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Hair Part II: Face

Guest: Shoshie

I was horrified when I started getting hair on my face. Little mustache hairs at first, then some on my chin. I also have wispy sideburns and thick eyebrows, though those don’t bother me as much.

I thought I was a freak.

I didn’t know that other women got facial hair as well. Nobody told me. No other women ever mentioned getting eyebrows sugared, mustaches waxed, chin hair tweezed or lasered off. Because, while we acknowledge that leg hair is a fact of life for most women, we never talk about facial hair. But just from doing some cursory Internet research, it looks like 10-25% of women are estimated to have facial hair. That’s a lot of women.

I could write about the ways in which facial hair blurs the boundaries between masculine and feminine, and how that’s scary.

I could write about wanting to feel beautiful, despite being a fat woman, and how facial hair gets in the way of that.

But I want to talk about race and ethnicity. Because I think far more than 10-25% of my Jewish female friends have facial hair, though none of us talk about it, except for a quick tip now and then regarding a method for removal. And although, theoretically, I feel the same way about my facial hair as I do about my leg hair (Why should I remove it? It’s not hurting anyone. Smash the patriarchy!) I still bring my tweezers along on trips. I’ve even contemplated laser treatment because I feel so ashamed of it.

One of the few fights that I remember between me and my brother (and trust me, we’ve had many fights), was when I was 20 and he was 15. He tried to insult me by telling me that my mustache was better than his, and it worked. I ran to my room in tears.

What is it about facial hair that makes it so shameful?

I think that one reason for Ashekenazi Jewish women,* is because it’s a reminder that we can almost blend in to whiteness, but not quite.

Don’t get me wrong. I benefit from white privilege, as do many of my friends. I am white, and I’ve never heard a compelling reason from a light-skinned Ashkenazi Jewish person in the US for why they do not qualify as white. But it wasn’t so long ago that we were considered a different race, fully separated from whiteness. Distinguishing physical characteristics brings that past to present. Despite my pale skin, fairly straight hair and nose, despite my English last name, I am hairier than your average US woman, and that hairiness is because of my Jewish ancestry. It sets me apart. It plays into Jewish stereotypes about Jewish women being more masculine (loud, overbearing, whathaveyou) than their non-Jewish counterparts.

In a culture that privileges tall, narrow-hipped, light-skinned, light-and-straight-haired, women, who definitely don’t have any facial hair south of their eyelashes, it’s another way that we can’t possibly fit, because even if we spend every day meticulously tweezing those wayward hairs, even if we drum up the money to remove that mustache for good, it wouldn’t matter. We still had to concern ourselves with it in the first place, same as the stereotypical Jewish teenage girl and her nose job (thank you, Glee, for perpetuating that hateful bit of misogyny against Jewish women). It’s even more beauty work that’s required of us, and even if we follow through with it, we can’t win. Because you get more facial hair as you age. Because even laser treatment doesn’t work perfectly. Because sometimes you don’t have time to tweeze in the morning. Because of stereotypes about the sneaky Jew trying to fit in. Because patriarchy.

I don’t have any good answers here. My feeling, at least, is that facial hair is even more taboo than leg hair, for the reasons mentioned above and many, many others (one other: transmisogyny! another: powerful women = scary! another: masculine women are unfuckable! I could go on and on…)

So, at this point, I just want to get the conversation going. Do you have facial hair? If so, how do you deal with it? Do you let it grow? Do you remove it? Have you ever considered *not* removing it? How much beauty work is too much? When is it enough?

When do we get to stop?

*I’m not a Jewish woman of color, and so I can in no way speak for their experiences.

82 thoughts on Hair Part II: Face

  1. My facial hair will always be connected to the moment my high school boyfriend made fun of my moustache.

    I trim my unibrow, my beardling, and my moustache, I tried dyeing it but that was a distinct failure. I hate my facial hair.

    I think, in our society, few people realize how similar cis men and cis women look; including our facial hair and unshaped eyebrows. Plucking our hair is way to assert a female identity, refusing to do it means we are not being women. And, definitely, the darker you are, the more it becomes an issue.

    1. “few people realize how similar cis men and cis women look”

      Oh that’s a good point. long lashes and red lips and no facial hair… All takes work (for many)

      1. Interesting factoid: Long lashes as feminine are one of the sillier bits of contemporary gender. As a general rule, men tend to have longer eyelashes than women because lashes are a form of body hair. Similarly, women from ethnic backgrounds that tend toward thicker facial hair will tend to also have longer lashes.

        1. Interesting! Both my husband and I have really long eyelashes and are also pretty fuzzy. He has an awesome beard.

  2. I love your posts Shoshie, first of all. all of them. Such interesting points.

    I had fairly rough bullying in school before I learned that I ought to tweeze. And, I’ve definitely never gone back. I’d love to be bold enough not to (I’m chill about my legs, but that’s it).

  3. I use and epilator on mine. I remember the first time some kid in high school commented on it and I was horrified. The hair on my arms is also pretty dark, though luckily not that thick. I just let it be. I’m NOT going down that path. People will just have to deal with it.

    It’s also kind of funny to think about in a way. I don’t wear makeup to work so I think people assume I don’t spend much time grooming. But that 20 or so minutes other women may spend on makeup, I’m using on tweezing and depilating. Though recently I opted to let my eyebrows grow out thicker. I was inspired by pics of Crystal Renn on that one.

  4. I developed one long chin hair at about age 40, and promptly named it Gertrude. Now, 5 years later, I pluck my chin and jawline regularly. Sometimes with tweezers and sometimes with fingers while I browse the net. It’s become a nervous habit that I have to be aware of when I’m in public so that I don’t disgust people. I should have known this was coming – I caught my mother plucking chin hairs at the same time, and then one day, noticed the soft down on her face (I have it, I don’t know how long it’s been there) and asked in genuine amazement if she was growing a beard. She told me I was being hurtful.

    All this disgust and anger and hurt over something our bodies just do. It’s crazy. Oh, and I’m white.

  5. I don’t really have much facial hair at all, despite being very dark haired and quite hairy pretty much everywhere else. Honestly, I kind of wish I did though.

    I find that I have very different standards of beauty than the people around me here in Australia. That probably comes from loads of sources, but it is what it is. And even though I know that so many woman around me get their faces waxed, I really like the look of a little moustache or the like on a woman. My best friend has this cute little moustache, and even though she’s terribly ashamed of it, I can still remember the first time I met her (when I still had a tiny crush on her) and thinking how adorable it was.

