The Unexpected Freedom of Unshaven Women: How the Pandemic Has Changed Beauty Standards

This was one of the unexpected lessons of the confinements imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic. For a few months, a wind of freedom blew on downs and fleeces. Many, especially among the youngest, have abandoned razors and epilators. According to the IFOP polling institute, more than a third of women under the age of 25 said they waxed in 2021 “less often than before the first confinement”. With relief, if we are to believe the reactions gathered by the Liberté, pilosité, sororité collective created in 2018 to denounce the “hairless standard” : “A sacred freedom! » ; “saving time and money! » ; “the end of pain” ; “a reappropriation of my body”testify those who have taken the plunge.

Barely out of their camera, they also tell on social networks the jokes, insults and even threats which they often pay the price. The account @payetonpoil, launched in July 2019 by young feminists in the wake of Metoo, has become the rallying sign of women facing disgust of all stripes. They bear witness to an ordinary stigmatization which particularly affects the youngest. Reflections often begin in childhood, within the family and at school, especially for brunettes. While a handful of stars like singers Madonna or Beyoncé dare to defy the ban, most women give up displaying their hair for fear of exclusion. “We see that they still cannot freely dispose of their bodies”observe the activists behind the initiative.

The female hair disturbs, it unbears, it bristles. If the subject unleashes passions, it is because displaying hair is perceived, in women, as a transgression which “offends traditions, but also contemporary standards”recalls the historian Christine Bard, professor of contemporary history, in her book Feminism. 150 years of received ideas (The Blue Rider, 2020). Displayed as a militant act, the gesture says a lot about the time. Because the hair is not just a matter of fashion or aesthetics, it is also “a subtle revealer of the state of a society, the idea it has of itself and the traumas it has suffered”, explains historian Marie-France Auzépy, who co-directed a masterful History of hair (Belin, 2011, republished in 2017).

Construction of appearances

Around this tiny attribute are deployed, in all civilizations, powerful symbolic dimensions. “Far from being unusual or marginal, the hair occupies a strategic position at the crossroads of anthropological knowledge of all types”assures the anthropologist Anne Friederike Delouis in Hair history.

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