Meditation on My Luxurious Leg Hair

How amazingly freeing it would be if hair removal — arguably the most deep-seated and impenetrable of all our beauty myths — became strictly optional, and being hairy was considered maybe a little hipster-ish (or insert your-favorite-youth-culture-group-here), but basically cool? -- Virginia Sole-Smith

I have never been super diligent about shaving my leg hair. When it first became A Thing To Do, I never quite understood the need to remove something that was so determined to grow on my body. In high school, when my entire basketball team decided to support one of our members in her pursuit of the Hairy Leg portion of the Smooth/Hairy Leg contest for Spirit Week, I was relieved that I would more easily blend in with my teammates when we were all wearing shorts. The looks on the faces of one opposing team in particular (whom we privately called the Microwave Barbies) were priceless to behold. We may even have gotten a few points off them before they crushed us with their superior firepower and uniformly perky blonde ponytails.

My mother's leg and arm hair had long since been stunted by radiation, and shaving was something that she rarely bothered to do. Nevertheless, I have always felt obliged to shave my legs (eventually), probably due to some unspoken social pressure. Like many women, I do less shaving during the winter, and I never wear skirts and therefore don't feel any obligation to have accordingly feminine-looking legs. I've never considered waxing or any other more extreme form of hair-removal, because I simply don't care that much whether there is hair on my legs at all. And I like to avoid pain wherever possible!

Last winter, I was stricken with a particularly painful full-body outbreak of psoriasis, which meant that I certainly wasn't going to apply a razor to any part of me, as it already looked and felt as if that had occurred. Several months and many treatments later, I was recovered enough to shave my left leg, but ran out of energy before I got to the other one. And then I kept shaving the left leg, and leaving the right leg. I idly wondered (although I knew better) if there would be some kind of crucial length of time where the growth would eventually stop, or whether I would have a braid-able quantity at some point. I enjoyed the contrast of one smooth leg and one . . . not. Recently, I went to the mall in shorts and noticed an older woman staring at my legs. I guess that unspoken social stigma is still in place for women with hairy legs, or maybe it only exists for women with one hairy leg?

This experimental phase of my life ended abruptly with the onset of summer weather and the brave sacrifice of two razor-heads. Did I end up shaving my right leg because of the aforementioned social pressure? I can't be sure. Part of me wants to grow it back out again expressly so I can find that lady at the mall and walk aggressively past her. Part of me just wanted my legs to match again, which, of course, they don't. I now have a smooth-shaven right leg and a few days of growth on the left leg.

Leg shaving: It's a lose-lose proposition.

Other reading: My other meditation on hair; Beauty Schooled on hairy legs and Reclaiming the Leg Wax; the frightening articles in Allure's Hair Removal section of the website; and an opinion piece on Feminism, Women Shaving & The Western Harem.

Meditation Index

A Meditation on Hair Loss

To be brutally honest, I adore my own hair. I feel that it is one of my most attractive features. I love it without reservation. Sometimes I have been known to pause while I am driving to work and admire the way it smells nice and sparkles in the sunlight, despite the fact that if I have passengers, this inevitably opens me up to ridicule. I started growing out my hair in eighth grade, largely due to the fact that I was tired of people asking if I was a boy or a girl. It used to be lighter, but under certain circumstances I think it still qualifies as "blonde," (although I may have just removed most of the qualifying parts on Friday). Since then, I have established a hair life cycle that goes like this:

Grow out hair. Time passes.
Complain about heat in summer, threaten to cut hair. Fail to cut hair.
Complain about unruliness of hair, yet admire it at the same time. Keep it restrained, usually in braid form.
Start talking about donating hair. Drive people around crazy by not going through with it for at least a year.
Finally cut hair and send it to worthy organization.


The first time I did this was July, 2006, sending off 12+ inches of hair. My mother had been diagnosed with terminal cancer, and had lost all of her hair after chemotherapy (you can actually see her bald head in the background of the picture below), but I'd actually been thinking about cutting my hair and sending it to a charity for quite a while. The charity I chose was Wigs for Kids, because they provide "hair replacement systems to children under the age of 18 who have lost their hair as a result of medical treatments, health conditions, or burn accidents."

 

A lot of people don't realize that it takes hair donations from many people (as many as 30, according to Wigs for Kids) to make one wig for someone who has lost their hair. In addition, though they vary from organization to organization, the requirements for donation are fairly stringent: donated hair must meet a minimum length; cannot be permed, color-treated, or highlighted; and should have less than a certain percentage of grey. If you, or someone you know, fits this description, I strongly encourage you to think about donating your hair. As much as I love my hair, I know it's a renewable resource for me, and that there are plenty of people out there, children and adults, for whom this is not the case. Hair, or the lack of it, contributes a lot to how we view ourselves. Our society is not very good about treating people nicely when we think they might be sick or disabled. We certainly aren't that kind to balding men. But enough preaching, let's get to the before and after photos from last week:

I felt, after four years of growing (with occasional trims of 1 inch or so to keep it healthy), that it was finally time to donate again. I had them cut off about 10+ inches, and I am donating it to Pantene Beautiful Lengths, which "encourages women and men to grow, cut, and donate their hair to make real hair wigs for women who have lost their hair due to cancer treatments."

Additional observations:

My hair is amazingly flippy at this length.
I have a phantom braid/ponytail that I keep trying to lift out of my shirt when I get dressed or brush aside when I go to the drinking fountain.
I hardly have enough hair to admire without looking in the mirror. COMMENCE GROWING PROJECT.
I waited until there would be enough hair left (after cutting 10 inches) to keep putting it up, since that is how I prefer to wear my hair. However, I have nicknamed the resulting effect "Stumpy," because that's what I've got to work with.

Helpful sites:

How to Donate Your Hair

Find a short hairstyle after you donate.

Meditation Index