    One of the many things I admire about that friend is her strength in not removing that hair. I know she feels ashamed about it, but she also values so much how the way she looks ties her to her family, and on top of that she finds all of the options for removal to be incredibly unpleasant, and I guess it all boils down to saying ‘why should I go through this pain just so that the world can feel comfortable with how I look?’

    1. ‘why should I go through this pain just so that the world can feel comfortable with how I look?’

      That would be why I never tried waxing or plucking anything.

  6. I’m not Jewish, but I have lots of dark body hair, including most of the kinds of facial hair you describe. I have a fine black mustache, that in some lights looks like someone has penciled it onto my face and in other lights disappears; I have baby sideburns, which I adore and wish were longer; I have very thick, dark eyebrows with a lot of sparse hair growing around them. The only thing you have that I don’t is a beard: I have blonde peachfuzz and a few isolated black chin-hairs that I shave off.

    My ancestry is German, Czech and Polish, and the hair on my body is a strange patchwork of brown, black and blonde. Almost all the other women I’ve known who are as hairy as I am, or hairier, are of either South Asian or Eastern European descent.

    When I was a teenager, and much more worried about being different, I would shave my arms, legs, and sometimes even my stomach and chest. I tried to shave my mustache once but it didn’t work; I’ve also tried hair-removal creams, but they didn’t work either. By college, I was down to only shaving my armpits and legs; now I only shave the ‘pits, and those few odd hairs on my neck. I have always had a masculine identity, so hair removal for me was never really about beauty or femininity — neither of which was a thing I desired — but about trying to avoid other people’s disgust and ridicule. (By late high school, though, I was laughing at the people who found me disgusting.)

    I’ve since started to like my excessive hair (though I’ve always liked some instances of it, like the eyebrows and the sideburns) as I’ve transformed my body through weightlifting; what I wanted to do, and what I did, was to get much, much bigger and stronger, but a side effect has been that the shape of my body changed, too, so that I look a lot more like a man is supposed to look: broad shoulders, big, muscular arms, a chest defined more by pectoral muscles than by breasts. I’m not sure how to explain it, but somehow those changes in my body made me feel better about everything else that made my body different, too.

    1. You’re my hero, awesome 🙂 I’m kind of like your inverse, a smallish boy who prefers to look a little girly.

  7. few people realize how similar cis men and cis women look

    If that were really true in more than a general sense, it would be a great deal easier for a whole lot of trans women to be perceived as women.

    1. There is truth in this; absolutely. Hormones do affect how you grow and develop.

      But I feel like a lot of trappings are mistaken for actual cis truths; cis women don’t have better skin with more even coloration, fewer pores, and no dark circles, that’s from a lifetime of makeup and lotion. Cis women do not have longer eyelashes (on average, cis men do, actually). Cis men and cis women often have facial hair, and even chest and nipple hair.

      1. I assure you that I’m extremely well aware of all the things everyone mentions. Having thought about these things quite a bit! But specifically with respect to the amount and “quality” of facial hair, hormones make a much bigger difference than they do with (say) leg hair, and there’s much less overlap, I think. If you were to try plucking not a dozen but 15,000 bristly, dark facial hairs every day in order to prevent visible 5 o’clock shadow — probably the single biggest thing that makes it impossible for many trans women to be perceived as women unless they’re able to spend enormous amounts of time and money having their facial hair removed, given that shaving doesn’t help and putting 3 pounds of dermablend on one’s face isn’t generally that convincing in daily life — I think you might understand what I meant. Please don’t trivialize the very real differences, and the difficulties they create.

        Also, unlike with body hair, medical transition in the form of hormones and anti-androgens generally does nothing whatsoever to reduce facial hair. Once you have it, it’s there. And it doesn’t magically become downy, either.

        1. Oh definitely Donna, wasn’t trying to trivialize the very real differences and difficulties! Was just attempting to clarify for the general audience here what I think a previous commenter meant.

    2. There is truth in this; absolutely. Hormones do affect how you grow and develop.

      But I feel like a lot of trappings are mistaken for actual cis truths; cis women don’t have better skin with more even coloration, fewer pores, and no dark circles, that’s from a lifetime of makeup and lotion. Cis women do not have longer eyelashes (on average, cis men do, actually). Cis men and cis women often have facial hair, and even chest and nipple hair.

      1. Prednisone gave me nipple hairs. Is this a common side effect? They disappeared after menopause, just as the chin whiskers arrived.

    3. few people realize how similar cis men and cis women look

      If that were really true in more than a general sense, it would be a great deal easier for a whole lot of trans women to be perceived as women.

      I think what the commenter was getting at is the fact that when you strip off all of the cultural additions — the make-up, the waxed eyebrows, the cutting the hair, the growing the hair, the facial hair removal, the body hair removal, the clothing, the dieting, the gym, the childhood of tons of physical activity vs. significantly less, the manners of speaking, the walk, the body language — there’s a whole lot of physical overlap, and many of the cues we use to distinguish men from women are not actually biological. Which is maybe part of your point — that to prove they’re women, trans women have to adopt many of the same cultural cues (make-up, hair removal, hair styling, gate, body language, etc etc) to indicate their femaleness, when it’s not actually any of those things that makes one a woman.

      1. sorry, I intended to make my reply to karak’s comment go after Jill’s, because it was supposed to apply to both.

        1. I should add that I don’t for a moment intend to trivialize the concerns cis women are expressing. It’s an intensely painful subject for me personally, and my personal abhorrence for being seen with visible facial hair (and thereby risk being misgendered by others, not to mention feeling horrible about myself) is such that I can’t be objective about the subject. (As opposed to, say, my nose, which, I’ve come to accept, simply = Jewish, not “male.” So I no longer hate it the way I once did, even though I’ve still sufficiently internalized Northern European standards of physical attractiveness that I’ll never be totally happy with it, despite the fact that I see nothing whatsoever wrong with “Jewish noses” on anybody else.)

