If you’ve ever shaved, waxed, plucked, sugared, lasered, epilated, threaded, you know the
trials and tribulations of body hair removal. Some people want more in some places and less
in others, but overall, humans are pretty invested in grooming our body hair. So...what
is your body hair for, exactly? Maybe you were told that removing your body hair makes you
cleaner, or healthier. So...let’s find out if that’s actually true.
On average, we’re covered in about 5 million hair follicles. That’s around the same number
as other non-human primates, ours just isn’t as visible because most of it is the short,
soft ‘peach fuzz’ called vellus hair. Our fuzz has a job: it helps us regulate our
temperature by helping us cool off when our sweat evaporates .
When we’re cold, miniscule muscles in our
skin contract around those hairs and make them stand on end—that’s what goosebumps are!
Now, the longer, coarser, more distinctive hair on our head, face, legs, and groin is
terminal hair. Terminal hair is what we tend to be more preoccupied with. It’s
found in specific places for a reason. Your eyelashes and eyebrows keep sweat and
debris out of your eyes (with the added bonus of helping us express ourselves and recognize
each other). Terminal hair on the head, legs, chest, and
other large surfaces also regulates our temperature, and may protect our skin from UV damage and
prickly, pokey stuff in our environment. But these are just our best guesses for why
we have body hair in the places we do. For evolutionary biology, body hair is actually
still something of an enigma. Now pubic hair actually does have a really specific known
job, but we’ll get down to that later. And something else we do know, is that hair
growth is partially influenced by sex hormones and age. Some of it only appears once you
hit puberty, so it’s one of your secondary sex characterics–those are traits like breast
development, facial hair, the beginning of menstruation, and body composition changes.
-So hormones like testosterone, which kind of fall in this family of androgens, can affect
the follicle to grow hair that's more coarse or thick.
People go through puberty, they start getting thicker hair in
more androgen-dependent areas, whether it is armpit hair or pubic hair.
-So your terminal
hair is one external sign that internally, you’ve rounded the corner into reproductive
age. Regardless of biology, it’s obvious that we modern humans care a lot about what
our body hair looks like. But why? People have removed body hair for
centuries, for all kinds of sociocultural reasons. But in modern hygiene history, razors
only really became popular for those who identify as women a little over a hundred years ago.
When Gillette invented the men’s safety razor, they saw an opportunity to target an
even broader client base. They started marketing campaigns that tied female body hair to shame.
And this was especially effective because the fashions of the day started to put lady’s
armpits on display. This made their product—a razor—now indispensable
to self confidence. And as hairlessness became more and more desirable,
the consequences of hair removal
also got more gruesome. Some hair removal creams of days past were made from rat poison.
One method required the user to sit in front of an X-ray and expose themselves to highly
dangerous radiation for hours. Talk about ‘beauty is pain’.
Some colours, textures,
and densities of body hair are deemed more socially ‘acceptable’ than others. Someone’s
gender or race or sexuality plays a role in the pressure they feel to remove or change
their body hair. On top of that, there’s the pervasive view that removing body hair
is ‘more hygienic’. Funnily enough, it can actually be the opposite.
-I think that, we're trying to fit like with these cultural norms, but a lot of times it
ends up causing more problems.
-Any method of hair removal runs the risk
of damaging your skin. They open your hair follicles to the outside
world, can result in ingrown hairs, and can introduce microabrasions, all
are little portals through which microbes can enter and wreak havoc like...infections.
Staph, anyone?
-There are issues that can happen with waxing,
because you're really pulling on the hair, you're pulling on the skin at the same time
when you're removing the wax and, and by pulling on the skin, if you have sensitive skin, it
could potentially even cause tears in the skin.
-And it’s not just waxing. Laser hair removal is becoming increasingly popular, and is safer
in terms of infection risk in comparison to many at-home methods. But that’s only when
it’s performed by a certified professional. Shady discount laser clinics are much more
likely to cause skin damage, burns. When it comes to laser procedures, expertise
of the practitioner counts.
Now many of us have probably felt particular pressure to alter our pubic hair...but it’s
also the kind we probably feel the least comfortable talking about. However you decide to do it,
removing hair down there can result in genital inflammation or long-term changes to the skin
and according to some studies, can actually increase your risk of contracting
some sexually transmitted infections.
On the bright side, pubic lice are actually kind of going extinct because of habitat destruction,
Our pubic hair protects us. It minimizes damage
caused by friction. It helps keep out the bad microbes that can cause UTIs and other infections,
and once again, keeps everything at the right temperature, so....
-I'm on Team leave your hair alone. But of course, that there's a huge cultural aspect,
you know, to body hair and not having it. So I get it, but I would love to help kind
of shake up that idea a little bit and really, you know, make it normal to have body hair.
-It’s normal, natural, and all part of being a mammal, babe. You don’t need to remove
it...unless you have a really good reason to. That really good reason can be some kinds
of medical conditions where removing hair is part of treatment. But it can also be...just
‘cause you want to. If you do landscape, here are some ways to do it safely.
-So a big thing… changing out your razor blade regularly. at least once every two weeks
or every seven to eight shaves. When you store your razor, make sure it's facing up. When
it's facing down, there's a higher chance for it to rust.
And then I do think that it is helpful to exfoliate regularly because a huge cause of
ingrown hairs is the buildup of skin and over the hair follicle and that traps the hair
inwards. I didn’t know most of those until my early twenties. Another big one is use
a separate razor for your genitals, and the microbiologist in me is BEGGING you to avoid
high infection risk scenarios—like, don’t go in a hot tub if you accidentally nicked
your leg shaving. And just know: what we think our bodies should
look and act like often doesn't have roots in science or medicine. You are not gross
or dirty if you decide to skip the shave. It’s just a choice, like any other one we
make in the modern cosmetic world, and now, armed with more information, you get to decide what works
best for you and your follicles. Thanks for watching Body Language, if you
want more topics from the series, check out season one here. What other topics do
you want us to cover in future videos? Let us know in the comments below and thanks
for watching. I’ll see you next time.