One of the world's strangest little outrages is how in commercials for female shaving products, the model demonstrating the razor is already completely hairless. Why? Because the idea that a woman's body should be as close to hairless as possible has been beaten into our collective consciousness as a society and showing a woman with body hair on television, even within a commercial for shaving said body hair, is taboo.
Billie, a razor company, is looking to change that.
Billie's Project Body Hair is a campaign to celebrate women with body hair and to normalize the idea that shaving is a choice, not a necessity.
Along with their own videos and images, Project Body Hair is also releasing many photos of women with body hair to Upslash, a popular stock images website, in the hopes of normalizing the sight.
Photographer Ashley Armitage loves the new initiative:It's amazing that Billie is the first shaving company to actually show women with body hair. In all razor commercials, for some reason I can't wrap my head around the fact that models already have smooth hairless skin. How can you know that a razor is even doing its job if all it's doing is swiping off some shaving cream? And more importantly, why is showing female body hair so taboo?"
She took these photos to help in the effort:
Twitter is loving Project Body Hair too!
Georgina Gooley, Billie's co-founder, commented in a press release:
Only showing smooth, hairless legs seemed like an archaic way of representing women. We have always said shaving is a choice. It's your hair and no one should tell you what to do with it. We're excited to launch a campaign that will help normalize body hair and change the one-dimensional way in which women are portrayed in mass media.