Women have long been pressured to remove their body hair, often scary feelings of shock and disgust once they don’t. In 2013, a Mintel study reported that an awesome 95 per cent of girls aged 16 to 24 said they removed hair from their underarms, while 92 per cent shaved their legs.
Previously, men have passed through the body hair conversation relatively unscathed. Nevertheless, recent research from Mintel suggests that that is changing, with increasingly more young British males embracing hair-free bodies.
In 2018, the study reports, 46 per cent of men removed hair from their bodies – up from 36 per cent in 2016. Fifty-seven per cent of men aged 16-24 have removed hair from their pubic region, up from 40 per cent two years ago; 42 per cent remove hair from their underarms, up from 16 per cent; while hair removal from the chest has doubled within the last two years increasing to 30 per cent.
While these numbers are still a far cry from the proportion of female body hair removal (in 2018, 90 per cent of girls aged 16-24 remove hair from their underarms, 90 per cent from their legs, and 75 per cent from the pubic region) they’re a big increase. The rise is considered being fuelled by social media and tv shows equivalent to Love Island which have normalised and popularised hairless torsos. Brands have been responding to this increase, with recent product launches targeted at men from Veet and Nad’s, in addition to NIVEA’s Men’s Body Hair Removal range.
The pressure for young men to look certain ways can also be manifesting itself in increased steroid use by 16-24-year-olds which quadrupled in 2017, in line with The Home Office, while the variety of men being admitted to hospital with an eating disorder has risen over 70 percent over the past six years.
While we support the normalisation of men spending time on themselves and removing body hair, if that’s what they decide to do, the pressure that social and popular media is putting on young people to live as much as unrealistic aesthetic standards is becoming increasingly toxic and damaging and wishes to be addressed.