          The biggest mistake I made in my transition was not having all of my facial hair removed before transition, and thinking that the laser treatments I’d had would be enough. Now it’s too late, because I’m old enough at this point that laser treatments wouldn’t work anymore on what remains in certain areas (which isn’t anything like it used to be, but would still be noticeable after a couple of days if I didn’t do something about it), and I’m not willing to let it grow enough for electrolysis. It’s not a big deal to take care of on a daily basis, and thank God my days of five o’clock shadow are long over, but every time I end up in the hospital I actually worry about it almost as much as whatever I’m in the hospital for. It’s torture. There’s a scene in one of Leslie Feinberg’s books in which the protagonist, someone on the trans-masculine spectrum, visits a trans woman friend in the hospital every day just to take care of her facial hair for her so she doesn’t have to hate herself. I wish I’d had a friend like that when I was in the hospital in Montreal three years ago.

        2. Yes, absolutely. My thinking was more directed at how beauty culture pushes women to such an intense level of modification that people often don’t know what unmodified humans look like. I had expressed this thought originally in relation to a thread on reddit, which advised women to not make dramatic appearance changes but totally wear makeup, shave, work out, use lotion, and go to the salon every 3 weeks to look “natural”. Wut.

          Something about hair, especially on my face, is so immensely angering because it’s so anti-gender-performing, and it’s not something I control or something most people seem to realize is natural. Not shaving my legs is a political statement, not plucking my beard hairs is me being being forced away from my gender identity.

          I’m always hesitant to generalize my cis experiences to trans women, but I feel that you probably have a lot of the same feelings, with a lot more complication attached about being misgendered and the dangerous inherent in that.

    4. Also, unlike with body hair, medical transition in the form of hormones and anti-androgens generally does nothing whatsoever to reduce facial hair. Once you have it, it’s there. And it doesn’t magically become downy, either.

      Interesting. I think that’s the same deal with PCOS and facial hair– like, even if the syndrome is corrected, once you start growing facial hair, it sticks around. But, from talking with my friend who got loads more facial hair with pregnancy, I think that her facial hair backed off afterward.

      And there’s for sure no comparison between the work that a trans woman needs to do for survival and the work that a hairy cis woman “needs” to do. Though I do think that the rigor expected from each is due to the general expectation that women have mostly hairless faces.

      1. the rigor expected from each is due to the general expectation that women have mostly hairless faces

        I agree.

      2. I’m at 7 months post partum and my increased facial hair is still around – not quite as bad as it was during pregnancy but still more than I had before. The extra hair on my head is long gone so I’m pretty sure the facial hair is here to stay.

        1. I am now 3 years post my second pregnancy and it does seem that the extra downy face hair is not going anywhere.

    5. Ah thanks for adding your perspective on this point DonnaL. I hear what you’re saying and I think my earlier comment about similiarities was trivializing. I’m sorry about that.

        1. But I do want to emphasize again that nothing I’ve said in any of these threads means in any way that I believe my concerns on these subjects are more important than those of any other woman commenting here. They aren’t, and I don’t.

  8. I don’t think I have a female friend who doesn’t do some chin plucking. And yes, it has become something of a compulsion. I tweeze while browsing the web and then make little sad patches where I got an outer layer of skin instead of a stubborn hair. Oh yes, I’m a blond, and the chin hairs are of varying darkness- mainly too light to be lasered, yet still visible 🙁
    Oh well, at least I’m pretty indifferent about my leg hair.

  9. Potential trigger warning for trans issues.

    Oh, man, the “no one talks about this” thing rings just about right.

    Leg hair? Enh. I wax every so often (I HATE the feeling of shaving), but mostly can’t be bothered. Underarms, same deal. Bikini? Oh, whatever. But when my facial hair grew in enough (and grew black, despite my blonde hair, thanks body…) that I could look convincingly Amish? Electolysis appointments ASAP, and damn the money.

    Leg hair/underarm hair/whatever else, for me, was just something my body DID, and, while I got flak for being both fat and hairy, I really never cared enough to shave regularly. Facial hair like that just gave me stomach-twisting moments of “I’m a woman, this is not-a-woman-body, this is not acceptable” that were completely not rational but also completely visceral.

    Which feels kinda sketchy, to me, because some women have beards, and some trans women have beards, and some cis women have beards, and I really don’t care about anyone else’s beard, but the idea of one on me makes my stomach tighten, and I don’t quite know how to unpack that baggage.

    1. I don’t quite know how to unpack that baggage.

      This is just me–but I’m a firm believer in not unpacking baggage unless you want to. I have a lot of baggage about my looks and I have a very detailed gender performance I engage in every day. And I used to be embarrassed about it and need to do it and hate myself for it, but now I’m like, “fuckit, to feel good about myself I need makeup, and I’m not going to make myself miserable over it any more.”

  10. I’m white cis straight femme-presenting person of Anglo/Irish background and I’m pretty bloody hairy – I’ve got a bit tired of the ongoing “but it would be so easy to wax” from Mum (we’ve agreed to disagree, and I know she fusses out of love) but it’s been interesting to have the comments come from a boyfriend.

    I’ve never had a lover comment on my hairiness before but he is (a) quite inexperienced with The Ladies and (b) almost totally hairless, naturally (as in, he has about two chest hairs and a bit of fuzz elsewhere). It’s incredibly frustrating to have to explain about rashes, ingrowing hair, the time and faffing about required for about two days of smoothness followed by a fortnight of stubble and uncomfortableness.

    If hair removal wasn’t such a pain, I’d probably put more effort into it. At the moment legs and pits get shaved, if it’s summer and/or if there’s someone around who might get to see me naked. Oh, and neck and nipple hairs get tweezered when I notice them.

  11. When I was in university one of the popular guys told to my friend (in secret) and she told to me (in secret) that I would be good looking girl if I do something with my brows and my choice of clothes.

    It irritates me that a a lot of woman I know say bad things about facial hair and laugh at Lily Collins in Mirror, Mirror for example. They always say something like “It’s just a common decency to get rid of…” or “Why do you want to be untended?” So it seems that if you don’t do it you are mentally sick.

