Long before razors, lasers, and waxing strips became everyday items in beauty routines, hair removal was already a deeply rooted practice.

In fact, the journey goes as far back as the Stone Age when both men and women used primitive tools – like seashells and sharpened stones – to scrape hair from their bodies.

‘Primitive ancestry’
Thousands of years later, Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection introduced a new lens: fur loss attributed to sexual selection.

According to Darwin, the less body hair one had, the more “evolved” they appeared. This pseudo-scientific rationale gave hairlessness a new kind of social currency – sexual attractiveness and evolutionary advancement.

Being hairless became a sign of progress and desirability.

Feminine duty
By the 1900s, the idea that being hairless was a feminine duty was firmly cemented in society. Body hair became shameful, a flaw to be corrected rather than a natural state to be accepted.

“It’s been deeply stigmatized – it still is – and cast with shame,” Heather Widdows, author of “Perfect Me: Beauty as an Ethical Ideal,” told CNN. “Today, most women feel like they have to shave. Like they have no other option. There’s something deeply fraught about that – though perceptions are slowly changing.”