Shave It or Let It Grow? Collecting stories on women’s body hair

My name is Melody, I’m a volunteer at GWL and I’m hairy.

I still remember the first time I was made aware of my body hair. I was twelve. A friend of mine was explaining her newly adopted, multi-step beauty routine, attempting to rope me into it. One of the steps was shaving her armpit, leg and arm hair. I was intrigued. I had never heard of this before. She told me how nice her skin felt afterwards and let me touch her arm. It was so smooth and silky. I immediately looked at my own arms and, as if for the first time, I saw the thick, long, brown fuzz that seemed to cover my entire arm – all the way down to my wrist.

I was horrified!

My friend twisted up her nose.

I hastily shoved on a jumper, mortified that I had been out in public with these hairy arms for the whole world to see!

I went home that day and asked my mom for my first razor. I never looked back. Until now.

We all have it. Yet, for some reason, body hair is still quite a controversial subject. It is associated with bad hygiene, masculinity, and if you’re anything like me, it’s a source of embarrassment and ridicule. It was thirteen years after the hairy arms incident that I finally found myself wondering why. Why was I ashamed? Why did I remove my hair? Why did I endure years of razor burn, waxing, blisters and rashes from creams and depilatories? I wanted to know where this all began. But I also wanted to hear from other women to understand their thoughts and feelings on the matter. That is what I am hoping to do today.

I want to collect women’s stories on if and why they remove their body hair. A 2016 YouGov study found that the majority of women in the UK remove all of their leg (74%) and armpit (83%) hair. In fact, the practice of body hair removal has become a cultural expectation in the West, and indeed in many other countries around the world. Historian Rebecca Herzig argues that attitudes toward body hair first started to change around the 1870s, when Charles Darwin published his seminal research in Decent of Man. According to him, body hair was not only a regression to our ‘ape’ like ancestors, but a hinderance to women in sexual selection. Although this type of thinking might elicit an eye roll now, back then it was pounced upon. Soon after the publication of Decent, medical experts began equating the quantity of body hair with ‘evolutionary fitness’. They even went so far as to classify ‘abnormal’ hair growth as a disease. As Darwin had targeted women in his research, hairiness became associated with men, so hairy women were treated as ‘abnormal’. One man went so far as to describe menopausal women who experience more hair growth as ‘feral’. Herzig and other historians studying body hair have argued that this is what gave rise to the shaming language we see in hair removal adverts.

Body hair is often referred to as ‘unsightly’, ‘embarrassing’, and a ‘problem’. More recently, adverts have suggested that hairy legs and body parts will prevent you from completing normal tasks. One of my favourite ads (watch it here) depicts a row of singing women belting out, ‘like a cactus I got thorny thighs, can barely dance!’ However, adverts will also have you believe that there are ‘feminine’ and ‘unfeminine’ ways of removing your body hair, like the controversial Veet adverts (watch them here) that suggest if you shave, you are ‘risking dudeness’. Moreover, women’s body hair is seen as so unsightly that most hair removal ads don’t even show women removing hair. Instead we see actors ‘shaving’ hairless skin. Billie became the first company to show women’s body hair in an advert that launched in 2018 (watch it here).

It’s easy to laugh at the ridiculousness of it all. However, the practice of hair removal, and the shaming language that surrounds it, can have a huge and lasting impact on women’s physical and mental health. In a Channel 4 documentary Hairy Woman (2003) participants detailed how their body hair seriously impacted their self-esteem. One woman admitted that she had considered using corrosive liquid over her skin in order to permanently remove her hair, while another said she often broke out in blisters and bruising from removing her body hair. Even academics researching body hair have received ridicule for simply investigating the topic. As such, there is very little research on the history of women’s body hair removal, and the little that has been done has focused mainly on white, American women. That’s where you come in.

I  want to centre the voices of women, inclusive of trans women and intersex women, and non binary, and gender fluid people in this conversation. As such, I want to collect your stories on your relationship to body hair and share these (anonymously if you would prefer) via this blog. What are your thoughts on body hair? How does it make you feel? Do you shave? Do you grow it out? No matter where you are in the world, let me know by emailing volunteers@womenslibrary.org.uk and share as much or as little detail as you feel comfortable with. Please let me know if you are happy for your words to be directly quoted in the blog and shared online via Glasgow Women’s Library website and social media channels. If you are happy for your first name to be used and for us to share your country of residence, please let us know. Otherwise we will share your comments anonymously. I will also be holding a Zoom event later this year presenting some materials held in GWL’s archive and museum collections relating to body hair and use these as starting point to discuss the history of body hair and our experiences of it, so keep an eye out for that!

I can’t wait to hear what you have to say!