  12. I just had a long conversation with my boyfriend about the social expectations that women be essentially hairless. To protect him, I won’t transcribe it here for you; I’ll just talk about me. I have been thinking about it a lot lately, just because I hate that its expected, and I hate that I am self conscious and conform to it. Some thoughts:

    -I remember in college, a girl admitted to struggling with dark hair on her nipples and we all (3 of us, I think) exhaled with a sigh of relief and hollered in different voices “ME TOO!”
    -I hate shaving my legs, and have always been lazy about it. It was also kind of fun to shock my classmates in high school P.E. 🙂
    -Like others here, I also hate the memories of someone referencing my mustache in high school.
    -I never would have thought to wax my big eyebrows if someone at a salon hadn’t sat me down and done it “to” me. And then the next day tons of girls commented, claiming that they noticed right away and I looked great/pretty and they’d been waiting for me to do it!
    -Thick dark line (“happy trail?”) from my belly button? ALSO would never have occurred to me until someone ELSE commented.
    -I am most self conscious about mustache and thick whisker-like neck hair. I stay on top of my arm pits for personal preference only and only do my legs when I have to. I also shave my arms, for fun.(I don’t know why it’s fun. I just like it.)
    -My 9yo daughter has already started asking about shaving legs, and it breaks my heart that she or anyone would care about the soft downy blond hair.

    p.s. I did not know that hormones did not eliminate facial hair; thanks for that info, DonnaL

    1. Hahahaha, nipple hair!

      For three years, I had a single long black pubic-looking hair growing out of one of my nipples. The hair on my head and arms is blonde, the hair on everything else is either practically transparent or dark, thick, bristly and curly. And the hair on my nipple? Looked exactly like a pube. I have been plucking it periodically for years now.

      Today I looked at my chest while putting on a bra and noticed I had lots of little black curly hairs on both of my nips. Oh well. I fought a good fight against the inevitable, I guess!

    2. Eve – I’ve got a few of the same as you.

      -I’ve shaved my monobrow since about age 12, then started plucking. I remember it used to make my eyes water but I’m so used to it now it doesn’t. When I was about 18, I was out shopping, taking myself on a date one day. I thought I’d ‘treat myself’ and have my brows waxed. The girl did not follow my instructions and did them way to thin for my liking. I went home and cried and wailed for hours! They grew back fine, but I was so horrified – the shape of your eyebrows is a big part of your face and I did not feel myself.

      -The hair that bothers me the most, and actually the thing about my body that bothers me the most, is my neck hair. They are thick and dark against my fair skin. I pluck just about everyday, whenever I have a minute and happen to be in the bathroom, before I brush my teeth, etc… I don’t actually know what they’d really be like if I stopped plucking, maybe I’ll test one day.

      -I pluck my eyebrows in front of my S.O./anyone else who might be in the house, but like a lot of you it seems, I’ve always done my neck/chest/breast plucking in private. I’m kinda happy to know it’s more common.

      I think it’s great to have these discussions and normalise the normal things our bodies do. Thanks everyone for sharing your stories.

  13. Shoshie, I have been loving these posts as well.

    Like you, I don’t shave my legs very often at all (occasionally I want to, mostly I can’t be bothered); I shave my pits in summer, and occasionally in winter. Even head hair I only have cut two or three times a year at most. But facial hair? I endured several years of twice weekly electrolysis appointments (though I am terrified of needles) and monthly IPL treatments (less painful; still not that pleasant). I stopped because it wasn’t getting substantially better, and it was costing me a fortune in money and emotional upset (seriously: terrified of needles). Then I was diagnosed with PCOS, which sort of ‘explained’ the hair. Sort of. The hair is very light now – all the darker ones got zapped away by the IPL – but I hate it. I shave those suckers as soon as they grow. But I don’t know why it upsets me so much when hairy legs are not an issue for me.

  14. My mom experienced the same thing – feeling intense shame about her facial hair when she was a teenager and young adult. She didn’t tell me about it until this year. She is now 59, I am 23, and I feel shame about my own facial hair.

    For what it’s worth, my face looks mostly like my mom’s, which looks mostly like her mom’s. My maternal grandmother was Italian, which is another mostly White group associated with hairiness.

    I pluck some of my facial hair with tweezers on a daily basis, but I regularly miss whole parts of it because I just don’t feel like continuing.

    I’m also trans, but I transitioned a while ago and it has been a long time since I’ve had testosterone-driven facial hair. My remaining hair is pretty much just like my mom’s. Still, I think my history makes me feel particularly sensitive about it.

  15. I think my history makes me feel particularly sensitive about it.

    I can relate to that!

    I do think that’s one of the physical advantages of transitioning at an earlier age, since uninterrupted testosterone really does tend to make one’s facial hair continue to get heavier (and more permanent) as one gets older, at least to a certain point.

    And I certainly agree that trans women wouldn’t need to be quite as obsessive about the subject, and quite as afraid of having any facial hair at all, if everyone didn’t equate “woman” with “no facial hair.”

    1. Yeah – I’m not an endocrinologist, but I always thought that facial hair did continue to respond to hormones throughout the lifespan, but that it had more inertia than most body hair, so that years of testosterone exposure could have consequences lasting for a long time. I had very thick facial hair when I started to transition, but I was young. After eleven laser treatments, it was mostly gone. Now, there is more hair than there was at the end of my laser treatments, but most of it is thin and wispy (more like my mom’s) rather than thick and stiff like it was before.

      Anyway, I think this concept is a pretty common thread in conversations about women’s body image issues – if you have a long history of anxiety about particular body characteristics, that anxiety typically doesn’t just vanish.

  16. It’s interesting that you associate hairlessness with whiteness. As an Asian American woman, I’ve always been pretty hairless and tend to think of white women as more hairy.

    1. Yeah, I’ve run into that as well, particularly for East Asian women, I think. I remember as a teen reading some non-fiction book with accounts of American soldiers who participated in the US occupation of Japan after WWII, and there was a lot of fetishizing of the Japanese women, particularly for their relative hairlessness. One guy made a point of comparing pubic hair in particular.

    2. That’s what I was thinking too!

      Also usually the hairiness of white men is taken as proof of their superiority over other men but how could white men be proud to be the hairiest if white women are supposed to be the least hairy?

    3. For serious! I have blondish head hair and thick, dark, fast-growing leg hair (except my outer thighs, oddly enough). Meanwhile, one of my best friends is mostly of Japanese descent, and she has thick, dark head hair and sparse, pale, slow-growing leg hair. We crack up over the weirdness pretty much any time we wear skirts around each other.

