The Tangled History of Women and Body Hair

“Mom–what’s laser hair removal!?” The question came from my then 8-year-old, as we drove by a shop in a strip mall. I explained that some women paid people to use lasers to burn the hairs off their legs and armpits (I left out the other places). Horrified, they shouted, “Why would anyone do that?!” 

“Well,” I said, “there’s a short answer and a longer answer. The short answer is the patriarchy.” (It’s an explanation they are used to hearing by now.) “The long answer,” I continued, “is that they do it as a result of one of the most effective marketing campaigns in modern history.” 

And then I shared what I’m about to share with you — a history that changed the way I look at my fuzzy legs forever. 

A solution in search of a problem

Many women in the U.S. take shaving for granted, but hairless legs and underarms didn’t become commonplace until 1915, when Gillette realized that it could increase its profits if it convinced women that leg and armpit hair were objectionable, “embarrassing,” masculine, and even unhygienic. 

Humans of all genders have been removing hair from various body parts since the ancient Egyptians used tweezers made of bronze and seashells, but the practice hasn’t always been ubiquitous. 

While you can point to famous Renaissance portraits of women sans body hair, like in Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, it wasn’t until the 1920s, when women’s fashions got more revealing, that Gillette launched an ad campaign featuring a woman in a sheer, short-sleeve dress with her bare armpit in view. Shaved armpits, the ad claimed, “are the latest European trend." 

Subsequent ad campaigns of the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s worked hard to rebrand armpit hair and leg hair as the enemy, pushing prepubescent bareness as the American ideal, along with toxic depilatory creams like “Sheer" (which contained mercury and bromine) and Koremlu, which contained a now-banned chemical — a rodenticide! — known to cause neuromuscular damage and blindness. 

Those advertising campaigns paid off when silk and nylon shortages during World War II made stockings a luxury and bare legs a necessity. A widely-cited stat suggests that by 1964, a staggering 98% of American women were routinely shaving their legs. Today, the global market for hair removal products and services is a impressive $5.42 billion. 

Though some feminists of the ’60s flaunted armpit and leg hair as a political statement, the demand for hairless bodies only grew more intense over time. In the 1980s and ’90s, the “the Brazilian,” an especially painful practice of using wax to remove some or all pubic hair, became popular. Millions got on board, including in Europe, where a 2018 Belgian study found that 80% of women reported removing at least some of their pubic hair. The increased pressure to be fuzz-free sometimes resulted in fierce reactions — ranging from shock and disgust to ridicule and mockery — for those who didn’t comply. (You may recall images of Julia Roberts lifting her arm to wave at fans at the 1999 “Notting Hill” premiere. The backlash was not cute.) 

“Women often don’t realize how much friends, family and society weigh in on what we do with our body,” Breanne Fahs, a professor of women and gender studies at Arizona State University told CNN in a 2020 interview. “Often, what we think is a choice — as in ‘I choose to shave’ — has actually been…enforced upon us for generations.” 

Fahs discovered this when, in 2008, she started giving her female students an assignment to grow their body hair. As a result they consistently reported feeling “a deep sense of shame, struggle with self-confidence, even social ostracism.”

In 2026, she says, the pressure has only gotten worse: “[Now, they] seem to find it even harder to not conform, as if the stakes are higher,” she told me. That makes sense, she reflected, “given that we’re living through peak misogyny right now.” 

Armpit hair … don’t care

Although a 2022 U.S. survey found that gender norms and social pressures around body hair still exist, especially among younger women (Millennials and Gen Z are more likely than Gen X and Boomers to remove body hair), 60% of Americans in that survey said they think attitudes are changing. Indeed celebrities including Miley Cyrus and Paris Jackson, Lady Gaga and Phoebe Bridgers, are among those who have unapologetically bared their unshaven underarms in the not-too-distant past. Even a decade ago, a 2016 study found nearly 1 in 4 women under 25 had stopped shaving their underarms, and the overall percent dropped from 95% in 2013 to 77%.

Over on TikTok, decorating underarm hair with dye or glitter to create “unicorn pits” is a trend. And at least some Gen Z women are willing to embrace body hair, as evidenced by posts with tags like #noshavenoshame, #bodyhairpositivity, and  #armpithairdontcare that have gained millions of views.

The timing is certainly pertinent in the wake of the Epstein files’ release. Professor Fahs, for one, had an interesting take when I asked her about attitudes around hairlessness in relation to Epstein. “Hair has long been associated with power, and hairlessness with powerlessness. Symbolically, valuing women who are hairless is a way to associate them with a lack of power,” she told me.

That reminded me of something the influencer and activist Leah Van King said in a recent Instagram post: “The same culture that protects Epstein also teaches women to look like children.” 

Maybe this particular beauty standard isn’t worthy of sticking around for another century. Or, as Fahs put it: “This is a norm that has no health benefits but [requires] incredible compliance among women. Hopefully, as a culture, we can think about what sorts of compliance we no longer want to agree to, and what this could mean for gender politics more broadly.”

I, for one, am tired of complying. Because, as Van King put it in her Instagram post: “Calling women disgusting for having the same hair that men do is like calling lions disgusting for having fur.” 

Maybe it’s my middle aged “who gives a crap?” attitude, but over the last few years I’ve abandoned several beauty “musts” that I never questioned before — shaving is one of them. 

I am happy to say I feel zero embarrassment walking around my local YMCA pool with hairy legs and fuzzy armpits, and so far, no one has said a single word. But if they do, I’ll be ready to tell them the tangled story that started with an ad, more than 100 years ago.