NOT SHAVING ARMPITS
Feminist statement or hot new look?
It’s a warm day and I’m moving house. Heaving boxes, I am not really aware of how I look until I catch one of our removal men watching me lift a plant. He quickly turns around, but he has definitely noticed. I’m not sure who is more embarrassed. “Surely the whole point is that you don’t care if people notice?” my husband had said to me the day before, as I stubbornly kept my jacket on. “Or that you’re proud of it, even?”
He is right. My body, my choice. And I choose to keep my jacket on.
Let me explain. After a few extended bouts of wintry low standards, forgetfulness and lockdown laziness, I decided to grow out my armpit hair. I told myself it was a political act – a low-effort, practical one, just the way I like them. It would be good for my toddler daughter to see female body hair, I said to almost everyone I met, because I had no other news after several lockdowns and a maternity leave.
But the real reason I grew out my armpit hair was slightly different, and also much worse. It wasn’t because I had finally made peace with my body (ha!). No, the real reason I did it was because I didn’t want to look old. Forget side partings and skinny jeans, armpits are the latest way to unintentionally show your age. Those of you still lying about your birthday, take note: if you’re shaving, waxing or in any way deforesting, you’re officially over the hill.
I first noticed it a few months back – a fuzz of relaxed grooming habits and a generation admirably impervious to the hairless Hollywood standards of old. Well, I thought, we’ve all let ourselves go a bit this year. But the trend has continued, even as those sporting their powder puffs of pit hair transition from lockdown leggings to “freedom day” frocks.
It’s nothing new, of course. Actor Julia Roberts flashed armpit hair on the red carpet in 1999. More recently, Madonna’s daughter Lourdes Leon, Lady Gaga and model Gigi Hadid have been spotted flaunting theirs. Adidas and Nike revealed advertising campaigns this year in which models had hairy armpits.
But it isn’t just celebrity attention-seekers any more. Among the under-30s, armpit hair is part of looking modern. I’m no longer surprised when I spot it but it still registers (I’ve only just got over the fact that nobody under 30 wears underwire bras anymore either). I’m a feminist, a bit of armpit fuzz shouldn’t seem rebellious to me, but it does. I might have two small children but I’ve been telling myself I’m just on hiatus from being cool.
For the most part, there’s a certain bucket hat and nose-piercing context to the youthful underarm hair, but I was surprised the other day when I saw a woman in a floaty, floral dress let hers hang out. I knew hairy armpits were in, I just hadn’t thought of them as girlie before. But what is more feminine than letting your body grow what it is supposed to?
As somebody who came of age in the early noughties, I can think of a few things. Really high heels and long hair. Fake tan. Wonderbra cleavage. When I was 18, bodycon stood for body conscious, not body confident. For someone of my generation, shaving your armpits is like brushing your teeth: gross if you forget one day but an interventionlevel event if you deliberately don’t for a while.
Because of all this, I have had to enrol in my own reeducation program in recent years. The skimpy clothes and celebrity gossip I was weaned on were, I now realise, part of the pornification of mainstream culture, the ramifications of which are only now coming to light as a new generation decide they are dysfunctional. The unkindness and general snark. The clothes we assumed we couldn’t wear because we were not a size 8. The food we decided we couldn’t eat because we were not a size 8.
This is a lot to read into whether one’s armpits are hairless or not, I realise. But armpits have made me reappraise my place in the circle of life. The biggest trends of the past 10 years – athleisure, eyebrows and Botox – haven’t come with an age limit. Since everyone from Zendaya (age 25) to Helen Mirren (76) started wearing midiskirts and white trainers, women have stopped living in fear of the lamb/mutton axis.
Armpits, however, are divisive. Smooth armpits are very centrist-mum. When I mentioned growing mine to my uni friends, most of them pulled vomit-faces. No re-entry anxiety for me, only a spiral of panic over whether to tell people about my underarm mission or hope they won’t see it as my social life starts up again.
I outed myself recently at the local pool, when keeping my arms clamped to my sides would have meant my young son drowning. Priorities. For the few moments during which nobody blinked an eye at the four-month fluff protruding from my armpits, I felt I had reclaimed something almost unquantifiable: one less thing in my life to keep track of. It was only then I realised I’d completely forgotten about my bikini line.