When you think of an ad for shaving body hair, what comes to mind? A woman wielding a pink razor in a shower? Or a woman running along a beach? As with so much in the area of health and beauty, the world of advertising has painted the subject of personal grooming as a feminine ‘problem’ for over a century.

Meanwhile, ads for shaving facial hair- have adhered so strongly to masculine, rugged convention that when Gillette tried to do something different in 2019 with its ‘The best a man can be’ ad, it was the subject of a furious backlash and threats of boycott. 

This isn’t just true for shaving but it’s a useful lens to view the way advertising has traditionally spoken to men and women. Women: sort yourselves out. Men, you’re already brilliant.

But things appear to be changing. Alongside the acknowledgement that beauty and grooming ads targeting women have to be better (and the great creative we’re seeing around this), the self-grooming giants are making the change on the other end of the gender spectrum too. 

New adverts are gradually pulling the subject of everything from shaving (any part of your body, and only if you want to), looking after yourself in the way you want, smelling nice and even having periods towards a more central ground, which is absolutely where it should be.

We’ve just released a new ad for Manscaped - a male, below the belt grooming brand - so we’ve recently been looking into this area. Body hair removal is a great proxy for a lot of the ‘issues’ that advertising has created in terms of personal grooming and gendered expectations. The good news is that, as these are entirely advertising’s doing, we can use advertising to put them right.

Hair removal in the name of beauty goes back over 5000 years, with some of the first razors dating back to 3000BCE Egypt. However, back then, body shaving was a sport played by both men and women.

Unfortunately, such equality didn’t last… The first body hair removal advert appeared in Harper’s Bazaar in 1914. Created by Gillette, the spot highlighted fashion trends for increasingly exposed arms and legs and sold women the Milady Décolleté razor as an antidote to “unsightly” armpit hair.

Cue the post-WW2 nylon shortage. Women could no longer wear stockings every day and so advertisers made sure their messaging implied that bare legs ought to be hairless. By 1964, 98% of American women were routinely shaving their legs.

Shifting the narrative

Today, we’re at the start of the great undoing of these unhealthy conventions. Male grooming brand Lynx released a big brand ad in an attempt to move its well established Lynx Effect positioning into a more palatable contemporary space. Lynx also released a series of absurd, lighthearted films in 2019 teaching men how to shave their “coconuts” as part of their Shower and Shave campaign. 

Additionally, our recent work for Manscaped, titled We Need To Talk About Your Balls, leveraged traditionally masculine tropes - a moustache-wearing man in a snooker hall - to talk about body hair removal. We used comedy to alleviate the potential awkwardness some men might feel - having been sold the idea that removing body hair is a feminine thing - and invited those men who want to shave their bodies to do it safely, i.e. not using a cheese grater. 

In the process of ‘de-masculinising’ and ‘de-feminising’ personal grooming and beauty comms, we want to make everyone feel welcome. So it’s been great to see brands popping up over the last few years with a gender-agnostic, ingredient/product-first approach. Many of these brands are targeted at amore progressive Gen Z audience, who care less and less about whether what they’re buying is “for her/him”. 

Within this movement are brands like Dollar Shave Club and Harry’s. Both now well known for their “gender-positive” approach to grooming, having focused first and foremost on offering “f*cking great blades”, as Dollar Shave Club put it, and, in the case of Harry’s, rightly including trans men in its comms. 

So why is this happening? A cynic might point at the recent male-focused beauty and shaving comms and identify the financial motive - more people invited to buy more products. But that’s not the whole picture. 

Fortunately, we now have a name for the sort of masculinity that makes people uncomfortable (‘toxic’) and we’re exploring alternative models for how to be a man. The ultimate truth is that, if we want equal societies, men and masculinity have to change, in all areas of life. Men can shave whatever they like, trans men and women can be (and buy) whatever products they want and need without having to handle ludicrous stereotypes. And women - obviously - are not one homogeneous, desperate to shave their legs and run on the beach - demographic.

And that’s what this comes down to. It’s no good to put all women into the same box, nor all men into the same box. And it’s not enough to just remove submissive femininity from advertising. Old-school, toxic masculinity has to go too. Thankfully, we can see this happening, captured perfectly by NIKE’s recent spot featuring Marcus Rashford booting a toxic, scraggly-old football as it screams “nice guys finish last” to camera. We’re on the way - and long may it continue.