the erasure of brown women from the body hair movement is nothing new, but this time we’ve had enough
[image description: a graphic with seven brown and black faces encircled in the centre, proudly showcasing their body hair. the faces encircled are set against a canary yellow backdrop with more faintly illustrated faces, and four hands reaching out from each corner. the text reads: #NOTYOURTREND #FACESOFTHEUNIBROWMOVEMENT]
Every part of our society reflects the institutions on which they have been built, namely, patriarchy, white supremacy and capitalism. Beauty standards are no different. The world of beauty – especially for women – serves as an extension of and a tool for the implementation of these violent systems, reinforcing social hierarchies on marginalised bodies.
However, in the last decade or so, the body positivity movement was created to combat those systems and encourage marginalised people to love themselves as they are. What started as a fat liberation movement has now extended to numerous other sources of marginalisation including disability, body hair, skin conditions and skin tone.
who is the body positivity movement for?
Black, plus-size blogger Stephanie Yeboah describes the body positivity movementas a “movement that was created for marginalised bodies with no privilege”, yet the people who act as the face of the movement are far from that. And this also tends to be the case in wider body positive subcommunities, including the body hair movement.
The pressure to not have body hair is a norm across cultures is a dominant part of the patriarchal beauty standards we are all held up against. It has produced whole industries that profit off policing of women’s bodies and is posited as a central standard of femininity and beauty. Resistance to this has seen the rise of a body hair segment of the body positivity movement, celebrating and embracing the natural hair that women have, be it facial hair or body hair.
body hair is a brown thing
Though all women have body hair (and varying degrees of it), women of colour and particularly Middle Eastern and South Asian women are known for being considerably more hairy than other groups. Most brown women have stories of being bullied, rejected and ostracised for being hairy at some point in their lives. Knowing this, you’d expect them to be leading the body hair movement. However, the opposite rings truer as the people celebrated as body-reclaiming, patriarchy-fighting feminist icons do not look like us.
In fact, having body hair only seems to be worth celebrating or seen in a positive light when it’s white women who are doing it. And even then, our natural features are reduced down to a trend. Dazed Beauty recently claimed that “unruly brows” were a 2021 beauty trend, with Greek-Cypriot model Sophia Hadjipanteli, who claims to be the founder of the #unibrowmovement,as the face of it.
But what Dazed Beauty and Sophia, fail to acknowledge is that women and non-binary people of colour have been wearing their natural features proudly long before there was a hashtag, but instead of celebration, have been met with violence and rejection from the world of beauty. There is a very real and violent history of racialised trauma that comes with being a hairy woman of colour, but this is completely ignored when our features are aestheticized and celebrated on white skinned women exclusively. The claim that beauty institutions make of wanting to challenge beauty standards is as transparent as it is empty when there is no effort to uplift the people who suffer the most under them: the people who have been leading the movement long before a white-skinned model with a thick, dyed unibrow went viral.
it’s not just about body hair; it’s about the way body hair is seen on black and brown bodies
Of course, women of all races live and suffer under the male gaze, but there is a clear disparity in the way that white women and women of colour experience it. The privilege lies in the act of embracing our bodies and the hair that grows on it. It is undeniably easier for white women to embrace their body hair, as seen with the work of Hadjipanteli, and is something they have a much greater chance of being praised for doing than us because of their skin colour.
For Middle Eastern and South Asian women, our body hair is not only weaponised against us by the patriarchy, but also used as an integral part of racial stereotypes designed to dehumanise and degrade us. Not only do we risk being seen as unattractive for having body hair, but our natural features are used to justify racial hierarchies and our second-class status in the world.
Moving through the world as people of colour, we experience a very particular paradox when it comes to beauty. Whilst we are completely excluded from the definition of what is beautiful, our features are appropriated and celebrated once they are repainted on a whiter canvas: hailed at best as fashion trends, and at worst, revolutionary political statements. The struggles of our people – not to mention the decolonising work that many have done in reclaiming our natural features – are completely erased when those same features are only considered worthy of celebration on white bodies.
And let’s not forget that a very specific and intentional part of colonialism and the establishment of white supremacy is one that teaches all people of colour that they are inferior. The superiority of whiteness instils a sense of self-hatred in BIPOC communities, and, in the context of beauty standards, this translates to undesirability and ugliness. We are told that our cultures are ugly. Our features are ugly. We are ugly.
Of course, this has significant life altering ramifications on self-esteem and self-image, affecting relationships, careers and self-development. This is why body positivity is such an important movement and part of wider anti-racism work; it aims to address this damage and encourages us to unlearn colonial beauty standards through self-love.
However, we cannot self-love ourselves out of oppressive systems. The beauty industry is one of many arms of the patriarchal, white supremacist, capitalist machine and the oppression and exclusion of black and brown bodies is nothing new. But for things to really change, we need more than performative statements and whitewashed campaigns. We need BIPOC voices and experiences to be uplifted and centred, because we have always been the movement. And we are done being ignored.
[image description: on a canary yellow background are a series of screenshots of instagram comments and messages from brown and black people responding to the centring of white people in the unibrow movement]