MY BODY MY HAIR WHY THE FUCK DO YOU CARE
WHAT?
PHOTOGRAPHY, INTERVIEW AND AUDIO CELEBRATING BODY HAIR.
Read our article in The Wellcome Collection here.
Over the covid-19 pandemic, young people have been questioning outdated ideas of beauty from their homes. We have harnessed this rare and hopeful pause in capitalism, and photographed and interviewed largely women and non binary people choosing to embrace their body hair.
Our key prerogative was to present body hair as what it is - art! Each person’s body hair is unique to them, their ancestry and genetics. Beauty standards have notoriously encouraged us to assimilate and fit a mould which excludes many in its underlying racism and class bias. The beauty industry profiting off of people’s insecurity is not new news, however we are!
Navigate to the Gallery and Stories pages to view images, listen to audio and read transcript.
Education and Misinformation
There is a staggering lack of education for young women and non-binary people around the risks of hair removal. (Salons that offer waxing and laser treatments report seeing an increasing number of girls as young as 8.)
We don’t question the expectation to remove our hair, leaving millions of young girls in particular at risk of harming their most vulnerable body parts. A quarter of people who groom their pubic hair end up injuring themselves. Removing hair can increase the risk of infections and STDs, despite the common argument that hair is unhygienic and unclean.
Sex
Hair is responsible for sending out hormones that attract the opposite sex. The more hair we have, the more nerve endings experience sexual pleasure, so basically, hair equals better sex! The idea that hairlessness is sexualised is troubling - we are reducing women to their pre-pubescent state. The ‘preference’ of hairlessness is inherently political.
Racism & Classism
The beauty industry robs us of our individuality, in its capitalist pursuit to profit off our insecurity. The pressure for women in particular to be hair-free in order to present as groomed very much perpetuates this, and works to enforce archaic racist and misogynistic beauty ideals. This alienates those who cannot afford the upkeep of constant body hair removal and maintenance.
With the dawn of Darwin’s evolutionary theory, body hair became associated with ‘primitive ancestry’ - to remove it marked one’s ‘racial superiority.’
Herzig tells the story of an 1893 study of 271 cases of insanity in white women, which found that insane women had excessive facial hair more frequently than the sane. Their hairs were also “thicker and stiffer,” more closely resembling those of the “inferior races.” Havelock Ellis, the scholar of human sexuality, claimed that this type of hair growth in women was “linked to criminal violence, strong sexual instincts … [and] exceptional ‘animal vigor.’”
Climate
We are in a climate emergency, meanwhile billions of razors end up in landfill every year. If theres one thing we could stop doing to save the planet, it might be to ditch that razor.
Time and money
The average woman still spends £23,000 to wax away unwanted hair over the course of her lifetime, a never ending battle against our body. That’s money that could help support other women without the privilege to even access basic rights and freedoms. Instead, it is driving a billion dollar industry.
Sticking the middle finger up to the capitalist beauty industry has the potential to empower a new generation of youth, increase education around intimacy and body image, and drastically reduce our carbon footprint.
Historical context
The rise of the hair removal industry dates back to the 1800’s, women put depilatorie creams on their bodies, the contents of which were dubious and needless to say in its early stages unsafe for the skin. Prior to this, women were still very much expected to strategise and cultivate their own means of hair removal. In 1540, The Birth of Mankynde (the woman’s book) was published, and became a wildly influential respected guidebook of sorts for woman discussing fertility, pregnancy and childbirth. In this book appeared a recipe for a depilatorie cream to aid woman in the not so essential pursuit ; “TO TAKE HAYRE FROM PLACES WHERE IT IS UNSEEMLY”. Recipes like these were not few and far between and suggested the use of Cat’s dung, ants egg’s, burnt leeches, frogs blood and so on to be used as part of elaborate prescribed treatments for the ailment that was and is our body hair.
You may wonder if hair removal is that big a deal and why we’d dedicate time to unpicking the roots of a frivolous cultural phenomenon as such when (in the present day) the repercussions of doing so are limited to razor burn, cuts and the pungent aroma of Nair. Bare with me here, in the early 1900’s physicians reported severe “melancholia” and self imposed seclusion as commonly endured by those woman afflicted with heavy hair growth. The only harm of such aesthetic affliction being society’s perception and widely held stigma . Contrary to long withstanding marketing ploys, body hair presents zero threat to hygiene and in fact the practice of removing body hair is what often leaves us open to infection and such. All of this is to say: if a practice negatively impacts both the physical and mental health of woman in its classist, racist and frankly misogynistic expectations, why are so many of us still partaking?
If we are to dismantle underlying bias and indoctrinated prejudice we need to start by empowering the self esteem of the youth to put their middle finger up to corporations which uphold and capitalise off harmful (arguably, racist, misogynistic trans exclusionary) dogma at our very literal expense.