Is Body Hair on Women STILL Not Normal?

After writing my last post on Victoria's Secrets rebrand (check it out here if you haven't already!), it got me thinking about how people perceive beauty, and what it really means to be attractive by today's standards.

In this article I will be expanding on the history of body hair, the body positivity movement and my own experiences with body hair.

How did being hairless as a woman become a trend?

Surprisingly, it was only in the 1920s when body hair removal really took off and became a 'trend', beforehand hair removal still existed, but there was little need for it because of how much of a woman's body was covered up by her clothing.

As with many female insecurities (wrinkles, cellulite and so-on), it was at the fault of companies wanting to make more money that led to them introducing these razors to women. The company Gillette introduced a razor called the Milady Decollete in 1915, and it was the first razor to be specifically targeted to women.

As Marlen Komar puts it "the goal of advertisers and magazine editors wasn't to meet women’s needs — it was to create new ones."

Gillette marketed this razor as "one that solves an embarrassing personal problem", already making a consumer believe something is wrong with them. It didn't help that fashion in the 1920s was changing, their style became less Victorian and more 'revealing' (well, of their arms and legs).

Because of this, it is now sadly estimated that “93 to 99 percent [of women] remove their body hair regularly,” as Breanne Fahs, Ph.D., a professor of women and gender studies at Arizona State University says.

Now with the body positivity movement, feminist activism and a lot more leeway than before (still not as much as we'd like...) peoples ideas are changing, and women are starting to realise that it is a personal choice to shave, not mandatory.

The body hair movement and its exclusion of non-white women

When you type in #noshavenoshame or #bodyhair on Instagram, you'll notice a bit of a trend in the types of women and body hair that you see. There is an overwhelming number of white, conventionally attractive and skinny women and a lot of it is only armpit hair, an easy trend to embrace when you do not have much hair nor very thick hair.

Shannon Steck explains this perfectly in her article here, saying that by focusing on hair in an easily hidden area, conversation is straying away from normalising facial hair, chest hair, back hair and other areas we don't see often portrayed online, which I agree with, conversation should focus on the more 'uncomfortable' (as society would see it) body hair.

As a half-Colombian woman, I very much inherited the thick black hair of my South American side. When I reached puberty, I grew dark thick hair quickly and very visibly, and the number of times I had been called a man or boy were more than I could count. I tried to shave my legs as a roughly 12-13 year-old and gave myself a pretty nasty cut because I didn't know how to use a razor, meaning I had put myself in danger because of an unrealistic beauty trend.

I, and many other women, also embarked on a journey of having consistently thin eyebrows. Starting at 15 I went to get them plucked, threaded, waxed, you name it! I knew they said "Pain is beauty" but god it hurt... Now I couldn't care less, half because it hurt so much, and half because I'm on my way to accepting my body hair as it is.

For myself and many other women, armpit hair is only the tip of the iceberg and one flaw in the body hair movement is its exclusion of minority women with much more body hair.

This is a lot more noticeable when you realise the self-proclaimed face of the #unibrowmovement is Sophia Hadjipanteli, who gained popularity for her monobrow.

This movement popularised in 2017 because of Hadjipanteli, but as discussed by Henna Amin here, BIPOC had been proudly wearing these features long before her, it only became popular and trendy when a model does it. Although Hadjipanteli helped in normalising hairiness to an extent, the body hair trend fails to recognise that it goes further than armpit and eyebrow hair, and that it should stop only spotlighting conventionally attractive women that have body hair.

In recognising that the trend needs to change, I feel like the body hair movement should spotlight people such as Harnaam Kaur (pictured below), Alok Vaid-Menon, Esther Calixte-Bea and others that normalise body hair not just on their eyebrows and armpits, but to show young girls that it's normal to have body hair in 'weird' places too, and they don't need to feel pressured to remove it, because those that find it disgusting are inherently not worth their time.

I hope that soon enough we can recognise that having body hair is beautiful, but more importantly, normal.

Also that women have the choice to shave, if they do not want to then it's okay, but as a society we need to stop pressuring women to make decisions about their own bodies!

M:)