Plucked: A History of Hair Removal. By Rebecca Herzig. NYU Press; 287 pages; $29.95.

CLAMSHELL razors, lasers, lye depilatories, tweezers, waxes, threading and electrolysis. Humanity has used an impressive array of tools to remove hair. This is, biologically speaking, pretty strange. Most of Earth’s mammals possess luxuriant fur. Only one seeks to remove it. Rebecca Herzig’s delightful history of hair removal in America helps explain why: smooth skin is a cultural imperative.

There is no finer example of this than the reaction of the bearded Europeans to the smooth skin of the male and female native Americans they saw when they arrived on their shores. George Catlin’s portrait of the eldest son of Black Hawk in 1832 (right) reveals the preoccupation that many colonists had with hairlessness. Hair was political, too, and formed part of a debate about Indian racial characteristics and whether natives were capable of being civilised. William Robertson, a Scottish historian, said hairlessness provided evidence of a “feebleness of constitution”.

Attitudes shifted after Charles Darwin published “The Descent of Man” in 1871 and perspectives on the relationship between humans and other animals changed. Although American theologians ignored or rejected Darwin’s ideas, the notion of a connection between man and ape had a great cultural impact on how hairiness was viewed. Freak shows and circuses displayed “dog-faced men” and “bearded ladies”, and unusual hair growth was even tied to various pathologies. By the start of the 20th century, plentiful hair had been linked to signs of sexual, mental and criminal deviance.

Women’s body hair attracted particular attention. Doctors reported mounting distress among women afflicted with “excessive” hairiness—particularly on the face and neck. Women who pushed for voting rights and equality were depicted as sexually inverted and hairy, and critics of the changing sexual roles of females deemed hairiness as evidence of an excess of manliness.

Aversion to body hair spread rapidly, fuelled by the racially tinged hygiene movement and less restrictive dress codes. Advertisements for hair-removal products sprouted everywhere, and by the start of the second world war body hair had become disgusting to middle-class American women. The Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act in 1938 was partly provoked by a rash of injuries from depilatory creams. One of the most popular creams contained thallium. Women were maimed by muscular atrophy, blindness or limb damage after using it; some even died.

The modern daily self-shave became common much earlier, when America entered the first world war. Military leaders liked the idea of shaving, as it helped keep lice away and assured a close fit for gas masks. Eventually army regulations required every soldier to possess a shaving device—a market anticipated by Gillette. As the nation demobilised, the company launched a campaign to create the idea that a daily shave was a cultural norm.

The current taste for pubic, perineal and anal waxing owes much to changes in the media, particularly pornography. The prevalence of bare genitals in porn has promoted the idea that hairlessness is erotic and attractive. Yet in the 1980s a porn actress would have expected to pose with a “full bush”. Indeed, when censorship laws were liberalised and genitalia were first unveiled in film, pubic hair was such a critical component of eroticism than it spawned an entire genre of so-called “beaver” films. Today porn stars are all either highly cropped, like topiary, or bald. Ms Hertzig reports that by the late 2000s American clinicians were saying it was unusual to treat any woman under the age of 30 who still had her pubic hair. “Within a single generation”, she writes, “female pubic hair has been rendered superfluous.”

What remains is the question of whether hair removal is a form of self-enhancement or oppression. Most men feel obliged to be clean-shaven for work or polite company, and the hairy woman is roundly scorned. Of a young woman with hairy armpits and legs, one writer for the Daily Mail, the world’s most popular newspaper website, recently wrote: “Watching her I nearly parted company with my breakfast.” For human beings to make themselves different from other animals, what is normal has been rendered monstrous.