During the 2020 lockdown, I stopped shaving my armpits and legs. There just didn’t seem to be any point: I wasn’t leaving the house, there was no one to see them, my partner didn’t mind. It started as pure laziness, then became something more. I began to realise how much time and money I had spent removing my body hair since the age of 14 – either myself, with a razor in the shower, or by paying some poor person to daub me in wax and rip off what felt like my skin. I mentioned not shaving to a friend and she surprised me by admitting she wasn’t shaving either. “Didn’t you know that’s what all the cool kids are doing these days?!” she said. Suddenly, everywhere I went there were young women with hair on their legs. I just hadn’t been noticing it before – which made me realise how little a bit of body hair even matters.
The unspoken pressure on women to be hairless has shifted over the years – and it still differs between generations. Most of the women I know over 50 would never dream of letting their armpit hair grow wild – and I felt free to let mine grow partly because I’m a millennial and it’s been modelled for me as an acceptable option. Although women who refuse to remove their body hair still face considerable backlash from men and other women alike – when Swedish model Arvida Byström flaunted her natural leg hair in an ad for Adidas, she received death threats – there is more of a choice for millennials and Gen Zers than there was for our mothers.
It’s not just body hair. Beauty ideals have shifted enormously over time, from the defined waists and rouge idolised in the early twentieth century
