The Shower Audit

It’s No-Shave November. The month where men grow moustaches for charity and women are apparently still not invited to the official challenge, which is a sentence I had to read twice before my brain filed it under “of course it is.”

I was in the shower this morning — obviously — and I caught myself doing the thing. The quick check. Armpits, legs, the usual audit. And I thought, why? Who taught me to inspect myself like a car before an MOT? Because it wasn’t my mum, not really. It was Gillette. In nineteen fifteen, they worked out that if they could convince women their body hair was a problem, they’d double their customers. A hundred and eleven years later, over half of Brits in a YouGov poll still think women should remove their armpit hair, and ninety-eight percent of UK women have done it at some point. That’s not grooming. That’s a century-old marketing campaign that outlived the company that started it.

And here’s the part that actually gets me. The message isn’t just “remove the hair.” It’s “remove the hair so you look younger.” Think about what that is asking. Body hair is one of the most obvious signs that a body has gone through puberty. So the beauty industry spent a hundred years selling women a product that makes them look like they haven’t. We’re being conditioned to erase the evidence that we’re grown. That’s not a beauty standard, that’s an infantilising one, and it should bother everyone, not just the women doing the shaving.

There’s a woman in East London called Bethany who spent fifty-one thousand pounds over seventeen years waxing and bleaching because she was convinced something was medically wrong with her. Doctors tested her for three years. Nothing. She’s just hairy. She said the words “I’m just a hairy girl” like she was confessing to a crime, and I want to frame that sentence and hang it somewhere.

Phoebe Bridgers turned up at Venice with leg hair under a tailored suit and it made international news. Amita Rao posted an armpit photo and the comments were yeti GIFs and dancing razors until she said, “DM me, I’ll send you a pic of my bush.” Emily Ratajkowski wrote in Harper’s Bazaar that grown-out armpits make her feel sexy, which is a sentence I read four times because it felt illegal. Nike put a model with underarm hair in an ad and half the internet called it disgusting while the other half pointed out, correctly, that if the model were male nobody would have noticed.

And here’s my favourite bit — young women in China are dyeing their armpit hair gold and purple and calling it armpit-hair freedom, and the scholars are saying the shame was imported from the West. We exported the problem and now we’re importing the solution. Peak us.

The generational data is the bit that gives me hope, if I’m honest. Sixteen to twenty-four-year-olds are the most relaxed about it. The over-forties are the most judgemental. Which means this is dying out, slowly, one unshaved armpit at a time.

At home, none of this is a conversation. Hair is just hair. It grows. We wash. We get on with it.

The body doesn’t send us a monthly invoice.

So — have you ever caught yourself doing the shower audit, and if so, when did you realise someone else wrote that script?