To shave, or not to shave?

How does social-media influence body hair beauty standards and hair removal trends among women? 

From about nine or ten years old I have considered removing my body hair. From primary school on, many of my friends shaved their legs and I questioned why I hadn't myself. I asked my mum multiple times over the years if I should or shouldn't shave, her answer always drawing my attention to the reasons why shaving is problematic but ultimately handing the choice over to me. Although I’m always aware of the pressure to shave them, I’m almost fifteen and I still haven't.  

  
For more than a century woman have been told that shaving is a necessity, that body hair is unclean, is a sign of masculinity, and is unattractive or undesirable. Advertising through both social and mainstream media has long been manipulating our perception of body hair and the need to remove it.  

Because of this, I was intrigued to delve deeper into how social media has influenced beauty standards surrounding body hair and how and why we remove it? Initially, body hair removal was marketed to women through mainstream media, now social media is being used as a tool for fighting back against body hair shaming and creating diversity in the messages surrounding body hair which are portrayed through social media.  

Around the start of the 20th-century razors and body hair removal was first marketed to women. As dress and sleeve length got shorter, more skin was on show, and with that more visible body hair. This correlated with a shift in conventional thinking to a preference for smooth, hairless skin.   

With time came new technology and advertising campaigns relating to hair removal products, including razors, wax strips, and depilatory creams. These adverts focused on the humiliation of women who publicly showed body hair, thus bringing to rise the use of emotional manipulation in hair removal product marketing for women.    

  

Effective adverts tapped into the viewers’ emotions to compel them to buy a product. These campaigns portrayed emotions of fear, shame, loneliness, envy, and a lack of sex appeal associated with visible body hair to create an entirely new industry of female hair removal products now worth over 880 million U.S. dollars (2017).    

  

As the commonality of television viewing rose, female body hair removal products went mainstream. In more recent times, adverts have showcased a predictable format. A female, usually conventionally pretty and white, glides a razor over her toned and already hairless leg. Now that she is wiped of body hair she is soon to acquire the affection of a male or somehow release some inner beauty or goddess-like self. This common theme of shaving a pre-waxed and already hairless leg just perpetuates the taboo of visible body hair and further advances these unrealistic beauty standards surrounding body hair. Brands pretending that all women have hairless bodies is a form of body shaming, again reinforcing this idea that body hair is something to be ashamed of or embarrassed by.   

  

In more recent times social media has brought to rise a form of rebellion against a variety of social norms and expectations. In relation to body hair, hashtags including #bodyhair, #bodyhairdontcare, and #girlswithhairyarms have captioned hundreds of thousands of pictures in the hope to bring light to body hair shaming, manipulative advertising and the idea that shaving is not a necessity. These acts of rebellion can be seen to have made an impact. Back in 2013, 95 percent of women from ages 16 to 24 removed their underarm hair and 92 percent shaved their legs, but those numbers dropped to 77 percent and 85 percent respectively in 2016 (according to Mintel research in the United Kingdom). Despite this increased visibility, removal of body hair is still among the strongest beauty norms in western culture.    

  

In the hope to normalize body hair and change the one-dimensional way in which women are portrayed in mass media, Billie (a razor company) released ‘Project Body Hair’. Driven to create the campaign due to the lack of representation of female body hair on the internet, the brand is set to donate all photos from ‘Project Body Hair’ to Unsplash, a stock image site.   

Currently flooding social media is their new advertising campaign, which is the first to show female body hair. The brands work highlights that shaving is a choice and opts out of emotional manipulation associated female hair removal adverts. “We have always said shaving is a choice—it’s your hair and no one should tell you what to do with it,” says Billie co-founder Georgina Gooley.   

The act of having never shaved my legs feels like a badge of honor or a secret rebellion against the media’s influence. This is not to say that shaving is a negative or not feminism conscious action as many of the values associated with and surrounding feminism are to do with choice around your own body but the act of not shaving does feel like a positive way of acknowledging the media's influence on self-perception.