Four years ago I stopped shaving my body: legs, armpits and bikini line. Although I didn’t really shave. I used to use an epilator, which was the most cost-effective and long-lasting way to get rid of my body hair. I never enjoyed the epilating ritual. It was painful and my skin is so sensitive that I often got rashes. I did it for about 25 years until one day I had enough and I just stopped removing my body hair altogether. The moment I stopped made me think about the reason I started. When I was a teenager my classmates said that girls didn’t go around sporting hairy legs or hairy armpits. I never thought of questioning that rule and going against the tide at that age is a scary thing.

Letting my body grow its fluff made me feel free. I was very self-conscious at the beginning but gradually got used to it. It made me wonder when and why women started removing their body hair. Doing a deep dive into the history of female body hair removal I learnt that money (of course) was behind it all. Women didn’t all of a sudden start begging companies for products to help them get rid of their body hair. Female body hair wasn’t an issue. Companies like Gillete, convinced women through advertising that their body hair was shameful. Having ladies buying their razors (not just guys) meant more profits. So female body hair became from there on “ugly, noticeable and unwanted” and an “embarrassing personal problem.”

How silly. I had been putting up with the pain of removing my body hair for over 25 years just to keep up with some standards made up by an industry interested in profiting. Sounds familiar? It’s the story of how our modern world was built. How many other nonsensical practices have I been engaging in just because they became part of a culture initiated by a drive for profit?

That was a big penny-drop moment for me and getting rid of the fluff became my new hobby. Not the fluff on my body but the fluff in my life. I’m slowly clearing out the things that don’t make sense or don’t work for me. It’s a bit of an experiment. In the process, I’m learning interesting things about how things got to be the way they are. Simplifying life is proving to be more enjoyable than I thought it would be.