The Sleek and the Coarse: What Our Hair Relationship Reveals About Us

[Un article de The Conversation écrit par Christian Bromberger – Anthropologue, professeur émérite, Aix-Marseille Université (AMU)]

In the daily life, the state of the Iranian eyebrows provides information on the status of interlocutor and immediately invites to use such a term of address or such politeness formula. But, in their concern for emancipation, intrepid young girls blur this code of recognition; Anticipating on the rite of passage and wanting to comply with the canons of Western juvenile beauty, they make their eyebrows spilled, which leads, in conservative circles, the reprobation of their parents.

Fluctuating practices

Historical and ethnic exceptions to this general scheme between smooth to the Dru are not lacking. Christianity has advocated, with more or less success, respect for nature created by God, the hairs having, in addition, for virtue, to hide the “shameful parts”, while the hair removal of the pubis and the armpits is the norm, for the two sexes, in Islamic societies, the hairs which retain secretions (blood, urine, sweat, impure. We cannot, under these conditions, carry out your religious obligations covered with hairs and it is significant that the depilatory paste is called in Persian vâjebi (” OBLIGATORY “).

In France, from the Middle Ages to the 16th^e A century, wealthy women practiced integral hair removal, a use that crusaders had discovered in the East. There were 26 hot or spots in Paris in 1292. Then, the practice of hair removal faded during the centuries following the Renaissance; Water, and especially hot water, then has a bad reputation; It is supposed to soften the flesh and make the pores of the skin permeable to microbes.

Despite a partial rehabilitation of hot baths at the end of the 18th century^e and in the XIX^e century, it was not until the XX^e A century for hair removal to find full legitimacy: the disappearance of long dresses, the appearance of necklines, the progressive stripping of the bodies in summer, then the appearance of transparent nylon stockings in 1946 contribute to this return, even to a dictatorship of the smoking (“A Depilatory Age”, says an American historian), which connotes, Disanimization, the net, hygienic and odorless. Let us cross the Atlantic Ocean: in Mexico, in ethnic border zones, as shown in the anthropologist Jima Paz Obregon, women of Spanish origin put a point of not spinning their legs to stand out from the Indiannes to the naturally glabrous skin. The concern of manifesting his ethnicity prevails here on that of exhibiting the signs of femininity commonly accepted by showing smooth legs.

Redefinition standards

Among the women of today, in the furrow of the recent feminist wave initiated with the #MeToo movement, the rebellion against the smooth corresponds to the refusal to bend to gender standards and to devote time to injunctions linked only to male desire in a heteronormized framework, but also to the refusal of a form of infantilization or hypersexualization … not to mention the painful and expensive character.

In France, women who did not spin pubis were 15 % in October 2013, compared to 28 % in January 2021. More generally, the proportion of epileed women decreased: 85 % in October 2013, against 72 % in January 2021.

But the beard, it will be said. This is a hair attribute which manifests belonging to the male genre – although it can be the subject of a queer game with the genre, as evidenced by the singer Drag Queen Conchita Wurst, winning Eurovision in 2014. The beard of today has nothing to do with the beard of the “hairy” of 1914, with the drunk mustache of the heroines of Maupassant (in a short text entitled “La Mustache”). The beard of today is not that, Hirsute, of the revolutionary but a beard maintained with a clove mower – the “hype” around the pointed barbers testifies to this.

The beard is nowadays a sign of entry into adulthood (according to the Way Opinion survey of 2018, 92 % of 24-35 year olds carry it) while, neglected, it was a long time a sign of entry into old age. What strikes is therefore this inversion of uses and meanings. This difference in generation is also reflected in the assessments of women: according to the same survey, young women as a couple are little seduced by completely shaved faces (17 %), while 42 % of women over 35 years old appreciate this style. Another testimony of this inversion: 44 % of the over 50s are shaking every day, only 6 % of the under 35s.

We passed, among men, from a generation to the smooth face to a generation valuing the hair on the face, from a glabrous facial aesthetic to a hinged aesthetic – although tamed. In the years 1980-1990 characterized by an aesthetic minimalism and where modernist ideologies dominated, everything was smooth: the glabrous, the clean, the shaved cut of the boys, agreed with the cold gray of the computer, the smooth simplicity of the furniture and the nudity of the facades; Only on the faces a “fly” or a few hairs on the edge of the lips reminded the gender difference.

Among women too, this leave idolatry seems to have lived-but can we predict the future? – And the most prominent models do not hesitate to exhibit hairy armpits, while some influencers assume hairy legs. This movement was initiated by Julia Roberts and Milla Jovovich who proudly exhibited their armpits in 1999 which they had let the hair repel. Could it be the announcement of an-improbable-return to “a hairy aesthetic”, an expression that Salvador Dali used to characterize the architecture of Gaudi?

The connection of the way of maintaining your hairs and stylistic dominants is manifest to other periods in history. So at the end of the 18th century^e century. The exuberance of baroque gardens, the ornamental proliferation of chapels of the same era and the extraordinary hairstyles: wigs of the reign of Louis XVI, decorated with feathers, ribbons, boat … participate in the same aesthetic scheme.

Scrutinizing a company by its hair corners may seem a priori very futile. But these appearance games that seem to divert from the essential brutally bring us back when we consider passions, controversies, prohibitions, the violence they can arouse. As often, the accessory (here smooth and dru) is a privileged window to smell the air of time.