In 1915, Harper’s Bazar (the original spelling) published what historians believe to be the first modern advertisement targeting women’s underarm hair. The ad, for a depilatory called X Bazin, ran with the headline “Summer Dress and Modern Dancing” and showed a woman in a sleeveless dress with her arm raised, suggesting that the new fashions required an underarm that was “as smooth and white as the face.” The product was positioned not as solving an existing problem but as creating awareness of one.

This is, almost uniquely in the history of commercial manufacturing of social norms, a case where we can observe the creation of a taboo in real time. Before 1915, the idea that underarm hair on women was unsightly, unhygienic, or requiring removal was essentially absent from Western culture. Within 15 years of sustained advertising, it was deeply embedded. By the mid-20th century, it was experienced as natural revulsion — as though the discomfort with women’s body hair had always been there.

It hadn’t.

The Historical Record

For most of human history, across most of the world, women’s body hair was simply not a subject of cosmetic concern. Greek sculpture shows women as naturally smooth, but this is an aesthetic convention of marble carving applied to idealized bodies, not a record of social practice. Roman records, which include considerable documentation of cosmetic practice, mention depilation mainly for men — specifically for the armpits of male athletes — without suggesting it was expected of women generally.

The middle centuries in Europe saw occasional references to facial hair removal as a female cosmetic practice — eyebrow shaping, management of facial hair — but nothing approaching a general requirement for total body hair removal. European women of all classes had body hair throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance, as they did throughout the 18th and 19th centuries.

The American feminist social historian Susan Basow’s 1991 review of the historical literature on women and body hair established the basic timeline: the normative expectation of female underarm hair removal emerged in the United States in the 1910s and 1920s, driven by changes in fashion (sleeveless dresses) and targeted advertising. Leg hair removal followed more slowly — it became normative in the US only in the 1940s, partly accelerated by wartime nylon shortages that required women to wear sheer stockings and then, eventually, bare legs.

This is not deep history. The grandmother of any woman alive today likely did not shave her legs as a young woman, because it was not expected.

The Commercial Mechanism

The razor industry’s targeting of women’s body hair is one of the cleanest examples of market creation through manufactured social anxiety in the history of advertising. Gillette introduced the first women’s razor, the Milady Décolleté, in 1915 — the same year as the Harper’s Bazar ad. The timing was not coincidental.

The advertising strategy was consistent: normalize the removal of body hair by simultaneously implying that body hair is problematic (unhygienic, unfashionable, unladylike) and that the solution exists and is affordable. The “problem” did not need to be argued for explicitly; it could be suggested through euphemism, through association with modernity and sophistication, through the implied contrast with women who were not yet enlightened enough to see it.

Historian Kathy Peiss’s work on the cosmetics industry in America shows that this strategy — creating a beauty standard through advertising and then selling the means to achieve it — was characteristic of the beauty industry’s growth in the early 20th century. Women’s underarm and leg hair were simply particularly effective commercial targets because the “solution” (regular shaving, purchase of razors and depilatories) required repeated purchase, creating long-term revenue streams.

The industry has continued to innovate the problem: pubic hair removal, virtually unknown as a mass market phenomenon before the late 1990s, became normative in many Western countries within roughly a decade, driven by the pornography industry’s aesthetic standards migrating into mainstream culture and, again, targeted product advertising. The laser hair removal market in the US is now a multi-billion-dollar industry.

Cross-Cultural Evidence

If women’s body hair were inherently unsightly or its removal a universal human response, we would expect to find broad cross-cultural consistency in the practice. We do not.

In much of South and Southeast Asia, including India, leg hair removal is not historically traditional for women, and many women today do not shave their legs without experiencing any social sanction for this. In parts of the Middle East and North Africa, body hair removal has a longer traditional history, but it has its own specific ritual and social context (it is associated with bridal preparation and specific ceremonial occasions) that is quite different from the daily routine maintenance practice of Western women.

In contemporary Europe, particularly in France and Germany, attitudes toward women’s body hair — while changing under American cultural influence — have historically been more relaxed than in the United States and United Kingdom. Research on attitudes toward body hair in different European countries has found significant variation even across similar cultural contexts.

China’s body hair norms have historically differed from Western ones: leg hair removal was not traditional and remains less entrenched despite growing Western beauty industry influence. Studies of Chinese women’s attitudes toward body hair removal find more ambivalence and less internalized disgust than comparable studies of American women.

This cross-cultural variation is important evidence. Deeply biological responses to physical traits — responses that reflect genuine adaptive value — tend to be more universal. The disgust that many Western women report at the sight of their own or other women’s unshaved body hair is not a universal human response. It is a culturally learned response, which means it is amenable to cultural change.

What the Disgust Response Is Actually About

The psychological mechanism through which the body hair taboo operates is worth understanding. Many women report not just aesthetic preference but genuine visceral disgust at women’s body hair — including their own. This is a stronger response than simple preference, and it suggests that the norm has been internalized at a more fundamental psychological level than conscious choice.

Research by Jonathan Haidt and colleagues on the psychology of disgust finds that disgust evolved primarily as a pathogen-avoidance mechanism — a response to things associated with disease contamination, bodily waste, and decay. The marketing of women’s body hair as “unhygienic” deliberately hijacked this response, linking body hair to dirt and disease in ways that were empirically false (body hair has no relationship to hygiene, as anyone familiar with human biology knows) but emotionally effective.

The manufactured association between women’s body hair and unhygienic disease has been sustained through a century of repetition. The disgusted response that many women now experience is real — it is a genuine psychological reaction — but it has been deliberately constructed. This doesn’t immediately dissolve it. Understanding its origins doesn’t make it vanish. But it does change the relationship to it.

The Reclamation Movement

The contemporary movement of women who are choosing not to remove their body hair, and doing so publicly, is part of a broader critique of manufactured beauty standards. Figures like Julia Roberts (who appeared on a red carpet with visible underarm hair in 1999, to considerable media uproar), and more recently the many women on social media who have documented their decision to stop shaving, are challenging the taboo through visibility.

The reclamation movement is not monolithic. Some women stop shaving as a feminist political statement. Some stop because they find it more comfortable. Some keep their leg hair while removing underarm hair or vice versa, based on their own calculation of personal preference and social context. Some shave everything and understand that as a choice rather than a compulsion.

The key shift is from “I have to” to “I choose to.” This sounds like a small distinction, but psychologically it is significant. Research on autonomy and wellbeing consistently finds that whether a behavior is freely chosen, rather than the behavior itself, is one of the strongest predictors of its relationship to wellbeing. The woman who shaves by preference and the woman who shaves from shame are doing the same thing; the experience and the psychological consequences are different.

The Simpler Question

Underneath the political and historical complexity, there is a simpler question: who is women’s body hair removal for? The honest answer, for many women, is not “for myself.” It is for an imagined or real male gaze, for social acceptance, to avoid the very real social costs that women who do not conform to the standard face.

That doesn’t mean removal is therefore wrong or inauthentic. Social animals adapt to social standards; that is a reasonable human strategy. But knowing what you’re doing and why — understanding that the “I just prefer it” feeling was manufactured in 1915 by a razor company and sustained by a century of advertising — is different from not knowing.

The taboo on women’s body hair is among the most easily documented cases of a manufactured social norm in history. The documentation exists. The dates are known. The mechanism is clear. This is not a natural human response. It is a commercial product.

What you do with that information is, genuinely, your choice.

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