Can someone please tell me what’s up with Brazil wanting to inflict pain on our lady parts?

First they gave us the Brazilian wax, a way to return your vulva to its prepubescent state (by mercilessly ripping out each and every hair). Some call it a beauty treatment; I call it a medieval torture technique. To-may-to, to-mah-to.

Now it seems the lovely ladies of Brazil have a new idea for your bikini area: ditching that boring old fabric bathing suit for a contraption made of gauze, paper towels, and electrical tape. It’s not about fashion, though (obviously). Instead, it’s about getting tan lines so sharp and so pale against tan skin that they’ll practically blind onlookers.

“We look sexier, it boosts our ego, and it looks prettier,” one customer told the Associated Press. Well, more power to them. But I have to go on record as saying I’m so glad I don’t have to deal with those beauty standards, for a few reasons.

First of all, I don’t think I want to find out how much tape it would take to cover my ass.

Secondly, I don’t even like removing band-aids. A roll of tape on my sensitive bits is not going to fly.

“You must have a lot of determination because it’s tough,” another customer said. No kidding. But apparently all the moisture from boob sweat and swamp ass makes the tape a little easier to remove, so there’s that.

The woman who invented the technique is now doing booming business in Rio de Janeiro. Apparently she’d been perfecting it for years before opening up a salon.

The AP says she practiced putting together the bikinis on her friends at first, and I’d love to know how that whole thing got started. Imagine having a girlfriend over to hang out and suddenly being like, “Hey, I have a cool idea—can I tape your butt cheeks shut? You’ll look awesome!”

It seems a little crazy to me, but I suppose it’s cheaper than a Miracle suit?