  17. Some years ago there was a post on Shapely Prose about body hair, and almost every woman who wrote in prefaced their statement with “I’m unusually hairy because I’m… French/Persian/Ainu/Greek/Italian/Jewish/Russian/Korean/Spanish/Italian/Black/Hindi/etc.” So basically you had all these different women claiming that THEY were UNIQUELY hairy, unlike every other woman ever, and it was because of their ethnic heritage. But if all ethnicities result in women with body hair, than maybe it’s just because we’re hairy mammals and not because some ethnicities are just coarse and gross and hairy. Which is what it comes down to, isn’t it? The pressure for women to be not like men, which is to say, that they be as hairless as children, that they be delicate and dainty and either Naturally Good (with no body hair) or else have lots of free time to depilate (affluent).

    I say this as a ciswoman who could grow a goatee and who shaves daily. I say this as a ciswoman who has taken the same prescription medication for facial hair loss that transwomen and postmenopausal ciswoman take (it did not work, apparently my chin hairs ARE MIGHTY.) I say this as a ciswoman with a transman friend who is SUPER PROUD of the one long hair he’s cultivated on his chin, and who I would swap facial hair with IN A HOT SECOND (he agrees). I’m not unusually hairy because of my ethnic background. I’m just hairy.

    I really dislike body hair on myself and I don’t know how much of that is deeply ingrained concepts of what is and isn’t acceptable on female bodies or if it’s just a personal preference (I also think I should be 3 inches taller and a red head). I’ve gone to some pretty great lengths to get rid of my facial hair (haven’t done electrolysis SOLELY because of the cost). So, you know, I totally get when women don’t want to be hairy/dislike their face hair. There’s a HUGE wad of shame associated with women having facial hair. But I think there’s also a big wad of internalized racism and classism associated with facial and body hair as well, with people being quick to dismiss THEIR hirsuteness as ABNORMAL because they just aren’t white enough.

    1. the same prescription medication for facial hair loss that transwomen and postmenopausal ciswoman take (it did not work, apparently my chin hairs ARE MIGHTY.)

      Is that Vaniqa (Eflornithine)? I tried that for a while, and it was expensive and didn’t really do anything at all for me. Too bad, because I got all excited when I heard about it.

      1. Also: you have to put it on twice a day, and it’s expensive, and even if it works it stops working if you stop using it. So, no miracles.

        1. Vaniqa totally doesn’t work. I’ll never forget the pharmacist who said to me as she filled the prescription, “I sell a lot of it, but I never do a refill.” Interesting that a prescription drug sold mainly to women is close to 100% worthless–not to mention expensive and often not covered by insurance because, you know, wimmenz be shallow.

          Right. My job would be in jeopardy if I didn’t “do something about it.”

  18. Great post. I’m a queer femme cis-woman, white with Scottish and German ancestry, and while my head hair is blonde, my mustache and nipple hairs are black. I’ve always been a fuck-the-patriarchy sort of person, and love love love my leg/pit/pubic hair. But I absolutely loathe my facial hair and freak out when I realize I’ve missed one in public. I don’t even understand this, since I find untended body hair on other women wildly attractive. I remember when I was 10 years old at a state fair noticing a vendor who had a significantly noticeable happy trail and mustache and feeling my first sexual feelings towards a real person (rather than Jessica Rabbit, my first love). Most of my girlfriends have ignored their own facial hair and didn’t mind mine at all; why should I then care so much? I guess it’s one of the last vestiges of internalized sexism for me?

    Oh, also, your 10-25% of women with facial hair estimate seems quite low, to me! I have commiserated with every single one of my woman friends about facial hair! In fact, when I first started getting mine, I was concerned because I didn’t think anyone else had this problem… and then my friends told me that they just never talked about it before because they were ashamed too.

  20. I’m in my 50s now and have done a complete turnaround regarding those “strong” features, inherited from my Jewish father. I was really ashamed of my thick eyebrows and over-tweezed them. Now I have to draw them in with a pencil every morning or I look ghostly and invisible (just like my Irish-English mom did past age 40). The chin, however, more than makes up for the eyebrow loss, oy vey — I have to pluck those tickly little hairs at least twice a week. They are relentless. The brows and the female pattern baldness you allude to in your next post — looks like mom’s genes won that particular contest. 🙁

  21. I first noticed an errant hair on my neck when I was ~19. Then there were a few – maybe four or so – chin hairs to crop up in the next couple of years. Now I’m 25 and there are many more on my chin and cheeks, mostly on my chin. I’m sure it will just keep going and going, unsure what I want to do about it. I pluck when I can be bothered, and I other times I shave my face. My feelings about it are complicated. Reading everyone’s comments and this post has made me feel better, though. I know it’s not at all uncommon but I’m still really embarrassed to talk about it with anyone.

  22. Female assigned at birth here, and likewise hairy. At about fourteen, my mum made the decision for me that I was going to get my eyebrows waxed, to “frame my face” better, and started sending me to get them waxed. Flash forward to twelve years later, when I’m trying to regrow my eyebrows out of curiosity to see what my natural face would look like, and they’ll barely muster up more than a patchy layer of hair (I have dark brown, fine hair, and lots of it – My head hair grows into a wavy ball which I flatten by shaving in an undercut) so it’s really noticeable which parts of my eyebrows have never been plucked, and which have – From a distance, it looks like I have one set of black eyebrows, and a grey set right underneath them.

    It’s a real shame that at an age when I was too young to really speak up much about it, I was shamed into altering my body permanently in a way that I don’t like. I bet that other people have similar stories, though.

  23. I once came to the same realization as Shoshie when it came to body hair: I was having my legs and arms waxed at a local beauty school (because I’m cheap) and wound up being served by a young woman who treated me with kindness and respect. The thought that immediately popped up in my brain was “She’s so nice – treating me like a white person.”

    This thought was startling to me on a number of fronts, but most of all because I’d never realized I didn’t identify as white: I usually check the “white” box as I’m of southern European descent, although on one side via Latin America. Shocking how these things can happen inside your own head.

  24. Some years ago there was a post on Shapely Prose about body hair, and almost every woman who wrote in prefaced their statement with “I’m unusually hairy because I’m… French/Persian/Ainu/Greek/Italian/Jewish/Russian/Korean/Spanish/Italian/Black/Hindi/etc.” So basically you had all these different women claiming that THEY were UNIQUELY hairy, unlike every other woman ever, and it was because of their ethnic heritage. But if all ethnicities result in women with body hair, than maybe it’s just because we’re hairy mammals and not because some ethnicities are just coarse and gross and hairy. Which is what it comes down to, isn’t it?

