BY MELISSA HECKSCHER >LA.COM

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It's about time.

After years of plucking, tweezing, waxing and unforgivingly ripping out our body hairs as if they were weeds invading a garden, it's finally happening:

Men are doing it, too.

It’s true. According to a survey published in Men’s Health magazine, about a third of all men groom their body hair. Even more surprising? Fifty-six percent of guys admit to having trimmed or shaved their nether-regions.

Just look on their shelves. There’s “Nair for Men.” Norelcro has its “Body Groomer” shaver. And, in 2006, a Santa Monica guy named Brett Marut invented the “Mangroomer,” a 2-foot-long reach-around razor designed so guys can get at their own backs. Marut reportedly sold more than 80,000 of the razors in his first year of business.

Yep. It seems men are starting to look a lot more ... like women.

Tina Perlmuter would know. An aesthetician at Mark Matthew Fine Gentlemen’s Grooming Club in Studio City, she’s waxed nearly every male body part possessing hair follicles. From under-the-arms to below-the-belt, she’s seen it all.

And it got me to thinking:

“Want to get your chest waxed?” I asked my boyfriend — let’s call him “Jacob” — ever-so-casually mid-dinner a few weeks ago.

He looked at me as if I were speaking pig Latin.

“Do I want to get what waxed?” (He’s thinking cars; I’m thinking hair.)

“You know, get ‘manscaped,’” I exaggerated the word so he would know I was only half-serious.

“Or maybe you could just get your chest hairs trimmed?” I amended. “Your eyebrows tweezed?”

His expression had an “Are you kidding me?” sort of look that made me feel embarrassed for asking. But he didn’t say no.

“Do you think I need it?” he asked plainly.

I said, of course not. (He didn’t.)

“It’s for a column,” I said. “Women have been doing it for years, I just want to see what it’s like for guys.”

Then, to my surprise:

“OK.”

“Wait — OK?”

“Sure.”

Flash forward two weeks. We’re in a procedure room of the Mark Matthews salon and Jacob (no doubt regretting that “OK”) is standing with his shirt off, looking as vulnerable as a child in a doctor’s office. He’s scheduled for a chest “trim,” having flat-out refused the chest waxing on account of having seen the scene in “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” where Steve Carell gets waxed (All you need to know: He bled.).

Before I say anything else, let’s get one thing straight: My boyfriend is not hairy. Well, not any more hairy than a good old-fashioned masculine and non-metrosexualized man should be.

But this is Los Angeles, the place where the smooth and rippled body of David Beckham in tightie-whities towers over Hollywood Boulevard from a billboard the size of the Queen Mary; where legions of seemingly hairless men get paid for playing volleyball on the beach, their chests gleaming like freshly polished wood.

In Los Angeles, unkempt male body hair is going the way of the preposterously oversized SUV — it’s just not as cool as it used to be.

“Oh yeah,” Perlmuter said, scanning Jacob’s bare chest as if it were an item up for auction. “He needs a trim.”

I felt defensive. “He doesn’t need anything,” I wanted to say. "He’s great just the way he is.”

But I stayed quiet.

Using an electric razor and with what looked like premeditated artistry, she began to trim. Jacob just stood there, stiff and still like a sheep being sheared, while I watched awkwardly from the corner. “What have I gotten him into?” was all I could think.

By the end, she had trimmed his chest hair down to an even fuzz as well as plucked out the stray hairs on his back and waxed his eyebrows into neatly manicured lines.

In the end, he liked it.

But did I?

I asked myself: Do I need a guy who’s perfectly smooth-skinned? Do I want a guy who worries about whether his eyebrows have the right amount of arch or whether his chest hair makes him look bad in a bathing suit?

No. And neither do most other women.

In fact, according to a Playgirl magazine survey, 47 percent of women said they actually like chest hair. Furthermore, nearly three-quarters of women prefer a guy who is “rough around the edges” to his perfectly manscaped counterpart.

Then again, studies have shown men prefer women with curves, but that’s not stopping Mary-Kate and Ashley from starving themselves into matching twin toothpicks. People will do what they want, regardless of popular opinion.

“So what do you think?” I asked Jacob as we walked out of the salon. “Do you think you’ll do it again?”

He looked at me. The skin above his eyes was red where the hair had been plucked and I realized I liked his eyebrows better untamed.

“I don’t know,” he said.“I don’t think so.”

Attaboy.

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Melissa Heckscher is the author of six books including "Date Him or Dump Him? The No-Nonsense Relationship Quiz” (Quirk Books, 2005). She can be reached at melissa.heckscher@dailybreeze.com.