A LOVE LETTER TO MY BODY HAIR & YOU

Growing up in the 90s meant a lot of great things for me: listening to guitar based music like Oasis & The Verve, playing Sims till the middle of the night, eating BumBum ice cream in summers, late night skinny dipping (should start that again, what a freeing adventure that always was!), having white Christmas (yes, there really was a time when that was reality), enjoying the coolness of bucket heads, bumbags & crop tops (these are coming back now which is amazing!) and so much more BUT it also meant a lot more, that I very late (let’s be real in the last year) started to strongly question.

I know this text looks long and I might have already lost your attention BUT I kindly ask you to HANG IN THERE WITH ME. <3

To be honest the number of things that I got socialized with and that I started to question is endless but let’s stick to this one: female BODY HAIR. 

Me growing up in the 90s meant not even questioning for a second why women are supposed to be hairless. I never second-guessed why there’s this difference between female and male. No, to be honest I never ever wondered. I just thought that that’s what it is.

When my first armpit hair grew – I shaved it instantly. When my first pubic hair grew – I shaved it instantly. I can’t recollect when I decided to shave my legs… but I can’t remember myself ever having leg hair so I would say it was incredibly early as well. So there I was, a young teenager with the constant concern that my shaving might be a day old and that there could be a little something visible. And OH MY god, imagine a boy I like would see that I even have something like body hair!!!! Women are not supposed to have body hair!, that’s what I thought for an incredibly long time.

Working against nature since I can remember and having to get 27 to see FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER how my body even looks with body hair. Isn’t that crazy?! That it took me 27 years to check out how my body naturally looks? To step back and redefine what I personally prefer and what I think is beautiful?!

And even now having seen my body with hair these normativ mind patterns of what is considered beautiful are still stuck in my head and it feels like a constant conversation with myself and my aesthetics. And why does it feel like a brave act of rebellion to „wear“ body hair?

Why can it not just be normal for any gender to have or not have any kind of body hair?! Just like everyone prefers a different kind of ice cream…

To somehow wrap this up for you: I felt the need to address this topic which is how this design was born. Crawling out of my comfort zone in any possible way to create a visual that serves as an ice breaker on body hair discourses. So…

LET’S START THIS CONVERSATION ABOUT BODY HAIR, LET’S NORMALIZE IT, LET’S BRAID IT, LET’S SUPPORT EACH OTHER AND LET’S CHALLENGE OUR OWN MIND PATTERNS.

Love from me to you.

Yours Christina