them, because the name of the condition was about cysts, and what I had was hair.

When medicine stops calling it cosmetic, women like me stop being told we are vain for being bothered by it. The rename is not a spelling change to me. It is the first time the official language matches what I lived through for fifteen years before a doctor finally believed me.

Cat Smith, Founder, Crybaby Wax

Our community survey will put real numbers to this gap, including which symptom first made women suspect something was wrong, and how many were told their excess hair was "just cosmetic" before they were ever diagnosed. [from our 2026 community survey, coming soon]

The science caught up. The name caught up. The mission was here the whole time: hirsutism is a clinical core feature, not a flaw to apologize for, and managing it deserves care that is honest, gentle, and less painful.

The diagnosis gap: dismissed, delayed, and undiagnosed

If you spent years being passed from one doctor to the next before anyone said the word "PCOS," you were not unlucky and you were not imagining it. The largest international study of PCOS diagnosis experiences shows that the long, dismissive road is the norm, not the exception.

47.1% of women saw 3 or more health professionals before they were diagnosed with PCOS (Gibson-Helm et al. 2017, the largest international study of PCOS diagnosis experiences, n=1,385 women across 32 countries). Source

33.6% waited more than 2 years for a diagnosis from when they first sought help (Gibson-Helm et al. 2017, n=1,385). Source

15.6% were satisfied with the information they received at diagnosis, and only 35.2% were satisfied with the diagnosis experience overall (Gibson-Helm et al. 2017, n=1,385). Source

Up to 70% of affected women remain undiagnosed worldwide (WHO, updated 22 January 2026). Source

Why this is the spine of the whole story

Almost half of women cycling through three or more clinicians, a third waiting over two years, and most of the rest never diagnosed at all is not a string of individual mistakes. It is a pattern. When the path to a name is this long for this many people, being dismissed becomes the default experience of living with this condition.

I had symptoms by middle school and got my first wax at 16, but I wasn't diagnosed until 31, after three OBGYNs waved me off. When I finally saw that 47.1% of women see three or more doctors first, my whole story stopped feeling like bad luck and started looking like the data. I built Crybaby Wax for the version of me who was still waiting to be believed.Cat Smith, Founder, Crybaby Wax

The symptom that hurts most: hirsutism and quality of life

For years, unwanted hair was treated as the footnote of PCOS, the cosmetic afterthought you were supposed to manage quietly and never mention. The data says the opposite. When researchers actually measure which PCOS symptom does the most damage to a woman's daily life, the hair wins. Not weight. Not irregular periods. Not even infertility. The hair.

Strongest of any symptom. In a study of 796 Iranian women with PCOS, excess body hair had the single largest negative impact on quality of life of any symptom measured, ahead of weight, irregular periods, and infertility (body-hair domain beta = -0.62, n=796; scope to this study population of Iranian women). Source

That is the line that should end the "it's just cosmetic" conversation. The symptom medicine spent decades waving off is, by the numbers, the one that hurts most.

How common is it, really?

65 to 75%. Hirsutism affects an estimated 65-75% of women with PCOS, versus just 4-11% of women in the general population, making it the leading clinical sign of hyperandrogenism (note: population-based estimates vary by how hirsutism is defined). Source

47.3%, the most common skin sign. In a single-center cohort of 447 women with PCOS, hirsutism was the most common cutaneous manifestation at 47.3%, ahead of acne (40.6%) and androgenic alopecia (20.3%). Source

So if you have PCOS and you are dealing with hair where you did not expect it, you are not the unlucky exception. You are, statistically, the rule.

What "very large effect" actually means

A DLQI of 15.98. Women with facial hirsutism scored a mean Dermatology Life Quality Index of 15.98 (plus or minus 5.79), which the scale classifies as a "very large effect" on quality of life (Pathania et al. 2023, n=50). Source

I got my first wax at sixteen. I would not be diagnosed for another fifteen years. For most of that time I believed the hair was a personal failing I was supposed to hide, not a clinical sign anyone should have taken seriously. The research now says it was the symptom hurting me the most, and not one of the three OBGYNs who dismissed me ever asked about it.Cat Smith, founder of Crybaby Wax

Reframing the footnote

This is the heart of why we built this report. The hair is not vanity, and it is not the easy part. It is the symptom with the strongest measured pull on quality of life, the most common skin sign of the condition, and a distress score in the same range as conditions no one would dare call cosmetic. Treating it that way for so long was not just unkind. It was wrong on the data.

