When did we get obsessed with removing every trace of our fuzz? Today, people are snubbing their noses at beauty standards and redefining what natural beauty means.
When I was growing up, my mom shaved her armpits. By the time I was 11 years old, I’d learned the joys of shaving with my mother's old razor and soap from a pink plastic cup in the shower. It wasn't until college that I realized there were other ways to deal with body hair, like Nair or Neet, those chemical-based products that “melt” your body hair off. They were nifty and quick. You applied them like lotion and then rinsed the hair off your legs and underarms. Next came the revolution of waxing and laser hair removal. Going hairless became the norm.
But when did we get so obsessed with removing every trace of fuzz?
For 46% of younger Americans between 16 and 34 years old have no preference on whether women should get rid of armpit hair. For 35- to 54-year-olds, that number was 54%.
There's no one moment in history where women stopped being hairy and started shaving everything except their heads, faces and maybe hands, but the last couple of years and the emergence of TikTok culture and Gen Z “anything goes” acceptance is pushing the dialogue about hair growth to the forefront.
The pandemic fuzz for all.
During the last two years, plenty of people decided to forgo shaving their body hair altogether. Why bother — right? Grooming practices that were once part of our routine and require leaving the house for professional waxing or laser treatments were suddenly not a priority anymore. Salons closed and social lives put on hold. Now that we’ve return to some form of normal living, the conversation around body hair has taken over social media. The TikTok community has snubbed its nose at many modern beauty standards, redefining what beauty and natural beauty means and creating a safer space for people to express themselves in different ways.
Hair was dangerous 100,000 years ago. But now?
How did we get here after all? In the Stone Age 100,000 years ago, removal of body hair was done for practical reasons. They used shells, sharp objects and any means possible to remove hair to prevent frostbites (water would freeze on body hair), to remove breeding grounds for mites and lice and to take away any advantage an adversary might get in a brawl by grabbing.
Through the centuries, cultural norms regarding body hair evolved from one of practicality to one of social class. The more hair, the lower the class. The aesthetic trend toward leg shaving started with Egyptians around 3000 B.C., followed by the Romans. Then by the 1500s, Queen Elizabeth formulated the norm for European women during her reign. She believed that hair on the face must be groomed at all times, requiring the eyebrows to be shaped and, hair on the forehead and upper lip removed.
Women’s leg and armpit hair wasn’t really on the radar until the mid-20th century. Until then, the culture had women garbed in long dresses and skirts that covered everything below the waist. So, they could get away unshaven body hair. During this time period, women were more concerned with how well their clothes fit on them rather than how they looked out of them—and hair was considered pretty low on the list of priorities when it came to appearances. Modern notions of body hair entered the picture in the 1900s, globally, and became more uniform. By 1915, Gillette created the first ever razor especially for women, ‘Milady Décolletée’ which promised to remove the “humiliating growth of hair on face, neck and arms”. It referred to shaving as a “refinement that has become a modern necessity.” Advertisements in magazines at the time sought to inform women of the changing fashion trends that demanded women to remove all visible body hair apart from that on the head, labeling it “superfluous,” “ugly,” “unwanted,” and “unfashionable.” Soon 66% of ads found in Harper’s Bazaar’s editions glorified shaving in images, cutlines, and story content.
By the 1950s, shaving was the norm, attributed to both cultural shaming and the evolution of fashion with sleeveless styles and shorter skirts.
Do we really care about body hair anymore?
A 2021 survey from YouGov found that 46% of younger Americans between 16 and 34 years old have no preference on whether women should get rid of armpit hair. For 35- to 54-year-olds, that number was 54%. Leg hair, on the other hand, is seen as less palatable across the board, with 59% of Americans saying it’s unattractive for a woman to have hair on her legs.
"It's a very personal decision," said Melissa Piliang, a dermatologist at the Cleveland Clinic. "It's just like shaving your head or dyeing it purple."
Interestingly, while women look at letting hair grow, there’s been an increased trend for men toward eliminating body hair. Some simply enjoy the feeling of being clean shaven. In these circumstances, shaving can make them feel more confident. And, where intimate partners have personal preferences, they enjoy the feeling of soft, unencumbered hairless skin on skin.
On TikTok, there is a growing number of body hair positive influencers. The hashtag #bodyhairisnatural has 100+ million views, while #bodyhairpositivity has nearly as many.
Social media influencers are breaking down societal norms of what it means to be feminine. And with armpit growth, styling hair has emerged as a way to personalize it, maintaining hair at a stylized length by using a body hair trimmer or they color or decorate hair. For these groomers, small bits of styled hair that peek out of shirts, tees and dresses tease people, express fun and complement wardrobe choices.
Whether or not you decide to go natural, there’s no doubt the conversation is here and it’s fair game to talk about out in the open. It’s become less taboo for men to express emotion, adopt a skincare routine, carry a handbag, and wear makeup similarly women should be more empowered to inhabit their bodies and no succumb to pressure to conform to an image of what’s beautiful, accepted and worshipped. While older generations may continue to follow the norms we grew up with, younger millennials and Gen Z are embracing body hair as a form of self-expression to signal what they are feeling on the inside, and also push back against the norm on the outside. They’ve adopted an “anything-goes view” on body size, color, body art and body hair. So, keep your hair, shave your hair but hairy is no longer scary.
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