Welcome to Januhairy

Welcome to Januhairy

Heads up, ladies: equality is here. As men have Movember to spend the penultimate month of the year growing a glorious moustache or full beard, women now have Januhairy. Oh, yes—put down that razor and cancel your waxing appointment. It’s time to grow.

Januhairy is a new month-long campaign founded by Laura Jackson, a student at the University of Exeter, which encourages women to grow out their body hair and ‘love and accept’ their natural hair while raising money for charity. Women all over the world have signed up to take part, with the money going to charity Body Gossip which teaches young people about body image.

‘I just want women to feel more comfortable in their own beautifully unique bodies,’ says Laura. ‘This is an empowering project for everyone to understand more about their views on themselves and others.’

After all, female body hair is hardly unnatural and it’s time we accept it’s nothing to be ashamed about. It’s a societal thing (what isn’t?) that says hairiness means manliness: media in all domains portrays women as flawlessly hairless no matter the situation. Barbie: smooth. Disney princesses: smooth. Zombie apocalypse survivors: smooth. Historical heroines: smooth. Nary a hair in sight.

A hairless body is a patriarchal ideal of what a woman should look like though we have to question what made female body hair so repellent in the first place. Forgetting the male preference for a moment, women tend to feel ‘gross’, ‘unclean’ and ‘unkempt’ should they dare skip a shave. Ever apologised for having hairy legs? Or squirmed at the sight of underarm hair on a woman in a camisole?

Laura’s fellow student Roisin McCay-Hine makes the crucial point, explaining she was initially nervous about taking part in Januhairy: ‘It made me feel uncomfortable. I nearly didn’t sign up because I was so nervous about drawing negative attention to myself. But that is exactly the problem, which is why I decided to challenge myself into getting over it.’

The history of women removing their body hair is a stroll through misogyny: though in Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, both men and women removed all of their body hair to be ‘clean’, by the time the Roman Empire appeared, hair removal was strictly a woman’s issue. Wealthy women removed all their body hair to make sure they conformed to standards of cleanliness and class—pubic hair was seen as uncivilised. Queen Elizabeth I had no issue with leg hair or pubic hair but all hair on the face had to be groomed in her opinion: enter the war on the moustache. Women enjoyed a period of relief in the 1700s and 1800s where there were no body hair standards to conform to—until the 1900s rolled around and fashion pressured women into shaving their armpits. Can’t have hair detracting from the flapper dress (or getting caught in the sequins). According to an ad in Harper’s Bazaar in 1915, completely bare underarms were a ‘necessity’ and women were urged to remove all ‘objectionable hair’. After WWII, the nylon shortage meant women could no longer cover up their ‘objectionable hair’ with tights and therefore needed to shave it all off and attention began to turn to the hair a little higher up. At the advent of the bikini, women began trimming their bikini lines; in 1987, the Brazilian wax became a thing and people worldwide were indoctrinated into believing hairless is sexy as internet porn took over the world.

From unclean to uncivilised to unsexy, female body hair has always been subject to patriarchal whims. Which is why Januhairy is great. It’s a fabulous movement for women fed up of conforming to a beauty standard requiring expert proficiency at razor-blade shower-yoga. But the one thing missing from the Instagram feeds? Facial hair.

One study from 2006 found women who suffer dark or excess facial hair spend 104 minutes every week trying to deal it; 75 percent of them feel clinical level anxiety about it. Some women rock it—if you haven’t heard of Harnaam Kaur, go devour her Instagram feed—while others feel unfeminine. There are millions of women suffering PCOS who have moderate or severe hirsutism, a condition where ‘excessive hair appears in a male pattern on women’s bodies’, and thousands of women with idiopathic hyperandrogenemia, a condition where women have excessive levels of ‘male hormones’ like testosterone. While this means hair grows on their backs, arms, chests and stomachs, the most noticeable place is the face—there are plenty of photos of women looking womanly with their armpit hair and leg hair; far fewer of women proudly and shamelessly showcasing their facial hair. It seems a hairy face is even less acceptable than a hairy bikini line.

The truth: shaving and waxing and epilating and plucking and threading and zapping with lasers and all other manners of hair removal are expensive, time-consuming and painful. The other truth: let your hair grow out and that’s a transgressive move that might even make you feel bad about yourself. The shave debate has become so politicised that there’s just no right thing to do: so do what you want.

Give Januhairy a go and see how your perceptions of your own body hair change or don’t change. As with all things in life, do what you want and accept yourself and others.