The Maintenance of Being A Woman

I am a very low-maintenance woman. I don't say that with pride, particularly, nor embarrassment. It's simply true.

I don't wear much makeup — most days, none at all. Hairy legs. Hairy armpits. If something on my face decides to become a spot, then apparently that's what my face is doing that week. I might curl my eyelashes occasionally, mostly because without it I sometimes think I resemble a hard-boiled egg. If I'm feeling particularly glamorous, I may stretch to clear mascara. That's about as far as things usually go.

It isn't that I don't appreciate women who do all of it beautifully — quite the opposite. Sometimes I see a woman with perfectly applied makeup and think, *wow, I'd genuinely like to know how to do that.* I just don't want to spend the time learning.

Recently, while thinking about shaving my legs — or more accurately, all the years I've spent not wanting to — I stumbled across a story that made me stop. Gillette wasn't selling enough razors, so sometime in the 1800s, the company persuaded newspapers to tell women that body hair was unhygienic. Women panicked. They started shaving. An entirely new market was born.

My first thought was bloody hell. My second was: is that actually true? Because if it were, it would mean millions of women had spent enormous amounts of their lives on a task that largely existed because someone once wanted to sell more razors. That's the kind of thing that keeps me awake. So I went looking. And, as is often the case with stories that spread beautifully around the internet, the truth is slightly messier. Perhaps more interesting, too.

Who decided this was normal?

Women didn't suddenly discover hair removal because Gillette invented it — humans have been removing body hair for thousands of years, for different reasons, in different cultures. But in Western culture, something specific happened in the early twentieth century. Safety razors had made shaving easier, razor manufacturers wanted new customers, and fashion was changing too — sleeveless dresses, rising hemlines. Parts of the female body that had previously stayed under fabric became visible. Commerce noticed.

According to the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, razor manufacturers began promoting women's body hair as masculine, indelicate and unhygienic. In 1915, Gillette introduced the Milady Décolletée, its first razor marketed specifically to women. By the 1920s, advertisers were actively encouraging women to make their newly visible legs and underarms "smooth."

That fascinates me, because it wasn't one evil advertisement brainwashing an entire sex. It was more subtle. Fashion changed. Technology changed. Businesses spotted an opportunity. Advertising amplified an idea. Culture absorbed it. And eventually everybody forgot there had ever been another option — which might be even stranger than the marketing itself. At some point, hair stopped simply being something that grew from women's bodies, and became something women were expected to do something about.

My mum's one piece of advice

She never gave me a reasoned feminist argument, just: "Francine, never shave your legs." No explanation. Which, when you're talking to a child, is an excellent way of guaranteeing she'll do exactly that.

So I did — round at my friend Lisa McDowell's house, with a razor, for what felt like an astonishing amount of leg. Ankles, knees, the bits behind my knees I couldn't see properly, wondering the entire time why anybody did this voluntarily more than once. Then I got into bed. My freshly shaved legs touched each other. Oh. My. God. Incredibly smooth. I'd never felt anything like it. And there, unknowingly, I'd entered into an agreement — because the smoothness doesn't stay. Soon there was stubble, and stubble wasn't nearly as satisfying. So you shave again. And again.

For years I believed, like a lot of people do, that shaving makes hair grow back thicker. It doesn't. A razor can't change the follicle underneath the skin — shaving just cuts off the naturally tapered end of the hair, so the blunt regrowth can feel rougher without actually being thicker, darker, or faster-growing. So perhaps Mum wasn't right for the reason I always assumed. Shaving didn't permanently change my hair. It changed my awareness of it. Before, I simply had legs. Afterwards, I had freshly shaved legs, legs that needed shaving, legs I'd forgotten to shave, legs too prickly for a dress. I'd accidentally created a recurring task.

