If I know I have visible facial hair, I’m much more reserved in social situations. All of this pain despite the fact that, for the most part, women’s facial hair is entirely normal. Overall, they said that they had a good quality of life, but tended to give low scores when it came to their social lives and relationships.
Forty percent said they felt uncomfortable in social situations, 75% reported clinical levels of anxiety. The study found facial hair takes an emotional toll. Two-thirds of the women in the study said they continually check their facial hair in mirrors and three-quarters said they continually check by touching it. On average, women with facial hair spend 104 minutes a week managing it, according to a 2006 British study. Instead of reading or finishing homework on the car drives to school growing up, I would spend the entire length of the drive obsessively plucking and threading my mustache.
Non-white skin is more likely to scar as a result of trying to remove hair. The removal doesn’t just make unwanted hair go away, it raises a whole new set of problems, particularly for women of color. I remember it itched and burned.”Īfter those first attempts come many, many more – each with their own investment in time, money and physical pain. “In fourth grade, a boy called me a werewolf when he saw my arm hairs and upper lip hairs … I cried to my mom about it … she bleached my lower legs, my arms, my back, my upper lip and part of my cheeks to diminish my growing sideburns. Génesis, a 24-year-old woman described her first memories of hair removal. For some girls, this bullying (more often by boys) was their first realization that they had facial hair and that the facial hair was somehow “wrong”. Alicia, 38, in Indiana wrote, “kids in my class would be like, ‘Haha look at this gorilla!’”, Lara was nicknamed “monkey” by her classmates while Mina in San Diego was called “sasquatch”. Their stories loudly echo one another.īecause terminal hairs start to appear on girls around the age of eight, the experiences start young. Since starting to research hirsutism, I’ve received over a hundred emails from women describing their experiences discovering, and living with, facial hair. Most women who live with facial hair don’t refer to the Ferriman-Gallwey scale before deciding they have a problem. Illustration: Mona Chalabi Photograph: Mona Chalabi The Ferriman-Gallwey scale for the measure of hirsutism The total score is then added up – less than eight is considered normal, a score of eight to 15 indicates mild hirsutism and a score greater than 15 moderate or severe hirsutism. It has since been simplified, scoring just nine body areas (upper lip, chin, chest, upper stomach, lower stomach, upper arms, upper legs, upper back and lower back).
The men looked at 11 body areas on women, rating the hair from zero (no hairs) to four (extensive hairs). More specifically, they were interested in terminal hairs (ones that are coarser, darker and at least 0.5cm/0.2 inches in length) rather than the fine vellus hairs. In 1961, an endocrinologist named Dr David Ferriman and a graduate student published a study on the “clinical assessment of body hair growth in women”. If you’re unsure whether your hair growth qualifies as “excessive” for a woman, there’s a measurement tool that some men have developed for you. But plenty more women who don’t come close to that benchmark of “excessive” still feel deeply uncomfortable about their body hair. Because these little whiskers represent the most basic rules of the patriarchy – to ignore them is to jeopardize your reputation, even your dignity.Ībout one in 14 women have hirsutism, a condition where “excessive” hair appears in a male pattern on women’s bodies. The removal of facial hair is just as paradoxical – the pressure to do it is recognized by many women as a stupid social norm and yet they strictly follow it. Merran Toerien, who wrote her PhD on the removal of female body hair, explained “biologically the boundary lines on body hair between masculinity and femininity are much more blurred than we make them seem”. It’s something that’s common yet considered abnormal, natural for one gender and freakish for another.
What can be dismissed as trivial is a source of deep anxiety for many women, but that’s what female facial hair is a series of contradictions.