The medical world is starting to catch up. The global consensus now recommending the PMOS name, a recommendation moving through a three-year transition, reframes this condition as multisystem and names the dermatological dimension out loud. The hair is finally being recognized as a clinical core feature, which is exactly what so many of us felt in our bodies long before anyone wrote it down.

We want to put a real face on which hair bothers our community most, and how it lands on confidence and mood. [from our 2026 community survey, coming soon] will map self-reported "trouble zones" (upper lip, chin, jaw, abdomen) against the clinical literature, and a Crybaby PMOS and Hair Confidence Index will turn the lived experience into numbers, so the next woman waiting fifteen years for someone to listen has the data on her side. If gentler, less painful waxing is part of how you manage that, we are here for it, on your timeline.

The mental-health toll, handled with care

Unwanted hair is not a vanity problem. The weight it puts on your mind is real, it is measurable, and for a long time almost nobody was asking about it. One of the strongest reasons behind the proposed move from PCOS to PMOS is exactly this: the psychological side of the condition has been under-recognized for decades, and the recommended rename, now in a multi-year transition, is meant to put it back in the room. Here is what the research actually shows.

The mood burden is roughly triple

2.79x the odds of depression and 2.75x the odds of anxiety for women with PCOS, pooled across 57 studies and 172,040 patients. These are odds, not flat rates. Source

Numbers like that can feel abstract. If you have ever sat in a car a beat longer than you needed to, bracing yourself before walking into a bright room, you already know the feeling underneath the statistic.

When the hair is the focus, the toll climbs

In a 2006 study of 88 women seeking treatment for unwanted facial hair, most with suspected or diagnosed PCOS, the burden was strikingly concentrated. Source

75% reported clinical levels of anxiety, 30% had depression above the clinical cutoff, and these women spent an average of 104 minutes per week managing their facial hair. That figure describes women already seeking treatment, not every woman with PCOS, but within that group the time and the worry add up fast. Source

Nearly two hours a week. More than a workday a month, spent tweezing, shaving, checking, re-checking, hiding. That is time and energy that belongs to you.

Appearance, not the diagnosis itself, may drive the mood

In a 2019 cross-sectional study of 189 women with PCOS compared to 225 controls, two specific facets of body-image distress, appearance evaluation and body-areas satisfaction, statistically and fully mediated the link between PCOS and both depression and anxiety. Because the study was cross-sectional, it cannot prove cause and effect. It suggests, rather than proves, that easing how you feel about your appearance may ease the mood symptoms too. Source

If that holds, then caring for the way you look is not shallow. It is care that reaches the part of you that is hurting.

The hardest number, and why we are sharing it gently

The screening gap, from our community

The 2023 international clinical guideline recommends routinely screening women with PCOS for depression and anxiety. We wanted to know how often that actually happens, so we asked our own community.

[from our 2026 community survey, coming soon] of Crybaby Wax customers say a clinician has ever screened them for depression or anxiety.

[from our 2026 community survey, coming soon] told us unwanted hair affects their confidence or mood.

I had symptoms since middle school and my first wax at 16, but I was 31 before a doctor finally named what was happening, after three OBGYNs waved me off. The hair was never just hair. It was the thing I rearranged my whole day around. I built Crybaby Wax in 2023 so that the part you can control feels a little kinder, and so the part you cannot feel a little less lonely.

Cat Smith, Founder of Crybaby Wax

Every hair-removal method for PCOS, honestly compared

If you have PCOS, you have probably tried almost everything, and somewhere along the way someone sold you a permanent fix that was not permanent. So here is the honest version, sourced straight from the FDA and the American Academy of Dermatology, no marketing math attached.

