A new challenging initiative set by woman has been marked by “Januhairy” over the past six years to let go their razors for the month and how their underarms, legs, bikini lines and upper lips hair.
So many women started posting their pictures and embracing their hair on social media which made this campaign very successful and has more than 40K followers celebrating their body hair and normalizing it.
Gillette took advantage of this campaign and launched the “Milady Decolette” to reveal more skin and sleeveless tops in the vogue show.
While there’s evidence of ancient Egyptians, Romans and Renaissance-era Europeans practicing hair removal, the status quo for women in the West — namely that hairless underarms, legs, bikini lines and upper lips are more socially acceptable — came about after the men of World War I returned home with disposable safety razors, only for women to experiment with them.
This marketing coincided with the rise of fashion photography in magazines that meant images of new beauty standards spread like wildfire. A century later, female body hair remains taboo to many — even in societies that celebrate the benefits of all that is “natural” elsewhere, from cosmetics to food.
A young lady named Roxanne Felig, 27, from Tampa, Florida posted continuously on her social media about her choice of growing hair and featured these pictures on Januhairy Instagram account which made her a famous personal as she was embraced/criticized by people over the internet.
Female body hair is also racialized. Historically, there have been countless examples of colonial powers enforcing hair removal as a means of control or punishment, and Charles Darwin’s suggestion (in his 1871 book “Descent of Man”) that excessive body hair was primitive gave rise to troubling narratives relating to respectability and hygiene.
“Women of color often have much darker body hair,” says Professor Fahs. “There are different implications if you have light blonde hair than if you have darker, coarser hair.”