Scarred in the quest for beauty

A walk through any supermarket or pharmacy tells the story - for women, facial and body hair have joined age and gravity as enemies in the quest for beauty.

Meredith Jones, a lecturer in cultural studies at the University of Technology, Sydney and author of Skintight: An Anatomy Of Cosmetic Surgery, says we are becoming a culture that refuses to accept hair on women; except on top of the head, of course.

"There's definitely a lot of angst about it, and it's something that women seem to need to work on quite a lot throughout their lives. Some of them resent that," Jones says.

Now at work on an anthology about women and body hair, Jones says she interviewed a woman who encountered verbal abuse from men at a gym for having hairy legs.

"We're so surrounded by these images of perfection that we forget to look at each other and see what normal people look like," she says.

"With the mainstreaming of pornography, things like the Brazilian wax, which used to be quite extreme, have now become part of the everyday visual lexicon."

Studies over 10 years show women find their body hair unattractive. In a 1998 American study, Women And Body Hair: Social Perceptions And Attitudes, participants watched videos of a bikini-clad woman, filmed first with body hair and then without.

The participants judged the hairier woman as less happy, less intelligent and less attractive.

Permanent removal of women's pubic hair is getting more popular too. A study last year by the Cosmetic Physicians Society of Australasia found 75 per cent of clients cited aesthetics as the main reason for hair removal, and 65 per cent of women surveyed said they felt sexier without hair.

These sentiments have elevated laser hair removal to a multimillion-dollar business in Australia, with most hair and beauty salons offering laser or intense pulsed light (IPL) services. Hair, cellulite, pigmentation, scars and spider veins - indeed, most skin imperfections - can be removed by laser.

Upper lip "permanent hair reduction", a common treatment, will cost anywhere between A$70 and A$150.

A full leg can cost up to A$700 a treatment, and at least six treatments are generally required. Laser treatments in Australia are estimated to number in the tens of thousands each year.

And this booming industry is largely unregulated.

Australian law requires laser machines to be registered as medical devices, but no NSW state law applies to laser operators, despite years of mounting evidence that, in untrained hands, these devices can cause serious damage and scarring.

- © Fairfax NZ News