Only one method is actually "permanent removal," and it is not laser

Electrolysis is the only method the FDA recognizes as permanent hair removal. Laser and IPL devices are FDA-cleared only for permanent hair reduction, defined as the long-term, stable reduction in the number of hairs regrowing measured at 6, 9, and 12 months after a completed treatment regime. Source

Reduction and removal are not the same word, and the gap between them is where a lot of money and hope gets lost. Laser thins and slows hair. It does not erase it.

What laser really does, especially on a woman's face

Per the American Academy of Dermatology, you can expect a 10% to 25% reduction in hair after the first laser treatment, most people need 2 to 6 treatments, and while results are permanent on most areas of the body, they are NOT permanent on a woman's face because of hormones. Source

The risk almost nobody warns the PCOS patient about

In a 2025 prospective study of women undergoing alexandrite laser facial hair removal, paradoxical hypertrichosis, where laser triggers MORE hair, appeared in 16.2% of patients, and rates were significantly higher in those with PCOS (33.3% vs 14.1%), irregular cycles, a family history of hirsutism, and darker skin types (Fitzpatrick III to IV). Source

To be precise about who this hits: the elevated risk tracks with skin TYPE on the Fitzpatrick scale, not with any ethnicity or heritage. The honest read is that the exact people most likely to seek laser for PCOS hirsutism, women with PCOS and deeper skin tones, are also the people most likely to grow more hair from it, not less. That is not a footnote a vendor blog tends to lead with.

And to clear one thing off the table: shaving

Shaving does not make hair grow back thicker, darker, or faster. It is a myth that has been debunked since 1928. Shaving cuts the hair at the surface, leaving a blunt tip that can feel coarser, but it changes nothing about the root, the color, or the rate. Source

Shave if you want to. Just know it is surface-level by design, which for hormone-driven hair means it is back by the weekend.

So where does that leave you

Here is the part the data quietly insists on. Hirsutism in PCOS is hormonally driven and lifelong. Laser reduces but does not permanently remove it from your face. Electrolysis can be permanent but runs long and costly across dozens of sessions. There is no method that lets you stop thinking about it forever, so the realistic question is not "how do I make it disappear," it is "how do I manage it for life without dreading the routine."

I started waxing at 16, years before anyone gave my body a name for what it was doing. By the time I was diagnosed at 31, I had cycled through everything and learned the hard way that "permanent" was a sales word. What actually held up was a routine I could live with, gentle enough to repeat forever. That is the whole reason Crybaby Wax exists: not to promise the hair away, but to make managing it for life less painful, less lonely, and a little kinder to your skin.

Cat Smith, founder of Crybaby Wax

Consistent at-home waxing, done with a wax built for sensitive, reactive skin, is not the consolation prize after laser fails. For a lifelong, hormone-driven symptom, it is the realistic management plan: less painful than you remember, on your schedule, in your bathroom, for a fraction of the cost. (We will always call it less painful, never the word that overpromises. It is less painful, and that honesty is the point.)

The cost and time tax of managing unwanted hair

Unwanted hair is not a one-time expense. It is a subscription nobody chose, billed in dollars and in hours, for life. Because the methods sold as "permanent" are not permanent on a hormonally driven face (see the method comparison above), the bill never really closes. Here is the honest math, built from primary pricing sources rather than vendor lifetime estimates.

The recurring dollar cost

$697 is the average cost of laser hair removal per treatment, and that is only part of the price, since most patients need a full course of roughly 6 to 12 sessions. Source

$50 to $150 per hour is the going rate for electrolysis, averaging about $1,193 total and running up to $4,000 over a course of 8 to more than 40 sessions. Source

And these are the costs for the methods marketed as the "end" of hair removal. For most women with PCOS, they are the beginning of a maintenance schedule, not the end of one.

The recurring time cost

About 72 days, roughly 1,728 hours, is the time the average woman spends shaving her legs over a lifetime, and that is legs alone, before any face, underarm, or body upkeep. Source

That figure comes from a 2013 brand-commissioned survey (Escentual) and covers legs only, so treat it as an estimate of the floor, not the ceiling. For a woman managing facial hirsutism on top of everything else, the real weekly hours run much higher.

