![]() ![]() By 1964, 98 percent of American women ages 15 to 44 reported that they removed some body hair. In 1939, Harper's Bazar wrote: "Ankle socks on the campus are a fine, old institution and all very well, but not on furry legs." There are hints that unshaved legs were still around at the time, but fading - in 1941, the magazine says, "If we were dean of women, we'd levy a demerit on every hairy leg on campus."Īs the '50s ended, the transformation of American hair was complete. The more conservative McCall's didn't completely follow suit, but it also shifted toward leg hair, with salacious ad taglines like "Let's Look at Your Legs - Everyone Else Does."Īnd around this time, the media joined the ads in condemning leg hair. "We'd levy a demerit on every hairy leg on campus" By this point, all of the hair removal ads in Harper's Bazar mentioned leg hair, and 56 percent focused on the legs alone, according to Hope. In the '50s, bare legs become the normīy the 1940s, leg hair removal had become standard. And most of the ads were seasonal, running from around April to September - timing that suggests women mostly relegated hair removal to summer, when their underarms and legs were exposed. From 1924 to 1926, ads for them disappeared from the Sears catalog and McCall's. Hope's analysis shows that a relatively small percentage of ads focused on leg hair removal: in Harper's Bazar, for example, 66 percent of the ads mentioned it, but only 10 percent made it their sole focus.īriefly, it even seemed like depilatories might just be a passing fad. Women shaving their legs in 1927 (these women were on Broadway, so they were slightly atypical for the time).ĭuring the 1920s, knee-high skirts made legs more visible, and depilatory companies wasted no time claiming that their products enabled "a woman to bathe stockingless, without self-consciousness." In the Roaring '20s, hemlines rise and the hair-removal industry targets legs But that technology also needed to expand its market. To some degree, the shift to increased shaving was made possible by technology, such as the the 1901 invention of a safety razor with disposable blades and the 1919 packaging of instant shaving cream. As Gillette claimed in a typical 1917 ad: "Milady Decolette is the dainty little Gillette used by the well-groomed woman to keep the underarm white and smooth." The appeals were largely based on fashion, but they also told women what they should do to look fashionable (remove their underarm hair). "The Woman of Fashion Says the underarm must be as smooth as the face" This typical quote from a contemporaneous ad campaign says it all: This 1922 ad from Harper's Bazaar is typical of the genre that emerged:Ī depilatory ad in Harper's Bazaar, from 1922. ![]() That, of course, led the depilatory industry to conclude that underarm hair was undesirable. A new trend in sleeveless dresses, often inspired by Greek and Roman clothing, exposed women's previously covered arms. Advertisers target the armpitĪccording to Hope, a shift began in 1915 when advertisers in Harper's Bazar started to target underarm hair (usually for various depilatory creams). The legs and underarm were nowhere to be seen.īut new trends started to change everything within a few years. Christine Hope did the definitive research on women's hair removal in her 1982 paper "Caucasian Female Body Hair and American Culture," and her survey of ads in old Harper's Bazaar and McCall's magazines shows that they targeted facial, neck, and forearm hair. Before the 1910s, depilatories for those areas were used primarily by actresses or dancers, or for surgery. Clothes were so concealing that it was rare to see bare legs or underarms, so removing hair there wasn't an issue. In 1908, fashion around the world was generally very concealing.Īs the 20th century began, women didn't care if they had leg or underarm hair, and it shows in the beauty guides, ads, and fashion of the time. In the 1900s, most women didn't care about armpit or leg hair The best research blames a sustained advertising campaign to change the way women groomed. How did women shaving their armpits and legs go from a freak story in 1920 to the mainstream by 1950?
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