Tearing Your Hair Out

By C.A. Asbrey

The average human body has about five million hair follicles, but whilst they’re associated with strength and virility in men, women have spent a large part of history getting rid of strategic parts of it in the name name of beauty. We don’t know when it started, but we do know it was an extremely long time ago.

It’s also cultural. The Chinese have only recently taken to hair removal in areas which have become more westernized. They tend towards leaving body hair alone due to a combination of superstition and a belief that body hair is there for protection. And they’re not wrong about the element of protection, but that hasn’t stopped the rest of us plucking, tearing, burning, lasering or using electrolysis to rid ourselves of some, or all, of our hair.

The ancient Jews considered the entry into adulthood for females as twelve, along with the appearance of two pubic hairs. For boys it was thirteen, along with the pair of pubic hairs. If a woman reached the age of twenty-four without producing the requisite number of hairs she was deemed incapable of reproducing. If the hairs appeared earlier, that alone did not signal adulthood, but the age alone did not signify it either. The child had to have the hairs, and attain the age, before the threshold was met. In reality, nobody really checks nowadays, but they used to. Records also exist of similar examinations in Roman culture too. How those hairs were dealt with was gendered. The women removed public and underarm hair, whilst then men did not. This was seen as not only more attractive, but was thought to be healthier for men to have sex with a woman who had removed her body hair. Women were also allowed to remove an facial hair. Men were forbidden to remove body hair in an edict against looking like a woman. The Talmud has instructions on kosher depilatories.

In an aside, Rabbis were forbidden from officiating if they were bald, had no eyebrows, only one eyebrow, or eyebrows which hung over the eyes.

The Greeks and the Romans had similar rules. Ovid , the Roman poet, urged women, “to groom so that no rude goat find his way beneath your arms and that your legs be not rough with bristling hair.”

Originally, sharp shells and shark teeth were used, until the razor was invented. It probably came from ancient India about five thousand years ago, but we cannot be sure. We do know that women removed body hair in ancient Babylonian texts, as did Zoroastrians. Egyptians saw hair removal as a sign of status, with some removing it all, including the head. They replaced it with elaborate wigs, and a queen would also wear a false beard as a sign of her power.

Ancient Greeks saw anything below the neck as worthy of removal, and would have shared the shame of the Roman matron seen entering the baths in full bloom. Both men and women saw excess hair as low-class and animalistic, so they would both work hard to remove it using razors, tweezers, and depilatories. Pumice stones would also be used to wear away the stubble too.

Above the neck was another matter. Greek women loved a huge unibrow. The medical term is Synophrys, and they would paint them in, and even stick on dyed goat hair with resin to create the desired look. This look is still favoured in some parts of the world. Women and men in Oman and Tajikistan still see them as attractive, and a sign of fertility and good health. Those not fortunate enough to grow their own buy a herb called usma. They dry the leaves in the sun, and grind them up until they produce a dark sap which can then be applied with a matchstick.

In medieval Europe, the Catholic church encouraged people to allow their hair to grow, but to hide any from public view. This led to a trend for hairier legs, but balder eyebrows. Women either plucked them or shaved them off entirely. There was a trend for plucked and shaven hairlines too. In the Renaissance, statues and paintings showed men and women without the animalistic hair to signify class and elegance. By Elizabethan times the fashion dictated once more that eyebrows be removed as well as hair on the forehead. Eyebrows were painted on higher up than their actual site to make the long faces which were fashionable. The queen’s hairline rose so much that women again shaved part of their head to emulate Elizabeth the first. Rumours persist that this was caused by natural hair loss in the queen, it didn’t stop people copying her.

The merkin remained fashionable for a long time, right through the 15th century to the eighteenth, and in some specialist brothels, the 19th. The reason is counterintuitive. Shaving the hair off meant that there was less chance of pubic lice. However, in a world where venereal disease could not be treated, luxuriant hair was a sign of health – hence the pubic wig. It also meant that signs of disease were hidden. The merkin hid a litany of horrors, which men often took back to their unsuspecting wives.

The hairy body was celebrated by many men in the 18th century, despite a fashion in hair removal in the upper classes, who wanted to be distinctly different from their lower class contemporaries. Again, the hair was seen as a sign of animalistic appetites, ans as such, hairy women were seen fair prey to upper class rakes. Robert Burns, the Scottish national bard, wrote beautiful songs and poems, but he also created risque verses designed to titivate 18th century males. While looking at historical porn and dirty poems may be seen as prurient, they really give us an insight into a mindset from the past, and Burns makes it clear that activities like ‘mowing’, finding a ‘magpie’s nest’ were very much in favour. There is also currently debate about whether or not his poems depict rape, or were just wistful boasts, but we do know that 18th century women had little protection, and even fewer rights. The Merry Muses of Caledonia certainly reflect attitudes of the time. Burns is currently being examined in a new light, but was certainly a man of his time, and a product of his time. He is therefore an excellent barometer of male tastes and practices of the time.

And we now come to the 19th century, and Darwin’s publication of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. It popularised the theory that the less hairy a woman was, the more attractive she was; a corruption of the scientific theory, as it related to the reduction of fur in humans due to less hairy mates being selected. By the 1900s upper class women, particularly in America, were fixed on the idea that smooth hairless skin related to femininity. Sleeves became shorter showing armpits, and as hems rose, the need to remove of hair from the legs became more pressing. Especially as corporations saw it as a way to make money. A whole new industry grew up providing hair removal by a whole range of methods, and magazines promoted them, making money from the advertising revenue. The pressure on women to conform to a hairless template increased.

Harper’s Bazaar (yes, you can blame them ladies) was the first to carry an advert for a razor specifically designed for women in 1914. Gillette’s, the Milady Décolleté, was just a safety razor, but was more expensive than the male version, a trend which still continues to this day. Before long, other magazines were producing articles about unsightly, and problem, hair. The marketing method is as old as the hills and still in use. Sell the customer a problem, and then sell them the solution.

By WW2 women were going bare-legged in Europe due to a lack of nylon. They painted their legs with gravy browning, and got friends and family to draw a seam down the back of their legs to create the illusion of stockings. To complete the picture, the legs had to be shaved. By the 50s it was normal for women to shave, just in time to prepare us all for the miniskirts and hot pants of the 60s.

A brief counter-reaction from feminists never really caught the public imagination beyond a few. It didn’t with me, having dark hair and Celtic genes, which tends towards the hirsute and a thick head of hair. I got my legs lasered a long time ago and never regretted it. It wasn’t long before easier travel saw people taking more foreign holidays and those bikini lines had to be perfect. The swimming costumes with legs, and even elbows, were long gone. The smaller they got, the more hair had to be removed. The regular wax, gave way to the French, then the Brazilian, and finally the Hollywood took it all away. We have gone full circle. Those Ancient Greeks and Egyptians would have approved. We are becoming more tolerant of people doing their own thing, and I thoroughly approve of ‘live and let live’ as a philosophy to live by.