BODY HAIR, DON’T CARE… OR DO YOU?

Body hair, we’ve all got it. In fact, the only skin that hair doesn’t grow on is the palms of your hands, soles of your feet, backs of your ears and lips. Just take a second to think about that…

I know right! Since 97%* the rest of our body is covered in hair to varying degrees, it’s kind of bizarre that there is a perception that some of it is unacceptable and we don’t even think about the rest.

I’m not sure if it’s the era I grew up in (post Sex and The City), or the location (sunny Queensland), but I come from a place where the slightest leg or underarm stubble was deeply offensive and Brazilian waxing was the norm and I’ve always been curious about where all of this even started. It turns out, that body hair removal dates as far back as Cleopatra’s day, where Cleo set the beauty standard and believed removing all body hair demonstrated cleanliness.

In modern society, our hairy bits were kept mostly covered up and under wraps until the 1920s when sleeveless dresses became a thing, and marketing campaigns dictated that the subsequent visible underarm hair was “objectionable” and needed to be removed. I think this means we’re all fashion victims. From here, the surface area of objectionable hair grew in line with shorter skirts and the desire to be on trend, fit in, and “sexy” by whatever the standards were at the time.

So now there we are up to speed on a very basic history of the concept of de-fuzzing and why it’s a thing, thanks to society and beauty standards,  I think it’s worth a personal inquiry. 

If you take a step back and think about it, how does the hair make you feel? Do you personally have a preference? Because that’s all that should matter.

For years I would trot off to a very regular, very expensive and very painful appointment to take care of my (not so) Brazilian bizness, but after about 6 years of this I started to question this routine and made the decision to prune my preening.

Now, I just do what I can when I can be bothered, and I still manage to have friends AND have sex, and neither seem to care or to be correlated to my sporadic preening, which suggests that it matters all of 0%. 

Thanks to the women’s empowerment movement, it’s become more socially “acceptable” to do what we want without becoming pariahs. So, if you’re happy to ditch the wax and razors and go au naturale, I raise my arms and wave my hands (and kind of hairy armpits!) to you. If you still want to go the whole hog because you prefer it, or you’ve mastered an efficient routine and it’s NBD, I also take my hat off to you, and to anyone who lands somewhere in the middle and cuts back on the extra annoying parts, then you do you, too.

What are your thoughts, vinas? Pro hair? Anti hair? No hair no care?

*non-scientific estimation, according to me a not so professional scientist of life.