From Ashley Armitage’s advert for razor brand Billie – the primary of its kind to feature women with body hair versus the standard silky smooth hairless pins – to Nike’s campaign earlier this 12 months that featured Nigerian-American singer Annahastasia together with her arm raised to disclose a small patch of hair on her armpits, mainstream representations of body hair are changing. A results of the viral body positivity movement, an increasing number of women are beginning to embrace their natural body hair and types are following suit.

In fact, it’s inspiring to see women who don’t just love themselves regardless of their body hair, but actually, love how they appear of their natural state. I feel struck by the sheer courage and self-belief it takes for anyone to reject a social convention that’s so intensely and relentlessly thrust upon us. Yet truth be told – I can’t help but still feel disgusted by the sight of body hair on women.

For generations, media representations have normalised the homogenous image of hairless women. Through these portrayals, we appear to have been conditioned into accepting that a girl’s natural state is to be smooth-legged and bump-free. While the movement to embrace body hair has actually helped alleviate a number of the stigma surrounding it, the main target up to now has typically been on thin, white bodies, with the hair itself being confined quite inoffensively to small patches on the legs and underarms. Beard hair, sideburns, monobrows, moustaches and navel hair on women are sometimes absent from the landscape of desirable hairiness displayed on social media today, which will be alienating to women who’ve a big amount of body hair, whether in consequence of PCOS, being trans or simply belonging to certain ethnic groups.  

Though the policing of girls’s bodies is a universal issue, in relation to matters of body hair it’s a very complex issue for girls of color. Once I was about six or seven I remember being taunted about my moustache and thick monobrow by older kids. It was the primary time I became aware of ‘conventional’ standards of beauty by the undeniable fact that I used to be not fulfilling them. To avoid being the topic of ridicule I withdrew into myself. I might avoid standing too near individuals who could see my facial hair, didn’t make much eye contact and would try my best to avoid direct sunlight. I discovered it difficult to feel confident in social situations, and struggled to perceive my very own femininity or feel attractive to boys.

This was not only my experience alone. I remember distinctly that it was mostly South Asian and Middle Eastern girls in school with visible body hair who felt essentially the most pressure to remove it. Light hair against fair skin seemed markedly less offensive compared, and many of the white girls I grew up with only bothered to shave their legs from the knee down. Seeing their furry blonde thighs, unshaved and unbothered, I became acutely aware from the onset of puberty that the onus on me to remove my body hair would at all times be far greater as a South Asian girl with thick, dark hair. 

I used to be desperate to start out experimenting with hair removal and started shaving and attempting to wax on the tender age of 11. But I used to be only in a position to start feeling more comfortable and assured in my body after I had convinced my mum to let me get laser hair removal on my face at around 12 or 13 and on my legs soon after.

The pain was excruciating, like tiny electric shocks burning my skin. My hair follicles were thick by genetic design and weren’t taking place and not using a fight. But I persevered. So while other girls were going shopping and hanging out at Starbucks on a Saturday afternoon, I used to be biting into towels and fighting back tears in the search for beauty and a way of inner peace. But once I began to see the hair growth begin to drastically reduce, I immediately knew it was price all of the pain and it totally transformed my confidence. 

That said, whilst the outcomes were gratifying because the hair reduction was significant, they weren’t everlasting and I actually have since needed to have various courses of laser hair removal, in addition to tedious evenings spent waxing and shaving in the course of the years in between. I’m currently undergoing my full body laser hair removal which cost just over £2000 and I pay for it in monthly instalments. Every six weeks I am going to the salon and lie there like a beached whale for 2 hours, getting zapped just about in every single place apart from the hair on my head within the hope that someday I’ll finally be rid of my body hair completely and never should give it some thought again.

In fact, I recognise that body hair positivity is very important, and I hope it allows quite a lot of young girls to like and accept themselves in a way that I wish I had been in a position to. But for me, being confronted with images of body hair just isn’t only a reminder of a very low period of my life; it continues to be very much an ongoing (and physically painful) a part of my life. I don’t feel as if I’ll ever be free from these internalised notions of beauty and femininity which might be etched so deeply into my psyche, so whilst it’s empowering to see images of girls embracing their body hair it could actually even be triggering – and a reminder of how body hair and ladies’s beauty standards will at all times be racialised. Perhaps it’s easy to embrace your body hair if it was never really weaponised against you.

It also feels surreal at times that the identical beauty culture that made me detest my very own body hair is now telling me, quite forcefully, that I have to embrace it. It made me feel unworthy of self-love for having body hair in the primary place, and now makes me feel as if I actually have failed at self-love again because I haven’t yet learnt to simply accept the hair I used to be at all times taught to hate. Self-love sold to us by corporations and thru social media makes self-acceptance seem really easy when reduced to a superficial Instagram post. But true self-love requires quite a lot of work that perhaps a lot of us aren’t yet willing or in a position to do. At this point in my life, what I’m willing to do is proceed down this path of hair removal, because it makes me feel blissful to be smooth and hairless. And that’s okay, too.