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It's time for the arm-bush ambush. Summer is a time when most women unquestioningly invest a lot of time, money and pain in hair removal, but many of London’s young feminists are becoming part of a growing revival. While this year has been declared “the year of the bush” for our lower regions, many women think that particular forest is old territory. Recently, outspoken trendsetting ladies (and uh… Madonna) have started cultivating their underarm gardens.

Many will recoil in horror at the thought of a woman’s unshaven pit. However, at a time when the most admired female faces are unashamedly bold, such as Cara Delevingne’s, it isn’t surprising that it’s increasingly cool for women to do something different.

I stopped shaving my armpits last year after my friend Alexis Calvas, 22, who hadn’t shaved for months, told me she was forced to remove her underarm hair or be fired from a dance-teaching job. It made me wonder why I mindlessly conformed to this fabricated part of feeling feminine. After a few months of shyly growing, I began to realise that we weren’t the only women binning our razors.

The underground armpit hair trend is sprouting all over London, where carefree young women are proudly presenting natural fuzz, often (less naturally) dyed in all colours of the rainbow. This is partly thanks to social media, which has allowed women to share images and stories about their bodies. But armpit hair is even growing within the fashion industry.

Pink-haired model Charlotte Free, 21, is loudly feminist and a picture of her licking her unshaven pits, by the (not so feminist) photographer Terry Richardson, has made her the face of fashionable fuzz. This sits alongside the Swedish artist and model Arvida Byström, 22, who is part of a movement on the photo blogging platform Tumblr of people questioning gender stereotypes. Even London modelling company Anti Agency, which champions individuality in fashion, has a number of women on its books who don’t shave.

On Facebook there are groups for women who won’t wax, one of the biggest being WANG (Women Against Non-Essential Grooming), which is 2,300 members strong and growing.

Recently, images of models with unshaven armpits by photographer Ben Hopper went viral online. WANG has garnered some negative responses over the snaps, but far from deterring women, this fuelled a huge increase in membership. Member and journalist Emer O’Toole says: “I decided to stop shaving for a year as a challenge to myself. Turns out shaving is like the inverse of Pringles. Once you stop, you just can’t understand why you ever popped in the first place.”

In the public eye, the likes of Amanda Palmer and Beth Ditto have been raising their unshaven arms against arbitrary beauty standards for years, and recently even Madonna chipped in, showing off her underarm muff on Instagram. But many popular female commentators, such as Caitlin Moran, who declares her love of a “big hairy minge”, are very quiet about armpit hair.

It is young women who have all the arm-bush tactics in the public sphere and the virtual one. And here’s hoping that the trend continues to grow (literally), so when unshaven women like me raise their arms on the Tube we won’t be met with whispers and stares, or even be seen as interesting, but will be accepted just like every hairy-pitted man.