Years later I did almost exactly the same thing to my face, ahead of a professional photoshoot I was already dreading. I rang the makeup artist beforehand, hoping for advice like *drink water, get some sleep, maybe exfoliate.* Instead she suggested shaving the fine hair off my face. I immediately thought: whoa, whoa, whoa — surely I'd grow a beard? I wouldn't, and biologically, she was right; it doesn't grow back thicker there either. But something still changed. The soft hairs on my face had barely entered my consciousness before. Now I knew they were there. Not because my body had changed. Because my perception of what might need maintaining had.

How many maintenance jobs begin the moment somebody points out that something about us could be improved?

A question worth more than an answer

I'm not particularly interested in whether women should shave. Shave everything if you love shaving. Grow everything if you don't. Wax one leg and plait the other, for all I care. Makeup can be art. Hair can be identity. A manicure can be a quiet hour when nobody wants anything from you. Freshly shaved legs under clean sheets genuinely feel bloody fantastic. Choice matters.

What interests me is the gap between I love doing this and I've learned I don't look acceptable when I don't. One experiment showed people the same women's faces with different levels of makeup, and cosmetics affected not just perceived attractiveness but perceived competence, with more nuanced effects on likeability and trust depending on the amount worn. The study was funded by P&G Beauty & Grooming, which is worth knowing — and the finding still raises a strange question. Nothing about the woman's brain changed. Her qualifications didn't change. Some pigment was applied to her face, and someone else's perception of her competence could shift anyway.

There's an invisible corridor women are often expected to walk through: look as though you've made an effort, but not as though you tried too hard. Be natural, but not that natural. Wear makeup, but make sure it's "natural makeup." Apparently even pretending to wear none requires products. I've never been particularly good at walking through that corridor. I'd rather wander off into a field.

Making the invisible visible

Suppose somebody shaved for ten minutes, three times a week — nothing dramatic, half an hour total. From fifteen to seventy, that's around 1,430 hours. Nearly sixty full days of a human life. That isn't an argument that she's wasted sixty days — perhaps she loved every one of those showers, perhaps the ritual was relaxing, perhaps smooth skin made her feel completely herself. But there's something fascinating about making the invisible visible. A few minutes here, a few minutes there, repeated for decades, and a task becomes weeks of a life. Shaving is only one of them. Eyebrows, nails, hair dye, tanning, makeup, anti-ageing — removing hair from one part of ourselves while carefully adding it somewhere else.

If you lived alone on an island where nobody would ever see you again, would you still shave your legs? Wear mascara? Paint your toenails? Maybe you would — which tells you something. Maybe you'd immediately stop — which might tell you something too.

What I want my daughters to have

These days my natural body doesn't particularly trouble me. Hairy armpits, hairy legs, no routine shaving, no real concern about whether that reads as a hairy gorilla rather than a smooth dolphin. There are too many other things I want to do — places to see, children to listen to, fires to sit beside, trees to stand underneath.

But I don't want my daughters growing up believing the opposite rule either — that shaving is bad, that makeup is shallow, that enjoying beauty rituals means you've failed to see through the system. That would just be another set of instructions. What I want them to have is simpler: the knowledge that doing nothing is also an option. I want them to see their mum with hair on her legs and understand that nothing terrible happens. You aren't dirty. You aren't unfinished. You're simply hairy. Maybe they'll grow up and shave everything anyway, or love makeup far more than I ever have, or own drawers full of products and know exactly what every brush is for — and I'll sit watching in complete confusion while they explain why I absolutely must try their £85 facial contraption. That's fine. I just want the choice to feel like theirs.

Because perhaps that's the most curious thing in all of this. The Gillette story was never really about Gillette. It's about how norms happen — something changes, somebody sells something, somebody else copies it, a generation grows up watching, and the next inherits the behaviour without inheriting the explanation. Eventually it stops being something we do and becomes simply what is done. Until somebody's mum says, "Francine, never shave your legs," and thirty years later, her daughter finally wonders why.

Not the instruction. The question. Who decided this was normal? When did it begin? Who benefited? Would I still choose it if nobody were watching?

What else are you doing every day simply because you've never thought to ask?