If you've never given much thought to your arm hair, it may be hard to imagine what it's like to be unhappy with your own day in and day out, but that's precisely the self-consciousness experienced by countless women moving from childhood into adolescence. One such person is Nicole, who recalls, "My arm hair was pointed out to me ever since I can remember." A hairless body was the ideal she saw in the media, and years of taunting by peers reminded her that she didn't meet it. "'Hairy' was my nickname," she tells Allure. "There’s nothing clever about that, but it continued to echo into my adulthood. When I’m wearing a strapless dress or when I have a tank top on, all I can see is my arm hair and I’m reminded of how ugly I felt."
The average human body boasts some 5 million hair follicles, and generations of beauty standards across many cultures have dictated that on femme-presenting bodies, some of this hair is acceptable and some of it is not. Body hair has been censured and policed, giving rise to hair-removal rituals requiring immense time and resources: shaving, waxing, laser hair removal, electrolysis, and more.
As the body-positivity movement has gathered momentum in recent years, though, body hair, especially on legs and armpits, has begun to enter the mainstream, with celebrities and Instagram influencers applauded for flaunting theirs. Arm hair has been discussed far less, but that's not to say it doesn't inspire strong feelings in those who have it, which is to say all of us. And growing acceptance of body hair doesn't mean everyone is embracing theirs. Nicole, for one, chooses to shave her arms. "It just makes me feel good," she explains. "And I think it would be more disempowering for me not to shave them just because there's some movement that I feel forced to be a part of."
Allure asked her and six others to show off their arm hair in intimate photos, as well as share their thoughts on it and their body image more broadly. From a woman facing family pressure to remove her arm hair to a nonbinary individual navigating the role their hair plays in their gender expression, they prove that our relationship with our hair is as personal as it is cultural.
I'm pretty hairy in general on my body. I swear I shave and then there's hair back in two days. I did try to shave my arms once; I was probably 13. When you're a certain age, you start your period, and then after that, it's like shaving is the next big thing. [When you're young,] you're excited about it. Of course, in adulthood, you're like, "Fuck, I have to shave again."
But when you're that age, you're very excited about having your cycle and shaving your arms and shaving your legs. It feels like you're a woman or you're turning into an adult. I think I shaved my arms when I was 13 and maybe 14, but I just eventually left them alone. When I became 15, 16, it was like, "This is dumb."
I felt like, from society as a whole, it was always taught that you shouldn't have hair on your legs, or under your arms. I definitely am super on top of armpit and leg hair, personally. I think it's just ingrained now. If my legs are out and they're hairy, it's not my jam.
Removing hair is part of culture — American culture and also South Asian culture. My mom owns a beauty salon, so she was really interested in me constantly removing my body hair [once] I hit my early teens. She was interested in a very specific idea of femininity that I obviously bought into, because it's all I was aware of.
I didn't like the [waxing] process, because it was really painful. I was rebellious about removing the hair, and I wanted to keep it because it's exhausting to constantly remove it…. I spent a whole year and a half not touching my body hair at all — from the beginning of 2016 to the beginning of 2017. It was also a time when I was trying to understand what queerness meant to me, and what different identities meant to me, and how I saw myself in different identities.
But I was also really depressed by not removing my hair. I didn't feel empowered at all. I would definitely get stared at. It's not something that's conventionally accepted or also considered conventionally attractive, so I definitely felt like shit a lot, and I was like, Fuck it. I'm just going to remove it. I think especially when I'm around my family [and haven't removed my body hair], they are super critical, [saying,] "Oh, you're hairy, and you're dirty." They associate hairiness with dirtiness. They also associate it with masculinity.
Self-empowerment is really hard to do alone, and I don't think it's meant to happen alone. That doesn't make sense. You can't empower yourself alone, [you need] a community. It's a constant back-and-forth between you and other people.
As much as you can love yourself or feel good about yourself, if there's someone out there constantly trying to bring you down every single day, that's going to affect you.
The first time I realized that I had [body] hair, I was probably seven or eight. I was just like, What is this? Why am I so hairy? My dad was pretty hairy, so I remember telling him and my cousin that I lived with back in the Dominican Republic that I wanted to shave. [My cousin] is super religious, and she told me no, but then my mom said I could. I started with my legs, and then I realized pretty quickly that it's a lot of work, and I kind of gave up on it. Then I stopped shaving all the way into middle school, maybe high school. [In high school I was shaving] my arms, and I did shave my knuckles... I stopped probably at the end of high school.
Especially when you come from Latin culture, it's all about being pretty and shaving and then straightening your hair and waxing your eyebrows. I think I was influenced by the people around me, people's opinions more than anything. But [now] I totally stopped shaving everywhere. I used to wax my eyebrows, and I stopped so now I'm completely comfortable with all my hair. I do shave my legs.
I think we just need to stop judging each other and telling each other what's right and what's beautiful and the way we should live, the way we should look, because everyone's different.
