The bare truth

[pappagooch]

Why are humans nearly hairless? And why do some wish to become more so?

AT THE back of a hairdresser's shop, just off Piccadilly in London, an Irish beautician called Genevieve is explaining what a “Brazilian” is as she practises her art on your correspondent. A Brazilian strip, some are surprised to learn, is nothing to do with Latin American football. Between each excruciating rip, she explains that she is going to remove nearly all my pubic hair, except for a narrow vertical strip of hairs the width of a couple of fingers. This is known colloquially as the “landing strip”.

In only a few years, this form of waxing has gone from the esoteric to the everyday and is starting to rival the ordinary bikini wax in popularity. At the same time the bikini wax is becoming a normal procedure for women of all ages: the youngest person Genevieve has waxed is a 12-year-old girl. Women are styling their pubic hair into hearts, stars and arrows. It is one of the more notable developments in hairdressing since the permanent wave.

The agony involved raises the question of why women increasingly feel the need to remove a natural covering of hair. One theory is that they are trying to acquire a prepubescent look in order to please men. The waxers, though, will let you into another little secret which suggests that, even if this is true, it is not the whole story. Some men too, both straight and gay, are waxing their most intimate parts. Ouch.

At a biological level this behaviour seems even odder. Most other mammals seem quite content with a luxuriant growth of fur. The idea of a chimpanzee pulling out the hair on its genital regions is ridiculous. Perhaps waxing is little more than a pseudo-sexual fad: another example of the kind of erotic titivation, such as body piercing and tattooing, that was once popular mainly among sailors, hippies and prostitutes. There is another possibility, though. It could be an extension of a longer-running animal story: humanity's evolution towards near nakedness.

Humans are clearly obsessed with having too much hair. Last year men and women spent $8 billion removing it with razor blades, reports Gillette, which makes the things. Of this, $2 billion was spent by America's 100m men on beard removal. More than 90% of American men over 15 shave about five times a week. But as beards are, biologically, a sexual signal indicating masculinity, why shave them off?

Men have been shaving since antiquity, although the habit really got going only when Gillette replaced the cut-throat razor with the safety razor in 1903. Gus Van Beek, a curator of archaeology at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, says that Egyptian tomb paintings of men show them without beards, or at least without real beards. When beards are depicted, they are false ones. This is known, says Mr Van Beek, because detached falsies have been found.

Beards may have been considered a disadvantage in hand-to-hand combat, since they can be grabbed. Yet much of the body, or so it is thought, was shaven by the ancient Egyptians. Mr Van Beek says that their razors would have been made first of copper, then of bronze and, much later, of brass. But the ancient Egyptians would not have gone in for the Sphinx, which is another style of pubic wax, named after the completely hairless Egyptian cat.

View: Full Article | Source: The Economist