BIKINI SEASON IS upon us which means that there will be countless articles asking if you are ‘beach body ready’.
The answer is to look down, and if you see you have a body, then yes, you are in fact beach body ready.
But the beauty industrial complex has a financial stake in making you doubt your own body and it’s ‘readyness’ for the beach. One of the assumed standards for a ‘beach body’ is that it is completely hairless except for the hair on your head (which should have tousled beach waves) and groomed eyebrows (which should be tinted and plucked).
Hair in any other places is judged to be revolting.
But it’s not revolting in all cases because when we see underarm hair on men nobody flinches. Stretch marks and freckles, previously seen as ‘blemishes’ that should be covered up, have been normalised of late thanks to celebs like Chrissy Teigen and Meghan Markle. What’s needed is some similar visual representations of underarm on women so we can all see how normal looking it is.
Enter Bella Thorne, the 137th most followed instagram account holder.
It might look weird but it’s only because we’re not used to seeing body hair there on women.
The Daily Mail of course wasn’t happy that a woman was out of the kitchen and not making sandwiches and her armpit hair made headlines three days in a row for them!
If you’re in Hawaii, you should be spending every waking second outside on a beach or in the ocean, and you certainly should not be a dark bathroom giving yourself shaving rashes every morning.
A British survey last year discovered that the average woman spends a ridiculous 72 freaking days, or 1,728 hours, shaving their legs over the course of their lifetime, with 35% saying it’s their most hated beauty ritual.
What a waste of time!
Why do we continue to adhere to a standard of beauty that we hate, and that isn’t even appreciated? When’s the last time your other half said to you ‘my god what beautiful hairless armpits you have?’, yet we’re expected to continue this time-wasting activity for fear of criticism or mockery.
It’s only for the past 100 years that this standard was created when sleeveless dresses started to become fashionable for the first time.
Hear that ladies? You’re armpits are embarassing and you must be ‘immaculate’ – a word associated with the “Virgin” Mary’s conception of Jesus with some holy ghost sperm!
For me, it was refreshing to see pictures of Bella Thorne looking fantastic on a beach holiday and sporting ‘au natural’ armpits. She did look immaculate, and in no way embarrassing.
Here’s hoping that her armpit hair exposure encourages others to ditch the razor and realise that they’re always beach body ready.
