Earliest Hair Removal Techniques
Every culture has some sort of belief or view on body hair. Some cultures believe a man must have a beard, while others frown on women not shaving their legs. It isn't just a modern view that unwanted body hair is unattractive and inconvenient. The practice of removing unwanted body hair dates back to the earliest humans and has continued throughout the progression of cultures, into the present. Does this Spark an idea?
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Shaving
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Archaeologists have found 20,000-year-old human remains with shaved faces. Men of the time used sharpened rocks to remove beards and shorten or shave the hair on the head. Hair removal was most likely related to safety, because an enemy couldn't grab the beard or head hair if it was shaved or cut short.
Ancient Egyptians
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Ancient Egyptian men and women removed the hair from their heads and wore wigs in its place. The men also removed their beards, because a shaved face was a sign of higher social status. Women used depilatories composed of resin, pitch, starch, arsenic and quicklime to remove leg, armpit, facial and pubic hair. Beeswax was another method women used for hair removal. Men and women both used tweezers to thin eyebrows.
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Threading
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Threading is the practice of removing several hairs from the follicle at one time, using a doubled strand of thread to twist around small groups of hairs and pull them out from the roots. Threading began with ancient Arabians in the Middle East and is still popular today. The procedure is faster than tweezing, but can be difficult to master.
Europeans
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During the time of Greeks and Romans, bare chests were popular with young men. It was a right of passage for the boy to shave his chest for the first time. He often offered the hair to his favorite god as a tribute. The women also shaved their legs and removed body hair with tweezers and shaving. As time progressed, and the Catholic church rose to power in Europe, women stopped shaving their legs. Instead, they removed all of their eyebrows and forehead hair to enhance the size of their brow. To discourage hair growth in these areas, the women used walnut oil, vinegar and cat feces.
Americans
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It has only been popular for American women to remove all unwanted body hair for the past 100 years or so. Men have alternated between clean-shaven, fully bearded and partial hair removal, depending on the style of the era. The first men's razor was invented in the 1880s. A razor for ladies debuted in 1915, and American women began shaving regularly. In the 1940s, razors were scarce due to War World II, so women used adhesive discs to buff away unwanted body hair. Laser hair removal became popular by the 1990s, but shaving, waxing, threading, depilatories, and sugaring are still used even today.
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