The toll is measurable, and so is the burden

15.98 is the mean Dermatology Life Quality Index score for women with facial hirsutism, classed as a "very large effect" on quality of life and documented alongside a real financial burden. Source (Pathania et al. 2023, n=50, scope to study population.)

What our community pays

Published pricing tells you what the market charges. It does not tell you what real women with PCOS actually spend chasing a moving target, or how many methods they cycle through first. So we asked.

Crybaby community members report spending an average of [from our 2026 community survey, coming soon] per year managing unwanted hair, and [from our 2026 community survey, coming soon] hours per week, segmented PCOS versus non-PCOS and by method.

Where women with PCOS actually go for help

The conversation about unwanted hair has moved. It used to happen in a dermatologist's waiting room or, more often, nowhere at all. Now it happens in a search bar at 1am and in a Reddit thread full of strangers who get it. If you have ever typed your symptoms into Google instead of saying them out loud to a doctor, you are not alone. You are the majority.

The questions are being asked at enormous scale

~368,000 US searches a month for "pcos symptoms," and 14,800 a month for "hirsutism." Source: Serpstat (Google US, June 2026)

That is hundreds of thousands of women a month, every month, quietly trying to name what is happening to their bodies. The "hirsutism" query in particular is mostly answered by a Wikipedia featured snippet and a medical knowledge panel, which means a clinical definition is doing the talking before any real human voice gets a word in.

Google is now answering with AI, not just links

On all six core PCOS hair queries we tested, Google fired an AI Overview at the top of the page, plus a People Also Ask box. That means the AI-generated answer is increasingly the first and sometimes only thing a woman reads. The volumes behind those queries:

5,400/mo "pcos facial hair," 2,900/mo "pcos chin hair," 2,400/mo "pcos beard," 2,400/mo "laser hair removal pcos," 1,000/mo "pcos hair removal," and 110/mo "best hair removal for pcos," every one of them serving an AI Overview. Source: Serpstat (Google US, June 2026)

There is a quiet lane the big sites have not taken

2,900/mo US searches for "pmos" at a keyword difficulty of just 5, and 480/mo for "pcos facial hair removal" at a keyword difficulty of 1, both triggering AI Overviews and both near-zero competition. Source: Serpstat (Google US, June 2026)

The newer "pmos" term especially is an open question space. PMOS is the proposed new name now moving through a three-year transition, and as more women come across it and search it, almost no one has stepped in to answer them with care.

And when search falls short, women turn to each other

page one of Google carried a Reddit thread for all 8 PCOS hair queries we checked. Source: Crybaby first-party SERP check, June 2026

Reddit ranking on the front page of every query is not an accident. It is what happens when people decide that other patients are a more trustworthy source than the institutions that dismissed them. The peer-support conversation has become a primary source of truth.

Measuring exactly how big that community conversation is, though, has gotten harder. In February 2024, TikTok removed public hashtag view counts, so one of the few open windows into how much women were talking about PCOS and hair removal on the platform simply closed.

February 2024 is when TikTok removed public hashtag view counts, ending verifiable at-the-source measurement of conversation volume. Source: The Washington Post

What our own community told us

We asked Crybaby customers where they first went looking for help with unwanted hair, whether that was a Google AI Overview, a Reddit thread, TikTok, a Facebook group, or a dermatologist or esthetician.

The first place women turned for hair-removal help: [from our 2026 community survey, coming soon]

Share who searched online before ever raising it with a clinician: [from our 2026 community survey, coming soon]

When I was searching, I wasn't looking for a diagnosis. I was looking for proof I wasn't the only one, and for someone to be honest with me about what actually works. For years that meant scrolling forums at midnight instead of getting a straight answer in an exam room. The least we can do, as the brand sitting in this space, is be the honest source we all wished we'd found first.Cat Smith, Founder, Crybaby Wax

The demand is real and growing

Here is the part medicine has been slow to count: a stigmatized need is still a measurable one. People are quietly buying for it, coming back for it, and they have been all along. Some of the clearest evidence I have sits in my own store data, and the broader market backs it up.

