Brazilian Wax Images

Extreme waxing

The trend for hairlessness is interesting to me because it's evolved throughout my awkwardly formative years. In the late-90s Brazilians were discussed gigglingly in glossy magazines as a painful one-off for the glamorous sex-person; in the last five years specialist waxing salons have reported a tenfold increase in business. Aside from the issue of ingrown hairs, some have noted problems with where this might lead. Five years ago, as Brazilian waxes became more common, demand for labial plastic surgery increased, then for "vaginal rejuvenation", perhaps the creepiest of the rejuvenations.

The Daily Mail this week, in that charming passive-aggressive-stepmother way it has, sent a writer to have the Showgirl, a full body wax. "The new feminine ideal is of egg-smooth perfection from hairline to toes," she writes, describing the exquisite agony of having her fingers, arms, back, buttocks and nostrils waxed. It was this piece, so similar to the stunty features of 1998 where a journalist describes the bizarre experience of a bikini wax ("More painful than labour!" "Like controversial yoga!"), that made me realise the extent to which Brazilians have been normalised.

And not just that: those of us who choose to curate our own body hair find ourselves carrying with us a certain weight of guilt. As if, perhaps, in staying quiet we're saying too much. After 10 years marinating in images of hairless women (including the odd week of tabloid furore when a celebrity flashes a fuzzy armpit) and five years of bawdy office chatter, we assume everyone is getting waxed. With Brazilians, it's not like legs or armpits where, on a warm day, we can see exactly who chooses to depilate and who chooses not to – it's something far more mysterious, far more stubbly in its threat.

So fear sends us waddling to the waxer, looking for, if not the porny glow extolled by early adopters, then simply neutrality. We want to know we're normal. But what if fewer people are hairless than we assume? What if the panic that many women feel about their intimate areas, these rudely unswept beaches, is unfounded? Perhaps everyone is getting waxed only because they think everyone else is.

It's not about the old arguments – how female oppression is played out on the squash courts of our bodies or all that blahing-on about infantilising women with the removal of this curly signifier of adulthood – it's that we have begun to feel that body hair on a woman is wrong. Instead of questioning this instinct that we're impure in our natural state (or even just wearing, um, bigger knickers?), we have internalised the shame.