For many women, shaving routines have become instinctive by the time they reach their teenage years. Similar to a girl experiencing menarche, the act of shaving is often a distinctive memory for girls signaling that they are entering womanhood. However, during quarantine, razor sales plummeted, indicating that we might be at the start of a cultural shift among women to toss razors for good.
There is a clear answer as to why so many women associate the act of removing natural body hair with femininity and womanhood. Within the past century alone, the act of shaving has been introduced and normalized as something expected of women. Interestingly enough, a mere one hundred years ago, shaving was extremely abnormal.
In the 1920s, Gillette introduced their razor and encouraged women to remove their underarm hair in order to look better in sleeveless dresses. By the 1950s, it had become fairly standard for women to shave their legs and underarms. Throughout the end of the twentieth century, it became more and more common for women to shave their pubic hair among their legs, underarms, and any other unwanted hair.
The world of body hair grooming has seen a dramatic shift, however. Quarantine indirectly assisted the feminist movement that has grown over the past ten years. The feminist movement has encouraged many women to own their feminity by embracing their natural body hair. Hashtags like #hairypits or #hairywomen on many social media platforms display thousands upon thousands of women powerfully embracing their natural body hair. Over quarantine, women consistently posted pictures under the hashtags as razor sales dipped, signifying a growing change.
With the grooming industry also comes the issue of the Pink Tax. This is the aptness for products marketed toward women to be more expensive than adjacent products marketed toward men. Typically, a single razor marketed toward women will be much more expensive than a single razor marketed toward men. As many more women grew out their body hair during quarantine, an unintended effect was a direct attack on the Pink Tax.
For Ariana Malins, a twenty-year-old student, quarantine challenged her entire mindset in terms of shaving. “Over quarantine, I found myself abandoning my razor on accident. The interesting thing was that after lockdown, I found myself embracing my body hair more than ever before. If anything, getting the time to change my grooming habits was the most powerful part of quarantine,” she shares.
Quarantine has generated a lot of interesting lifestyle changes. Is this the event to normalize feminine body hair in full force? Only time will tell. However, one thing is for sure: your body is your own and your grooming habits are entirely your choice.