What our own customers tell us

Our PCOS Facial Hair Kit is the best-selling multi-product kit by revenue that we make, with 88 orders (89 units) over the trailing year. That is real, repeat demand following a symptom that insurers still call cosmetic. Source (Shopify Admin Analytics, trailing 365 days, 2026-06-24)

870 orders (1,253 units) over the trailing year make "I'm Sensitive Meltdown Vegan Hard Wax," our coconut-scented sensitive-skin wax, our number-one product by both orders and units. The people reaching for the gentlest option are the ones buying the most. Source (Shopify Admin Analytics, trailing 365 days, 2026-06-24)

19.1% of our customers are repeat buyers over the trailing year. Hair driven by hormones keeps coming back, so the people managing it keep coming back too. (This is Shopify's native returning-customer rate and does not yet exclude $0 comp and sample orders, so the cleaned figure may shift slightly.) Source (Shopify Admin Analytics, returning-customer rate, 2025-06-24 to 2026-06-24)

The market around it

The US personal waxing and nail salons industry reached $25.5B in 2025, growing at a 9.1% annual rate from 2020 to 2025 off a COVID-trough base (an adjacent services market, not a wax-product figure). The need we serve sits inside a category people are already spending billions on. Source

What we still cannot tell you is how our community's reorder cadence compares to that 19.1% sitewide rate, or which states lead in demand for help with unwanted hair. Those answers are coming. [from our 2026 community survey, coming soon]

Methodology and sources

This report blends three kinds of evidence, and we label which is which on every line. The first is peer-reviewed research: published clinical studies, meta-analyses, and consensus statements from sources like The Lancet, the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, Nature Genetics, and the World Health Organization. The second is public search and market data, pulled from Serpstat (Google US, verified 2026-06-24) and named industry-analysis firms. The third is Crybaby Wax first-party data: anonymized order and customer figures from our own Shopify store, dated to the trailing 365 days ending 2026-06-24.

How we handle the numbers

Every statistic in this report carries a linked source directly beneath it, and we cite the primary study wherever one exists rather than a secondary summary. Where a figure has limits, we say so out loud: odds ratios are reported as odds and not as plain rates, single-center and single-country studies are flagged as such, the suicide-risk finding is scoped as adjusted odds of an attempt within a Taiwan nationwide cohort, and the paradoxical-hypertrichosis figures are tied to skin type and not to ethnicity. Where our own Shopify figures rely on Shopify's native returning-customer and order counts, we note that those counts do not yet exclude $0 comp and sample orders under our standard rule, so we treat them as preliminary and reconcile a clean comp-excluded count before any external use. We do not round, invent, or stretch a number past what its source says. The PCOS-to-PMOS rename is presented as it stands today: a consensus recommendation now in a roughly three-year transition, with full adoption planned for the 2028 international guideline update, not a change that is already official.

86% of patients and 76% of health professionals agreed PCOS should be renamed, the single canonical support figure used throughout this report. Source

Our community survey

The most important data in this report is the part that does not exist yet. We are running an original PCOS and PMOS community survey of our own customers, covering time to diagnosis, number of doctors seen, the symptom they noticed first, the mental-health toll of unwanted hair, the methods they tried, and what they spend. Until those results are in, every survey-dependent number appears as [from our 2026 community survey, coming soon]. We would rather show you a placeholder than a guess.

About Crybaby Wax

Crybaby Wax is the vegan hard wax brand built for sensitive skin and for the people medicine kept dismissing. I am Cat Smith, the founder. I had symptoms in middle school, my first wax at 16, and a PCOS diagnosis at 31, after three OBGYNs waved me off. I started Crybaby Wax in 2023 because unwanted hair was never cosmetic to me, it was the symptom no one would name. We make waxing less painful, and we never pretend it does not hurt, and we made this report so the next person gets believed sooner.

For years this community told us their unwanted hair was a real symptom, not a vanity problem, and the new consensus to rename PCOS finally puts the dermatological side of this condition on the record. This report is our way of putting the data behind what we have heard from this community all along.Cat Smith, Founder, Crybaby Wax