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Whatsapp Clipped from Zip Depilatory advertisement from a September 1924 issue of Photoplay magazine.

In her lifetime, the average woman will spend thousands of dollars on hair removal. In the US 60 per cent of men regularly remove body hair. However, author Rebecca Herzig says that in terms of western history, this trend is quite new. Gail Boserio reports.

Whether you wax, thread, pluck or use razors and lasers, you're doing it. The removal of unwanted body hair has become an obsession and a lucrative industry in most western nations. The average American woman will spend US$10,000 during her lifetime on removing her body hair, and 60 per cent of men now regularly reduce or remove body hair from areas below the neck.

Yet in the history of humanity, hair removal has generally been uncommon.

When the pilgrims first arrived on American shores, they were shocked at the ‘strange obsession’ America's indigenous people had with hair-free skin. According to Thomas Jefferson, Native Americans regarded body hair as disgraceful, and believed that it likened them to hogs.

Visible body hair, like women’s smoking, drinking, and paid labour outside the home, became a ready mark of the new woman’s “excessive” sexual, political and economic independence.

The sight of Native Americans plucking out their beards as fast as they appeared shocked the early settlers because, as Rebecca Herzig writes in her new book Plucked, ‘they equated beards with philosophical wisdom’.

Scottish historian William Robertson believed that the hairlessness of the Native Americans was evidence of ‘natural debility’, and although not everyone agreed, his 1777 History of America remained a standard reference in both Europe and the US well into the 19th century. Robertson argued that this defect was not the result of a harsh environment but rather inherent vice.

By the 1840s, hair was being microscopically studied and compared for racial distinctions in the same way that skulls were. ‘The aim was to reveal fundamental distinctions between the races and similarities between so called lower races and other animals,’ writes Herzig. ‘These claims then were used to support the continuing enslavement of men, women, and children of African descent.’

As white settlement continued across the New World, homemade depilatories were becoming widespread. One 17th century manual, Johann Jacob Wecker’s widely circulated book Cosmeticks; or; The Beautifying Part of the Physick, contained more than three dozen recipes to hinder or remove hair.

Antebellum women burdened with troubling ‘low foreheads’, could ‘boil a lime solution, silver paint and aromatic oil together, soaking a rag in the resulting compound and applying it to the hairy skin’. Others proposed the application of eggshells, vinegar and cat’s dung, or ‘thinning the eyebrows with a combination of ground ivy, gum, ant eggs, burnt leeches, and frog’s blood’.

Industrial changes soon meant that home-made recipes went out of vogue in favour of packaged depilatories, however. As early as 1801, advertisements for ready-made powders and creams to ‘take off all superfluous hair’ began appearing in US newspapers and magazines.

‘Marketed primarily though not exclusively to women, the powders promised to alleviate “unsightly appendages” from upper lips, foreheads, temples, and brows,’ writes Herzig. ‘Superfluous hair was described as “the greatest blemish a woman might possess” or “the greatest disfigurement of female beauty”.’

The hirsute lady would soon have even more products to choose from.

One of the by-products of the centralisation of meat production was the discovery that chemicals could effectively remove animal fur prior to slaughter. It is unknown whether innovations in beautification drove agricultural applications or the other way around, the human skin and vice versa. Often there was no way a woman could know what she was applying to her face, and injuries sustained from packaged depilatories were often treated as a source of humour.

‘In 1804,’ writes Herzig, ‘one Boston weekly reported the “amusing case of a dowager lady” who followed an advertisement for a depilatory. The woman rubbed the product around her mouth, removing the hairs yet taking all the flesh with them.’

In 1831, an article in Lady’s Book described packaged depilatories as a ‘preparation of quicklime, or of some other alkaline or corrosive substance’. Such corrosives, the article warned, often result in ‘very considerable’ injuries to the skin. The issue of cosmetic regulation was raised as early as 1870, but uncertainty continued for as long as markets in hair removers remained without oversight.

