What’s the real deal with armpit hair?

The thoughts of someone’s armpit hair coming within 10 foot can cause us to break out into a cold sweat, but why?

It seems that there is a study on everything now after Breanne Fahs, a professor at Arizona State, published a paper that studies women’s disgust of body hair, including their own.

The study which was published in the Psychology of Women Quarterly saw Breanne asking 20 women how they felt about shaving, other women’s shaving and body hair. While shaving was considered to be a bit of a nuisance – something we can all relate to – body hair was considered gross.

One respondent said: “I think women who don’t shave are a little gross. Because sometimes, like if people don’t shave their entire lives, that’s just a little too much to handle for me. I always shave. I don’t like hair. I shave everything.”

The study also asked women to grow body hair for 10 weeks and record it in a diary. Apparently they got extra credit in Breanne’s class if they did it – not sure extra credit would be enough of an incentive for us…

Extracts from the journals showed how the participants felt about body hair with some calling it “gross hair”.  Some were even told that they were gross and unclean, which we think is a little bit mean and uncalled for.

Unfortunately, while men are (usually) applauded for their body hair, women aren’t. However, it seems things are changing – remember, Madonna’s body hair selfie? Yeah we can’t get the image out of our head either!