    Excellent point. I too have a tendency to blame characteristics which I feel I have no control over on my ethnicity. I read one article saying that Jewish men are more prone to irritable bowel syndrome, and I’ve since blamed my heritage for my toilet troubles. I mean, I can see that some ethnic groups are less hirsute than others and have fewer men with beards and both sexes are less hairy, so these beliefs aren’t completely unfounded, but if it wasn’t something that ran across many ethnic groups, I wouldn’t pass a sign for lip waxing on every block.

    1. This is a really interesting point, though I do think that medical professionals need to be aware of race and ethnicity. Like, I was diagnosed with PCOS for ages because I was “hirsute”. Except I’m not really, if you compare me to other Ashkenazi Jewish women.

    2. I read one article saying that Jewish men are more prone to irritable bowel syndrome

      I have no idea if that’s true, but it’s definitely true that Ashkenazi Jews (both men and women) have materially higher rates of inflammatory bowel disease — Crohn’s Disease and ulcerative colitis — than the rest of the population.

  25. OK so maybe my particular blondness makes me luckier in the hair department, and it isn’t my problem, but somehow, it pisses me off that women have to do (or feel like they have to do) this battle with hair, especially facial hair. My friend Crystal has that Hispanic moustache and I think she looks great. Is all this hair removal stuff tied to men wanting women to look prepubescent? Because it’s just creepy if it is.

  26. I have heavy eyebrows and have never ever for a hot second considered “dealing” with them, in part because I like them, but in part because I really don’t like pain. But I have received a ton of pressure to pluck or wax or trim; my parents called me in for a talk when I was twelve to say they were getting a bit wild and I should consider trimming them (I told them that, paraphrased, that was some sexist bullshit right there and they would never be saying that to me if I were a boy and I was going back to reading my book now); random friends and family have suggested waxing (mostly my sister). Once my sister was bored and asked if she could try plucking my eyebrows (I’d already let her straighten my hair for the first and last time in my life–I hated it, I didn’t know who I was when she was done) and it hurt like hell. My mother told me I was wrong, it didn’t hurt, and how did I think I could have a baby if I thought this hurt (I am not even kidding) (my mother is generally awesome, I don’t know where this comes from).

    I also have the dark hairs around my nipples and leading down from my belly button, but I made my peace with them when I was a teenager based on my strong aversion to pain. And now I figure that anybody who gets to see them should just consider him/herself lucky; any objections will result in cutting off of his/her privileges, not the hair.

  27. [Warning: This does get a bit “notes from my boner”, admittedly – I don’t want to erase the experiences of women with prominent facial hair at all, I just thought it would be interesting to contribute another perspective on it from a queer woman who is attracted to women with facial hair.]

    I really like the lady-stache, personally. I don’t have one of my own, but it’s something I find really attractive on other women for some reason, though I know there’s a stigma about it. And for once it’s not because it’s a gender-queering type thing (though I’d like that too) – I’m just a fan of those kinds of details on women’s faces (Frida Kahlo: uber-hot). I find it enhances faces the way make-up does. I don’t find less hairy women unattractive though, but I’ve always found photoshopped magazine pictures bizarre in the way that the faces have been smoothed down until they’re like plastic, and I do find that repulsive and weird given that it’s actually supposed to make these women look hyper-attractive. Men in these types of photos seem to fare better, with more wrinkles left in and stubble to help them look human and not escapees from the Uncanny Valley.

    My love for facial hair on women wasn’t always, though. A girl I fell for in high school had that kind of hair and the first time I met her (before I actually realized I was queer and was still all kinds of teenage messed-up) I was secretly happy to notice all the little black hairs around her lips, her belly button, on her toe knuckles, because I thought they marked her as “inattractive” and otherwise she was so drop-dead gorgeous I felt threatened by her. Later I just accepted that the hair was part of what made her so damn fine.

    1. Well, this makes me really happy 🙂 Gives me hope that I’ll find a queer lady who accepts my hair!

      I also agree about Frida. Total babe.

  28. As a teenager I was so ashamed of my body hair that I once spent several hours shaving my entire body. I told my boyfriend about this last week and he just stared at my soft, downy, nearly invisible arm hair in disbelief.

    Interestingly, I also attribute my body hair to my ethnic heritage (Native American).

  29. After having my first child, I got put on a heavy dose of prednisone to control a fairly severe colitis flare-up. I was on it for a number of months. I put on 30 pounds. I got a puffy moon-face. I even lost a quarter inch of height due to bone loss.

    But what made me finally run to my doctor and beg to be taken off the prednizone and put on something else, no matter the financial cost? The day I saw the small black hairs that had sprung up on my upper lip. THAT’s when I said ‘No effin’ way.’

  30. I have two rogue chin hairs that grow much longer than the usual tiny facial hairs. I shave them off with a normal razor every now and then when I feel they are getting too noticeable. I used to think I was weird until I realized that most cis women have chin hairs, or the mustache hairs, or the random scatter of “happy trail” hairs, be they light or dark. We are trained to think they are gross and to NEVER EVER talk about them, so we all think we are strange when really it’s super duper common.

  31. Pingback: Parenting and Hair « this is the worst thing

  32. I’m a mixed Jew (half Ashkenazi/half Mizrahi) and given that I’m from the UK, I don’t really want to weigh in over the whole “Jews are White thing” as it just doesn’t transfer over here. But clearly Jewish people in the UK context are very different from the ‘norm’ as the UK is still c.90% Anglo-Saxon-Celt and, on average, Jewish women are just much much hairier than the average White woman.

    Suffice to say my hairy jodhpurs (happy trail up to my rib cage, extended pubic hair on my inner and back of thighs) have been a huge confidence-sapper and problem, as has my extremely strong thick lower leg hair. Like my father I have a tough beard but soft skin, as he says, which has meant twenty-five years of hair removal, pain, rashes repeat ad infinitum. It has stopped me having sex with people I wanted to, because of roughness and stubble, it’s also cost me 000s of pounds. Luckily, I have not had to deal with significant facial hair apart from a few chin monsters.

    But re: the concept of ethnicity/Othering, in the UK at least, there is a real issue with the whole concept of body hair being ‘foreign’, strange and masculine. Most recently, there was a sitcom set in a Jewish family called Grandma’s House and one of the women characters had a notable moustache who was loud, rude and frequently mocked (the creator Simon Amstell has obviously internalised some lovely anti-Semitic tropes). The only other character I can remember in my lifetime with similar, was Mrs Doyle in Father Ted, another figure of ridicule. Simply put, only strange, Other, women have noticeable facial/body hair – regular White women presumably aren’t supposed to have any at all.

