It’s easy to think that, when it comes to women’s bodies, hairlessness has always been the Western beauty ideal. But combing through history, you’ll find plenty of evidence to the contrary. 18th- and 19th-century lovers, for example, would gift each other locks of their pubic hair, which were encased in jewellery, carried around in trinket boxes or kept in envelopes. Anne Lister, a 19th-century diarist often described as “the first modern lesbian”, had a penchant for collecting her lovers’ pubes. Meanwhile, in the 15th century, the bush was seen as a symbol of health and prosperity, according to The Oxford Companion to the Body, and being clean-shaven was viewed with suspicion as a way to conceal venereal diseases. 

Growing up in a culture of Brazilian waxes, internet porn and feminine intimate washes, it feels almost impossible to fathom that women’s pubic hair was once thought of as more hygienic or desirable. These days, stray pubes are mostly still framed as a faux pas, although the bush went viral last year thanks to TikTok discourse and Skims merkins. Much like in the free-spirited 70s or the absinthe-soaked 19th century, it felt like a moment where women had (slightly) more autonomy to grow out their pubes. But this runs contrary to what has been the artistic and cultural norm for a lot of history.

People tended to their pubes long before modern razors and laser hair removal – archaeologists have found bronze tweezers the ancient Romans used to pluck out their pits and pubes, hair by hair. And if you look at female nudes in art history, there’s rarely a hairy mons pubis in sight. Art historian Cathelijne Blok traces this aesthetic standard as far back as the Venus of Willendorf: a 30,000-year-old figurine with feminine curves, a belly button and labia, but no discernible bush. It lasted well into the late 19th century, save for a few periods where vulvas weren’t depicted at all. In Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, the subject’s mons pubis is covered with hair flowing from her head. “[This is] likely because she arrives on land and becomes conscious of her nudity,” Blok tells Dazed. The gesture even has a name: the Venus Pudica. More than 500 years later, Gillette would famously name a razor after her. 

When it came to men, Blok says that their body hair was only lightly smoothed, pointing to Michelangelo’s David, “which symbolised the ideal male body,” and “has a small crown of hair, perfectly trimmed and curled.” This is because white, male perspectives dominated the art world, and women’s bodies were a canvas onto which they could impose a narrow set of virtues – “innocence, divinity and chastity” – which women themselves were also expected to meet. As Blok says, “youth and smoothness have long been desirable, while hairiness was associated with animalism.” Later, that logic soured into something even uglier: racist pseudoscientists casting visible body hair as more primitive or less evolved.

Off the canvas, pubic hair ideals cycled, often signalling status and material wealth. For the ancient Greeks, smoothness likely symbolised refined femininity because it hinged on access to grooming, while the opposite can be said for medieval Europeans and the bush, as mentioned above. During this time, when a lack of pubic hair suggested pubic lice or other STDs, merkins became popular with sex workers and even aristocratic women, tired of getting lice from their philandering husbands.

Women’s pubes didn’t really enter western mainstream art until the late 19th century, when male artists like Courbet, Klimt and Schiele started painting explicit nudes to the outrage and shock of many. Back then, pubes were only common in erotic work: pornographic drawings, photographs and the aforementioned exchange of lovers’ pubes. In 1866, Courbet’s close-up of a full-bushed vulva was met with pearl-clutching controversy. This wasn’t art: it was porn! The piece wasn’t exhibited in Paris until 1995 and was famously censored on social media more than a century after its creation. 

The real breakthrough happened when the female gaze entered art, and artists like Suzanne Valadon, Frida Kahlo, and later Judy Chicago and Tracey Emin, depicted pubic hair “from their own perspective,” as Blok says. “Whether it was consciously meant as such, [pubic hair in art] represents a certain degree of freedom in terms of what you want to – or can – do.” 

In 1915, Gillette launched Milady Decolleté: the first razor marketed to women, with a campaign describing body hair as “an embarrassing personal problem.” This was the beauty industry at its finest (inventing the flaw to sell you the fix), and a smooth body quickly became mainstream. But the razor mostly targeted armpit, leg and cleavage hair. In her book Plucked: A History of Hair Removal, Rebecca Herzig writes that for most of the 20th century, fashion covered up enough of the body to keep pubes out of the public eye. 

In the 70s, body hair became political — a symbol of second-wave feminism and the rejection of traditional gender roles. The first issue of Ms. Magazine included an opinion piece on why women should grow their body hair, noting that women who shaved their pubes were “emulating the infantile sexlessness of a little girl.” Shortly after, bushes dominated the pages of Playboy and Penthouse. Beauty ideals then cycled again as the leotard-clad, aerobics-toned bodies of the 80s and the Kate-Moss-in-her-Calvins minimalism of the 90s called for more trimming. In the 2000s, pubic hair almost completely disappeared. Low-rise trousers crept down to pubic bone level and left little room for visible hair, and laser hair removal rose in popularity after becoming commercially available for the first time in the 90s. When bushes did appear in media, films or television shows, for example, it was usually the butt of the joke – see Anna Faris in 2000’s Scary Movie, whose overgrown pubic hair is a source of comic revulsion.

In 2024, bushes and merkins returned to the cultural zeitgeist, first on the runway in Margiela’s SS24 artisanal collection, then online with BushTok and the ‘full bush in a bikini’ discourse, and finally in stores with the Skims merkin thongs.  

“Pubic hair has been treated as something private, excessive or even undesirable for a long time. Social media, contemporary art and fashion have all played a role in making bodies and body hair more visible again,” hair artist Yumiko Hikage tells Dazed. “We’re slowly questioning the idea that the body needs to be constantly controlled, corrected or made more ‘beautiful’ according to a fixed standard.” Just because we’re talking about it, however, doesn’t mean standards will necessarily change. “Visibility doesn’t automatically mean freedom. Even ‘natural’ body hair can become another beauty ideal,” she adds.

Thinking back to the medieval merkins or the 70s feminists who dubbed pubic grooming an act of “infantile sexlessness,” it becomes clear that pube-related beauty norms are never just about the hair, but the body underneath it: sex, reproduction, and bodily autonomy.