We’re exploring how we came to have body hair and how to remove it, if you so choose.
Did you know there are approximately five million hair follicles on the human body? And each one of those follicles serves a number of significant roles when it comes to the overall function of the human anatomy.
So why exactly have we been removing our body hair for the last few hundreds of years? Well, you can chock that up to societal and cultural norms.
To learn more about the fascinating origin of body hair, its true purpose, and why it occurred to us to get rid of it in the first place. if you so choose. Either way, after reading the below you’ll never look at your body hair the same way again.
The Origin of Body Hair.
Now, before we talk about the what of body hair, we have to speak to the why. Why do we have body hair? Well, to answer that, we have to go back to the beginning. Millions of years ago, the ancestors of human beings were covered in hair. The reason for this was due to a number of functional purposes.
Body hair keeps mammals warm. It protects their skin from a lot of external influences, from abrasion, from water, from chemical attack, all sorts of things, Hair is really, really useful. Most mammals, including our closest relatives, and the chimpanzee, are covered in hair. So for us to not have much body hair now is pretty noteworthy.
At what point in time did humans begin to lose hair? The short story, is that we lost most of our body hair probably beginning around two million years ago due to the adoption of an active lifestyle. “Our ancestors were not couch potatoes they weren’t just sitting around or hanging around in trees in a pretty sick burn on the bonobo. “They were active, walking, running, really, really active creatures, And with all of that activity, plus the steamy climate in equatorial Africa, where our ancestors came from, they built up a lot of body heat. So what happened, and this was such a cool transition, is that we see our skin becoming increasingly more naked,” she says. “Instead of being covered with body hair, it's covered with more and more sweat glands that help us lose heat through the evaporation of sweat.”
We lost our body hair over a half a million-year period, evolving from fairly hairy beings to almost completely hairless ones, with the exception of a few areas.
Why do we have body hair?
Today, we have an estimated five million follicles of hair on our bodies from our scalp to our pubic area to our toes that we have today. You're born with all of them. You don't develop more as you get older.
While you may not grow more hair as you age, the hair that you do have and its distribution changes over time. For example, when babies are born, they’re often covered in soft peach fuzz called lanugo that eventually falls off. As you get older, your hair matures and differentiates depending on where it is on your body.
For instance, pubic and underarm hair, as well as the hair on your head, is known as terminal hair, which is noticeably stronger and thicker than the rest of the hair on the body. The lighter, thinner hair, found over most of the rest of your body is what’s known as vellus hair.
However, thanks to hormones, vellus hair can transform into terminal hair as you get older. You have vellus hair and then you go through puberty, when you have a lot of androgens or testosterone. Hormones change the hair follicle to grow hair that's coarser and thicker.” A classic example of this is when a young boy has light-coloured hair on his face, but after reaching the age of puberty, his facial hair becomes thicker and more noticeable.
But going back to why we have hair in specific places in our bodies is actually quite fascinating. For example, the most significant reason for the hair on our heads is to regulate our brain’s temperature. We have these really big brains, and in order to keep them cool, we need to keep our whole body temperature within a fairly narrow window. It turns out that especially really curly hair is remarkably effective at protecting the scalp and the brain from excess heat, and it also allows the evaporation of sweat very efficiently. So it’s this remarkable, important structure.
Along with the hair on our heads, you’ve probably noticed it densely grows in a few key places on the body: the underarms, the pubic region, and the eyebrows. Underarm and pubic hair may have stuck around because they helped disperse odour molecules.
Today, most of us try to get rid of all of this odour that's produced in our armpits and in our pubic regions. But those odour molecules, at least some of them, are really important for communication about our reproductive status and our attractiveness.
Eyebrows, on the other hand, provide an entirely different purpose than that of underarm or pubic hair. “Our eyebrows allow our expressions and moods to be determined or communicated from one person to another, even at a great distance.
And what about the hair you can’t noticeably see on the body? Just know it’s still there and its function is substantial. There are tiny, tiny, tiny hairs coming out of hair follicles all over our body. These turned out to be remarkably important for us because they allow our skin to heal properly they are little repositories of stem cells, which help us to heal our wounds.
To note, while the majority of your body is covered in these minuscule hairs, there are three areas of your body that don’t grow hair: your palms, your soles, and the red of your lips. Oil glands are attached to hair follicles. In these three areas, however, you can have glands that produce sweat but don't necessarily produce sebum, So you'll never get pimples on your palms and soles.
As for your lips, we don’t grow hair there because our lips are made up of “a different type of cell,” as they’re considered to be an extension of the gastrointestinal (GI) tract.
The History of Body Hair Removal.
If having hair is so crucial to the function of our bodies, why have we been removing it for hundreds of years? Well, we have no one to blame but ourselves. “We have, through communication with one another, established a globalised practice of removing hair to make women especially look very smooth and have baby-like skin; and for men to retain their body hair. We tend to think, ‘Oh, these signals are very ancient. These practices are very ancient.’ They're not. This is a pretty recent obsession. The practice of body hair removal started about only 500 years ago.
While modern societal standards of what femininity and masculinity are still very much linked to hairiness or lack of hairiness, we’ve begun to see a shift in the acceptance and normalisation of body hair, thanks in part to social media, which has even helped us celebrate body hair for the first time. (Remember #freeyourpits?)
It's really wonderful when people examine those social norms and say, hold on, who started this? This is a bunch of nonsense, And they realise, ‘Hey, I can be a beautiful person inside and out without following these practices.’ It is tremendously liberating.
The Bottom Line.
Body hair is a natural, functional part of the human anatomy. Whether you choose to embrace it or remove it, your body hair — and what you do with it — is entirely up to you.
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