I think I knew very young that my arm hair was a lot more than most people's. The first time I was ever rejected for a date was when I was in sixth grade, fifth grade maybe. I asked [a classmate] to the dance, and he said no because, according to him, my arms were too hairy. I was devastated — I had already been very self-conscious, and I didn't really like my body. I just remember thinking, Oh, OK, this means that I'm never going to be seen as pretty. And that's when I probably started shaving my arms. I did that until 2014, so for 15 years.
I remember I stopped wanting to shave my legs because I got tired of it, so I just stopped shaving my legs, and then I also stopped shaving my arms because I just decided it was too much. And then I would start periodically. I was doing it very seldom. The older I got, the less I cared. And then I think partially coming out as genderqueer helped, because I feel like it validated some of the ways that society views gender constructs: They think of masculinity as being associated with hair, and they think of femininity as being associated with being hairless.
I don't think that [hair and femininity] necessarily need to be associated. But because no one has ever thought of me as remotely "androgynous" — because of the way I'm shaped, and the way that my face is shaped — it was just like, Well, I'm very hairy, so at the very least I have that.
I went through a lot of teasing. It's just so weird to even talk about it now. Growing up, through middle school, I thought, Oh, that's why boys don't date me — because I have hairy arms. I told myself, That's fine, because I'm not really interested in boys anyway, so I'm just going to be the tomboy and the friend. And that's who I was through middle school and high school.
I'm really hairy all over. I grew up in the '90s and the 2000s, when it was [all about] Kate Moss and pencil-thin eyebrows. There weren't too many Latinas out there. You had Salma Hayek, and I'm sure she's hairy, but who would know?
I'm 75 percent Mexican, one-eighth German, and one-eighth Italian… I was begging my mom to let me shave my legs all the way through middle school. I finally got to do it in seventh grade. [But] the arm hair was something I forced myself to keep and work on my relationship with it...[but] every time I would go into a room, people would look at [my arms]. I saw them looking, for sure.
It wasn't until actually after college where I felt like I could shave my arms. I felt like if I had done it earlier everyone would think, Oh, you shave your arms now? I grew up with the same group of people and even went through college with them. At 22, I thought, Oh, I'm an adult — I can re-create myself.
I've been shaving my arms ever since. It just makes me feel good. I have no problem growing my leg hair out, my armpit hair, but with my arm hair, I feel better about myself and I feel more confident when I'm going into meetings and things like that, that people aren't looking at it.
I've had this arm hair all my life. I guess some of my friends have waxed their hair and shaved it, but I just didn't. I thought about removing it, I think in grade school or high school, but as I'm growing up, I'm finding that it's quite beautiful and that it makes you unique. Whether it's a scar or acne, there are these things that we were conditioned to get rid of. I think that there's been a big movement the past couple of years to start encouraging people to think about their so-called "flaws" differently.
People can think arm hair is "manly" or putting you outside the category of how a woman should look, but I think that I'm going to embrace it. I'm 75 percent Italian, and Polish, Irish, Austrian. I have so much hair and it came out blonde. I shave my legs, but then the hair will grow back immediately when I step out of the shower.
I am the hairiest person. I grow hair on my nipples. I grow hair under my chin, under my eyes, or my cheekbones, everywhere. It's just become more and more. Just a lot. On my chest. Everywhere. I'm getting laser done on my nipples... For this shoot, I did shave my armpits, but I usually don't. I think it just has to do with pure laziness, but I'm also embracing it because it's like, Why do I have to shave my armpits? If guys don't, why should I?
I don't think that hair removal — body hair — has been something that I've devoted a lot of thought to over the years. I grew up without any specific positive or negative thoughts towards it. The one distinct memory I have of hair removal from childhood is my mom plucking her armpit hair because it wasn't thick enough that she needed to shave it. It was more of a routine touch up with tweezers. It's similar for me: My underarm hair is not super thick, so it's easier to get a clean look with tweezers. My forearm hair is even thinner, so I've always just let it be.
The fact that standards of hair removal have been associated with a certain gender is annoying to me. More power to you for doing you, whether you feel like cleanly shaving your legs, leaving them stubbly, or not removing your body hair at all.
While attending a private religious school for most of my teenage years, I was repeatedly reminded that I had to cover up — that the girls shouldn't dare distract anyone with our bodies.
Whether I liked it or not, that did, in a way, influence the way that I saw women's bodies as inherently bad. If I could go back, I would love to tell my teenage self: Just don't listen to that crap. Don't be influenced by the adults who are telling you that you have to look a certain way.
Fashion stylist: Calvy Click. Makeup: Deanna Melluso for Caudalie. Hair: Junya Nakashima for R+Co. Manicure: Yukie Miyakawa. Prop stylist: Gozde Eker.
Read more stories about our relationships with our bodies:
- We Asked Women to Bare Their Cellulite, and the Results Are Breathtaking
- 6 Women Show Off Their Stretch Marks
- 5 Women Pose for Striking Portraits of Their Pubic Hair
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