Hairless from Birth: My Struggle with Beauty Standards in South Asia

My own experiences with body hair have been of contempt; more from others than myself. My mother recalls advice the elder women in our family gave her upon my birth - “Remove her facial hair.” According to the myth, passed on by several generations across Pakistan, if you ‘wax’ the hair off of a newborn girl child, she remains virtually hairless for the rest of her life. 

My mother did as she was told. She kneaded together flour and water, made a small ball of dough, and dutifully removed my facial hair. When she recounted the story to me as an adult, she told me to thank her, because now I got to enjoy minimal facial hair thanks to her foresight. While she claims to know better than believe this mythology, there are many who still cling to the old wives tale. A distaste for facial hair is a pervasive beauty standard in my community. 

My relationship with body hair has always been complicated at best. As a South Asian woman, this doesn’t come as a complete surprise, the entire continent is obsessed with hairless skin. From prominent female celebrities endorsing ‘hair removal creams’ to homemade remedies peddled by grandmothers for swift hair removal, the pressure to be hairless is inundating. 

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Rebecca Herzig’s book ‘Plucked: A History of Hair Removal’ explores where the obsession with hair removal stems from, crediting Darwin’s 1871 book ‘Descent of Man,’ as the first time the topic of body hair was even brought to the broader public’s attention. Before this, little consideration was given to the natural fuzz that forms on our skin. 

She also clarifies in her book that this is where body hair being used as a tool to racially discriminate between people originates. According to Herzig, coarser and thicker hair on women was considered an undesirable trait as it was linked to those who were inferior; either racially or socially. Much like the obsession with paler skin in the subcontinent, a bitter remnant from our colonised past, hairlessness is something that seems to have been taught to us as well. 

But even before colonisation, hair on a person’s body was not something society accepted. The spread of Islam in the subcontinent from the 7th century might have something to do with the popularity of this practice as well, especially in modern day Pakistan where the majority population is Muslim. An important Muslim practice is to remove your armpit and pubic hair. Even today adolescent boys and girls in Muslim communities are given ‘the talk’ about how they need to remove their newly sprouted ‘dirty’ hair. But for girls, the hair removal is not limited to two specific areas. 

Bihamaal, a multi-media artist from Lahore, tells me about the first time she was made to undergo waxing. She was just 7 years old and she remembers hating the entire experience and thinking that it was not for her, but being forced into doing it anyway. As she grew up, she questioned society’s collective contempt for body hair on women. When she didn’t shave her hair, she would notice comments from people. Bihamaal saw that no one was talking about normalising body hair for Pakistani women; how body hair is not a big deal and that it should be destigmatised. 

So she decided to use her influence on Instagram to do exactly that. As a Pakistani woman, based in the country, this was a bold move. She posted pictures of parts of her body with body hair. She wasn’t ashamed or embarrassed, and she reiterated how this was just a part of her body. With the amount of support it got, it clearly showed how this representation was sorely needed. Clearly, the new generation of women do not want to adhere to the same old societal norms of what ‘feminine beauty’ looks like. 

Still, there were those who made sure Bihamaal knew about their disgust with her. While some South Asian women obsess over being hairless, they also obsess over making sure other women do the same. I might never recover from the embarrassment my aunt caused me at a family dinner when she pointed out my body hair to everyone in the room. I wanted the ground to open and swallow me whole. 

“Threading, plucking, and waxing are all painful methods and the ones women turn to most often. This is in part because of the widely believed myth about using razors to shave causes hair to grow back thicker and coarser - something completely undesirable - and these painful methods are thrust upon girls at such a young age or at times, young girls end up asking for them on their own in order to conform to the ideals of ‘feminine beauty.’”

Shifa Lodhi, is a trainee therapist based in Karachi. While being in therapy for the last few years herself has put Shifa in a place where she now accepts her body hair and is completely comfortable with it, she does recall her adolescence when this was not the case. Lodhi remembers being bullied for her moustache in school when she was barely 11 years old. When she was 12 years old, she had had enough and demanded to her mother that something be done about it. Her mother brought home a tub of ‘Lubna’s Wax,’ a product many Pakistani women will recall using. Her mother then waxed off her moustache - she still remembers how much it hurt.

But bullying over facial hair isn’t just restrained to adolescence, women of all ages are taunted for it. Zainab Tariq is an Instagram influencer based in the UK, she has won the hearts of many South Asian women because of her strict ‘no filters’ policy on her account. Zainab does not shy away from posting stories with her bare face, when she is well aware that her upper lip has not been waxed and plucked hairless. 

Whenever she posts a story without shaving her facial hair, she says she gets comments from people pointing out how she needs to remove her moustache. But she chooses to focus on the positive - the thousands of women appreciating how she posts ‘raw’ content that shows the real side of being a woman without relying on filters. 

Seeing how these women exist boldly gives me some semblance of hope that perhaps, we will one day be able to make peace with body hair. A 12 year old girl having her entire body waxed should never be considered normal. Our culture barely gives any room for self love to even develop in our people. The time we spend on removing all our ‘unwanted’ body hair should be used to instead learn how to accept ourselves. 

It has taken me years to feel somewhat comfortable with my body hair, and it’s still an ongoing struggle. But I know that if today a relative wanted to point out my body hair at a family dinner, I wouldn’t be the one who’d be left embarrassed by the interaction. 

Words: Rameeza Ahmad