Women’s distress concerning facial and bodily hair began to accelerate. In 1913 the American Medical Association Journal reported that women ‘afflicted’ with heavy hair growth, particularly on the face, became ‘embittered, melancholy and resentful’.

‘Often,’ the journal continued, ‘patients asserted that death was preferable to the life of embarrassment they had to live.’

Herzig describes several developments which converged to shape women’s expectations, including the growth of print advertising, the suffragette movement, revealing new fashions in clothing, and changing gender and sexual roles. ‘As usual, female body hair was a ready repository for wider social and political concerns,’ she writes.

‘Visible body hair, like women’s smoking, drinking, and paid labour outside the home, became a ready mark of the new woman’s “excessive” sexual, political and economic independence.’

In a relatively short period of time, body hair came to be seen as disgusting to middle class American women. In fact, by 1938, one expert declared without sarcasm that any publicly visible hair not on a woman’s scalp was rightly considered ‘excessive’.

Augmented by the growing influence of the so-called ‘hygiene movement’, the focus on hair was also overtly racial. Herzig quotes historian Peter Stearns, who noted that removing body hair was a way to ‘separate oneself from cruder people, the lower class and immigrant’.

Women could choose from a wide array of products from pumice stones, to sugar-paste solutions and Velvet Mittens made from sandpaper, but they all came with their own problems. Shoemakers wax was hard to come across in bulk, cut throat razors were too dangerous to use, sulphides irritated the skins while some products contained thallium acetate compounds which were outright lethal.

Thousands of users of a product called Koremlu were either killed or permanently maimed by muscular atrophy, blindness or limb damage. The alarming increase in the incidence of death and injury from depilatories led to the passage of the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act in 1938.

The introduction of the Cosmetic Act didn’t prevent the use of dangerous x-rays in the removal of unwanted hair, however. Promoted as the most ‘scientific’ method of hair removal available, x-rays were used widely for over 40 years in the United States with devastating health effects, and despite warnings from doctors.

Although scientists, technicians and physicians had grown wary of radiation burns prior to experimentation with x-ray hair removal, Herzig notes that ‘their support for it continued even as they saw the destruction wrought on the bodies of “x-ray martyrs”.’

Despite the damage, advertising narratives continued apace and linked smooth, white, velvety skin with dreams of upward mobility. In the words of the Dermic Laboratories of San Francisco: ‘Freedom from unwanted hair opens the gates to social enjoyments that are forever closed to those so afflicted.’

Herzig notes that it was mostly women employed or low or middle income positions, such as telephone operators, secretaries or clerks who succumbed to such promises.

Even once x-ray hair removal was prohibited by state authorities, women still tried to access it via ‘back alley’ clinics.

‘The increasing prominence of severely disfigured or dying x-ray clients and their retributive claims against salon owners must have also impacted the popularity of the procedure,’ writes Herzig, though it wasn’t until 1940 that it was banned across the country.

Rebecca Herzig on the history of hair removal Listen to the full episode of Late Night Live to find out more about the history of hair removal.

In the 21st century young women in western countries almost unanimously choose the Brazilian—the removal of all or nearly all hair from the genital area, including the vulva, anus and perineum.

The popularity of the Brazilian soared in 2000 after the airing of an episode of Sex and the City in which one of the stars was waxed. Today one in five American women under 25 maintain ‘consistent, and complete removal of all their genital hair’.

Since then a veritable tsunami of laser hair removal salons have appeared around the world. ‘Within 10 years of its introduction there were almost two million hair removal procedures completed each year in the US alone, outranking liposuction, rhinoplasty, eyelid surgery and breast implants,’ writes Herzig.

As for the future of hair removal, Herzig reports that research into hair genetics is an area that’s generating billions of dollars in investment. American pharmaceutical company Merck paid US$1.1 billion to acquire a leading company in the field. The aim is to alter cellular machinery by silencing the expression of genes. It seems the obsession with hair removal is here to stay.

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