    The thing that I have specifically noticed about how this plays out in hair removal/beauty regimes is that certain types of hair removal, vastly more common to ethnic minorities, are quite literally erased and beyond the pale in the UK. Basically, waxing places have price lists for different types of waxing – bikini line, lower leg, upper leg, underarm – except the kind of waxing I need was never on the list. Literally not there. I thought I was an absolute freak for needing my stomach waxed and my toes, knuckles etc. Only in my local area now – where there are a majority of minority women – Jewish, Greek, Persian, Italian etc – are such things even vaguely alluded to. There is just not that recognition that other people are made the way you are naturally, that you are not odd and strange and something to be hidden away. In the UK, at least, with the prevailing beauty and wider culture, we are not even a bit of the way there on that front.

  33. Ugh, this thread! i stood up and shouted AMEN at the top of my lungs as I read the comments. My hat is off to all of you beautiful people with facial hair, body hair, etc.

    TW: Bullying

    I’ll have you know I was teased mercilessly for having facial hair, leg hair, etc. My parents are white from the Caribbean (Latino) and by American standards I think i’m pretty hairy. God I can still remember being in tears every day after school because someone told me that I looked “like a man.” I still remember how much I despised my body hair and how I wailed to my mother to let me get rid of it at the ripe old age of 9.

    Now that I’ve grown up, I realize that the fear of looking “manly” is rooted in some really hetero and gender normative ish, but as another poster said (and I find this word so apt) it is a VISCERAL reaction. When I see a woman with less visible facial hair then I do, I’m immediately envious. It’s a programmed response. When I see a woman with hair between her eyebrows or upper lip, I immediately go into some misogynistic She-should-take-care-of-that inner commentary. I’ve been learning to shut that off in favor of body positivity… but it’s so hard! Body size, color, hair texture – all of these things are easy for me to appreciate as beautiful. But I think because I was so traumatized by this particular experience of being made fun of for my hairiness, in a town that was racially diverse and so race wasn’t a key factor in my victimization.

    What is it about this issue that makes us so sensitive?

  34. I’m kind of exhausted from a long day at work now, and I’ll probably have a lot more to say a little later, but something that someone said reminded me of a bit from Bridget Jones’s Diary, where she says something like, “Being a woman is like being a farmer. You constantly have to pluck and pull and trim and thin,” about dealing with facial hair.

  35. THANK YOU for writing this. So so much. My facial hair made me absolutely miserable when I was younger, and I was convinced that I was The Only One with this problem. (I also endured 10+ laser hair removal sessions, and the technician could not understand why it wasn’t working on my epic goat-like lady beard. I finally gave up and now just shave daily.) It’s so awesome to hear other peoples stories and perspectives, and I feel like perhaps I can finally not feel Completely Ashamed about my stupid, natural, normal hair.

  36. TW bullying.

    I’m white, blue-white with very fair hair. I’ve been on and off prednisolone for years, I’ve got PCOS as well.

    My mother and grandmother had visible facial hair. I got thick black brows, thick black bushy pit hair, leg hair, pubes and tummy hair at age nine.

    Seven years of torture followed. I didn’t know I was supposed to be ashamed of it, so I wasn’t. As a result I was dehumanised by teachers and students, beaten, the works. Details are too painful. Years of cut and damaged skin followed, due to frantic removal attempts with cheap blunt razors.

    I can grow a beard. Not patchy hair, a thick, full ginger beard. I look like my brother’s twin from the shoulders up.

    Whenever I’m hospitalised my gf has to sneakily shave my face twice a day. From 14-25 I went everywhere with a razor, and on sleepovers I’d sneak to the toilet in the night and shave face to save face. Any event or date that involved being away from the house for more than five hours required a touch up. Off to the pub toilet to hide my “shameful” secret. To obliterate the stiff, harsh, dark hair. Exhausting, emotionally devastating. Even “freaks” have feelings.

    I stopped telling anyone about my PCOS after it became well known, after a “friend”started examining my face over meals, asking where my hair was.

    I had to say I waxed. Shaving was too manly, shameful, wrong.

    Fuck oppressive standards. Fuck the pain and shame. Fuck what’s done to all my sisters, cis and trans, to push an unrealistic ideal on us that maybe 5% of women can fulfill naturally.

    I do love this thesocietypages.org/socimages/2012/08/06/half-drag-portraits-and-the-performance-of-gender/ though –

    1. mangled my link through tears. How embarrassing!

      thesocietypages.org/socimages/2012/08/06/half-drag-portraits-and-the-performance-of-gender/

      Thanks for the great run Shoshie.

    2. Whenever I’m hospitalised my gf has to sneakily shave my face twice a day.

      As much as I’m sorry about everything that makes that necessary, I think it’s really great that she does that for you. As I mentioned, being in the hospital and unable to take care of myself in that way is almost as upsetting to me as what I’m in the hospital for. So much so that the last time I was hospitalized, I spent a lot of time trying to balance a mirror on my chest and use a pair of tweezers on my face, which isn’t easy when you have IV’s in both arms and an NG tube covering part of your face and the lighting is terrible. I kept setting off the IV alarms by bending my arms at the elbow, which apparently knocked things off kilter, so much so that the nurses yelled at me and eventually threatened to confiscate the mirror and tweezers if I didn’t stop. Fond memories!

      1. She’s amazing. A life partner in every sense of the term

        She’ll draw the curtains and make busy-talk about washing my “stinky pits” and removing my nightie that “[I’ve] managed to destroy in a mere 18 hours”. Laughing so hard during my spruce up that we both have chunks cut out!

        I’m so sorry you had to deal with it on your own. You need a Sister Signal you can flash in the sky. Big hugs.

  37. It’s wonderful reading this thread and understanding how common this is. I was very lightly bullied in middle school because of the hair on my arms. At the time, I was unwilling to do anything about it because I didn’t want to give the mean kids the satisfaction of knowing that they had hurt my feelings. But it stuck with me, and I have waxed and shaved and Naired and lasered my facial, leg and arm hair ever since I reached high school and was no longer at the same school with the people who delighted in pointing out my hairyness.

