I distinctly remember my mother leaning across a coffee table and swiping at my chin. She brandished a long, grey hair and gave me an “Aha!” You’d have to get her particular humour to understand that she wasn’t teasing me — I was about 32 and postpartum with my second child — she was teaching me, in her own way, to not be so precious about the fleeting nature of youth. She was teaching me to normalize change. See? Ya just rip it out and move on with your day.
That chin hair didn’t return, but two decades later it instead sent dozens in its stead. Perimenopause is such a fun time, really, isn’t it? Chin hair is just one of the many challenges to body and mind. Our letter this week is from Alice, who asks, “Is there a magical way to make chin hairs disappear? I’m 52 and they are driving me truly crazy, popping up seemingly overnight after I’ve just plucked them from the day before!”
I agree wholeheartedly, Alice, chin hairs are damn annoying. As a culture, we may be working towards acceptance of some body hair for women. Armpit hair, for instance, gets a new movie star advocate every year or so, from Sophia Loren in the ’50s to Madonna in the ’80s to Julia Roberts in the ’90s. Post-pandemic estimates show that one in four young women has forsaken her razor. The body positivity movement, and a growing understanding and embrace of gender fluidity, has made advocacy for body hair acceptance a popular movement.
But hair on women’s faces is a whole other frontier. The only image of chin hair for women in popular culture is green-skinned and warty wicked witches in movies and storybooks.
There is a fascinating book I went down the rabbit hole reading for the research for this response: gender studies professor Rebecca M. Herzig’s Plucked: A History of Hair Removal tells the complicated story of how women started to epilate en masse. Her research points to the publication of Darwin’s Descent of a Man in the 1870s as the turning point. See, Darwin’s theories associated hairiness with primitivity; hairlessness with “more evolved” beings. The medical and scientific patriarchy then piled on the idea that hairiness was thereafter to be associated with insanity and deviancy. Really, argues Herzig, it was a way to control and police women’s bodies. Thus, the hair removal industry was born and has been thriving, especially in North America, ever since.
All that origin of the stigma aside, I may be less obsessive these days about body waxing schedules, but I will always stay on top of any random chin hairs. The thing is, they grow so swiftly, like overnight, so it is a perennial concern.
