People never seem to be satisfied with what they have got.
Many naturally balding men spend thousands of dollars a year on potions and cremes to stimulate a little regrowth ( and don’t even get me started on the toupees and the comb-overs), whist people such as myself, who have been blessed with a relatively full head of hair, spend a considerable wad of cash on razors to maintain a silky smooth scalp.
Personally, I think we are all victims of advertising agencies messing around with our collective self image.
Self image is a force that is both compellingly powerful and deceptively fragile. A while ago a friend of mine lost all her hair during chemotherapy and was inconsolable. Thing is, to many of us she really did look far more beautiful without hair. But we could not convince her of this. Eventually she began to wear these fantastic wigs1 out in public. And the change in her self confidence was immediate.
Anyway, whilst engaged in pandering to the complexities of my own self image, and searching online for some quality head shaving accoutrement, I have come across this 2007 thesis by Kirsten Hansen titled: Hair or Bare?: The History of American Women and Hair Removal, 1914-1934.
I came to write this thesis because of a personal curiosity about hair removal and its origins. Among my female friends hair removal is considered an annoying, arduous, often painful, but necessary ritual. Most insist on removing leg hair before putting on a skirt or shorts, and balk at the thought of wearing a bathing suit without shaving or waxing the bikini line. Hair removal is considered so essential to some of these women that they refuse to participate in daily activities such as exercising or going on a date if they have not paid proper attention to removing their body hair. Furthermore, hair removal is generally considered to be a timeless ritual, or at least one that all American women have always practiced. Through my research, however, I discovered that hair removal is not an ancient tradition, nor is it an isolated behavior. Hair removal was introduced first in the nineteen teens and twenties, and coincided with a momentous change in the definition of the American feminine ideal.
Turns out no-one is exactly sure when we first began the practice of hair removal although there are cave paintings from prehistoric times that depicted men without beards or facial hair. No mean feat in those days, as any attempt at shaving would have involved some form of flint axe or sharpened animal teeth.
You may think we have come a long way since then, but if you catch me cleaning the blood spatters off the mirror after a rushed morning shave, you might swear I had used some sort of sharpened animal teeth…. and the forensics would suggest the animal was still attached.
By Egyptian times the production of flint razors became more sophisticated. Soldiers were known to shave their face and head to deprive the enemy of a good hand hold during attempted beheadings.
Even though beards were symbolic of manhood, fear of loosing ones head during battle lead to a trend in shaving during times of war by the Romans and Greeks.
This seemed to have caught on to the point where a clean shaven man represented civility and became more attractive to the females, whilst the bearded were seen as barbarians.
There is also some evidence that females of the time would remove all the hair (including pubic) from their bodies using beeswax as it was also considered ‘uncivilised’.
Today, your letterbox may get a drop of leaflets from a local beauty clinic offering a wide ( and expensive) variety of waxings to remove hair from any number of body crevices and plateaus.
Everything from the exotic sounding Brazilian, for the females to the somewhat less exotic back, crack and sack for the men.
In western culture shaving went in and out of style, and up until the invention of the Gillette disposable blade in 1885, razors remained crude and hazardous implements.
By developing a market for a clean shaven face, and then producing a blade that would have to be replaced by a new one after a few shaves, a continuous flow of product was guaranteed.
By its second year of sale Gillette had sold over 91,000 sets of razor blades.
It was onto something here.
In 1915 Gillette decided it could increase its sales by producing a razor for women. The timing was perfect, as women’s fashion was beginning to get shorter, with hemlines creeping up and shorter sleeves becoming more common. Hooking into some intensive and persuasive advertising campaigns in the now flourishing women’s magazines, shaving took its place in the marketing of the female ideal body image.
“…other behaviors centering around body image and self-improvement including the use of make-up and the practice of dieting caught on during the same era. Thus hair removal, at first glance, seems to be an inane, isolated habit, but was in fact part of a marked shift in the American feminine ideal. Understanding how and why the practice of hair removal was introduced and disseminated in the 1920s brings us one step closer to understanding how the modern feminine ideal came to be. It is also a step towards understanding why females today organize their sense of self around their bodies, and why they believe the body to be “the ultimate expression of self.”
Like I said, most of us have been willing participants as our self image, has been crafted and manipulated into a complex and fragile beast.
You cant help but wonder that if all the mirrors in the world were suddenly to vaporize into morning mist…we would all wake up happier, healthier and more able to spend a little more time looking at each other instead.
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