    I have developed a bit of a sense of humor about it, but I’m still embarrassed by it and feel less like a woman because of it. My husband and I joked that when we had our first child, he’d be short, hairy, and nearsighted, as that accurately describes both of us. Even though we joked about it, I was actually a little relieved that my child was a boy, because I worried that I was passing on a hirsute curse to another girl–and I felt this way even knowing that we want to have another child and I would love to have a daughter.

    My son was born with fine hair all over his body, which has since mostly disappeared. I don’t remember this, but my doula included in our birth story the fact that just minutes post-birth, I cradled my little boy and crooned to him “You’re going to be running nearsighted into the furniture while Mama runs after you with a razor, aren’t you?”

    The point is, until reading this discussion, I really did think that I was unique and that facial hair was not particularly a feminist issue because most women didn’t have to worry about it. Thanks for sparking this discussion, and maybe I can learn to have a real sense of humor about my facial and body hair and not just a self-deprecating, make fun of myself before you do you version of it.

    1. “You’re going to be running nearsighted into the furniture while Mama runs after you with a razor, aren’t you?”

      ADOPT ME!

      Seriously though, that is adorable. Your son has a the best kind of mama, one who’ll understand.

  38. Hooowdy Folks,

    I have an amazing amount of hair, copper colored, looks like little strands of copper wire coming off my arms and chest. its really more like fur then hair!!!. big beard etc. Of course being a guy it is no big deal.. hey its midnight somehow I ended up on this site ( from the restupicans idiot comments about rape me thinks) and being a hard ass electrician, I kinda got some issue with men haten women.. but you know after reading all this stuff about hair and what women go thru,, I will never have anything but patience and compassion with any/all women for the rest of my life!!! I don’t quite understand about the thingy about not wanting to care about what one looks like ( like me for example total caveman don’t ever even think about what I look like) and then all this talk about hair on my face etc??? The mystery of women shall continue for me!

    1. “The mystery of women shall continue for me!”

      Oooh dear. I know you mean well but if you think that women are a mystery then you should really be seeking a feminist 101 kind of blog

  40. I’m way late on this one, but just wanted to highlight something that D For Dalrymple has been up to: she conducted a massive study of people’s attitudes to body hair and its removal, and has been analysing the data in a series of blog posts. It’s FASCINATING.

    Something I noticed reading through the comments is that almost everyone says they’re hairier than average. Can we all be hairier than average? Are we commenting because we are hairier than average? Or do we just have no idea how hairy other women are? Discuss!

  41. Found this page via a PostSecret link in a thread about hair-shaming. Random thoughts from me on hair:

    I’ve always been hairy, though I don’t know enough about my “heritage” to know if that plays a role in it. I have leg hair thicker than all but one of the men I’ve ever dated, pubic hair ditto – and it has begun to spread in what my GYN called a “male-pattern distribution,” meaning I can take off my pants and look almost like I’m wearing a dark, fuzzy loincloth. I fully expect that in another 5 years, it will wrap all the way around (right now I have about a handspan on the sides of my hips that’s still relatively hair-free).

    I’ve been lucky with the facial hair, overall – I have about 8-12 thick, fast-growing hairs that I have to keep track of. My GYN doesn’t believe me, but I know where these hairs grow (have freckles/scars to orient them), and I check the mirror every day, without fail, before I leave the house: Even so, I sometimes come home to find a half-inch long black hair standing proudly at attention in the middle of my face.

    My first boyfriend’s mother had a lot of soft, faint “down”-like hair on her face, and I thought it was the most beautiful thing ever. I still do; I get happy when I see the same “fuzz” on my own cheeks, so my daily policing for those stray black hairs is not as upsetting as it is for some others – I enjoy seeing the rest of the hair; it’s only the thick, pube-looking ones that I bother with.

    My eyebrows, on the other hand, are ridiculous. If I left them to grow their natural path, they’d take up my facial acreage than my eye sockets; I have eyebrow hair up to about 1″ from my browline, and all the way down to the fold of my eyelid. Not to mention out to the sides, reaching my hairline and trending down, as if they’re trying to convert to sideburns. In the thickest part of my eyebrows, the individual hairs grow past an inch in length unless I pay careful attention to cutting or plucking them (and pay even MORE careful attention that I don’t *over*pluck and get a bald spot). I have heard stories (as at least one person above mentioned) of people who tweezed, waxed, or in one case shaved their eyebrows and, to their dismay, the hair never grew back – I have been hoping for that to happen to me for the last ~35 years!

    Strangely, the longest hairs I get are ones that grow in random places (halfway down my side, underside of my arm just above my elbow, etc), and are so thin, fine, and pale that I don’t even notice them unless they get caught or stuck in something.

    My mother made the same “that doesn’t hurt! You’ll never survive having a baby” remark as someone else’s mother up-thread; she still tells me what does and doesn’t hurt me (?!?). She’s also very sex-negative; when I was 9-10 and begging to shave my legs, she told me that only prostitutes shaved above their mid-thigh. I somehow learned to be fairly open about the weird things human bodies do. When I mentioned (half-hoping to shock her, I admit) tweezing my (thick, dark, numerous) nipple hairs at age ~25, she scoffed and said that anything between the neck and mid-thigh should be left alone, as having hair in those areas discourages men from pursuing sex.

    The ways we find to screw up our minds, and our kids’ minds… sad.

    My son (now 18) and I laughed uproariously when he came into the kitchen one day holding his arm awkwardly about 4 inches from his chest – turns out he was gripping a nipple hair that he had just noticed growing. He said it reminded him of Jack’s beanstalk. We also shared a laugh over a comedian’s routine in which he describes the turmoil of adolescence: [comedian] “I’m angry and moody and I have hair growing on my butt.” [comedian’s mom] “Oh! Me too!”

    I wish I’d had more of that when I was growing up, and less of the sex-and-body-shaming conflicting messages. I try to be as open as I can, as often as I can, about things like this, in the hopes that one day – far in the future, if enough of us are honest and frank – the shame and “secrecy” of it will dissipate. I keep hoping we’re, as a society, as a world, getting better, or at least that we have a chance.

    1. Late again, but not only did I LOVE this comment, I loved all of these comments. I’ve often wondered why I have ONE hair that grows to, like, head-length (i’m fucking serious) if unnoticed long enough, on my ear. EAR.

      And then one long hair that grows from my neck. Love that other people have these long friends, too. (sorry!)

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