Why the Brazilian Wax Has a Feminist Backstory and Body Hair Stays a Personal Choice

The first Brazilian wax is often credited to a beauty salon in Ipanema during the late 1980s, where a local hairdresser named Jocelyne七 sisters created what she later described as the "full moon" for the beaches of Rio de Janeiro. The Seven Sisters salon became legendary in its own neighbourhood, but the technique spread through word of mouth long before it reached the glossier pages of Western magazines. Within a decade, the practice had migrated from Copacabana to Bondi, from Carnival costumes to swimwear calendars, and into the everyday conversation about what a "polished" body should look like.

The globalisation of the Brazilian happened alongside a parallel conversation inside feminist circles. As the technique became a fixture in beauty menus from Surfers Paradise to Fitzroy, scholars and activists were already pulling apart the cultural reasons behind the sudden demand for hairless labia, buttocks, and the strip above the bikini line. The wax was packaged as liberation, as confidence, as a rite of passage before a tropical honeymoon in Bali, yet the underlying script remained remarkably old. Somewhere between the salon and the self-help section, a very modern form of bodily governance was taking shape.

Australian conversations about grooming sit inside a culture where beachwear is a near-uniform. From the Bondi Icebergs pool at dawn to the sand at Cottesloe on a Sunday, the body in a swimsuit is a recurring backdrop, and the routines around it are openly discussed in group chats, gyms, and brunch tables. Asking a friend in Collingwood or Newtown whether they are keeping it natural or going bare before a Noosa weekend often sparks more debate than politics.

Yet underneath the cultural gossip lies a far more personal question about who owns the decision. Body hair sits at the meeting point of pleasure, hygiene myths, fashion, sexuality, identity, and often something a therapist would call a boundary. Choosing to remove it, to keep it, to dye it, to glitter it, or to never think about it again are all valid responses to a habit that has been sold for years as compulsory.

From Rio Runway to Inner-City Brisbane Salon

The wax itself is older than most of its practitioners realise. Ancient Egyptian and Greek sources describe sugaring and resin-based hair removal, and Middle Eastern hammams kept the tradition alive for centuries. What changed in the late twentieth century was not the technique but the target zone. Earlier cultures tended to remove underarm or leg hair. The twentieth century turned its attention to the mons pubis and the labia, areas that had previously been considered too intimate for commercial beauty work.

The migration into Australian salons happened through imported magazines, international film shoots, and a steady stream of returning travellers who had been waxed in Bali or Thailand. Brisbane's Fortitude Valley and Sydney's Kings Cross developed reputations for early adopters, while Adelaide salons were slower to add the service to their menus. By the early two thousands, the language had become standardised across the country: Brazilian, Hollywood, bikini line.

The rise of strip-spa chains and franchise waxing outlets accelerated the conversation by turning a once-niche service into a thirty-five dollar lunchtime appointment. As the cost dropped and the marketing imagery became more explicit, the question of who was opting in or opting out became harder to dodge.

The Feminist Argument Against the Standard

Critics of the trend point out that the sudden social pressure to remove pubic hair arrived at exactly the same moment that pornography became widely available on dial-up internet. Whether the change was driven by erotic imagery or simply used it as marketing fuel, the practical effect was a narrowing of what counted as an attractive vulva. Smooth became shorthand for desirable, hygienic, and even mature.

Feminist writers including Caitlin Fisher and Heather Wicks have argued that the Brazilian wax functions as a form of soft coercion. Women are rarely required to remove their hair by law, yet the social penalty for keeping it can include awkward comments at the beach, unwanted questions during a waxing appointment, or the strange silence that follows a partner encountering a body that does not match their late-night screen habits.

In this reading, the choice is real but loaded. A woman who keeps her hair is often treated as though she is making a statement, while a woman who removes it is treated as though she is simply maintaining a sensible default. That uneven attention is, in itself, a feminist concern.

How Australian Beach Culture Amplifies the Pressure

Australia's relationship with the beach adds a specific wrinkle. The country has one of the highest rates of swimwear-wearing public time in the world, and outdoor pools such as the Bondi Icebergs or the Melbourne City Baths carry an unspoken dress code that prizes grooming. Across the inner suburbs of Sydney, Melbourne, and increasingly Perth, the line between swimwear and underwear has blurred to the point where a quick trip to the shops in a bikini top barely registers.

This visibility shapes the conversation in ways that colder, more covered-up European nations do not experience. Australian women grow up overhearing mothers, aunts, and older cousins discussing waxing appointments before big holidays, school formals, and the summer Christmas street parties that define December in places like Fremantle or Manly. To never have that conversation at all is, statistically, unusual.

The cultural tilt is strong enough that some Australian dermatologists now report rising rates of folliculitis, contact dermatitis, and ingrown hairs in patients in their twenties and thirties, all linked to frequent intimate waxing or shaving paired with chlorine-heavy pool use and sun exposure.

Health Realities of Going Bare

The skin of the mons and labia is some of the most sensitive on the body, and removing hair from it carries real medical considerations. Waxing can cause tearing, especially when the skin is damp or the hair is short. Shaving invites micro-cuts and razor burn. Laser and IPL carry the risk of pigmentation changes, particularly on olive or darker Australian skin tones that tan easily under the harsh local UV.

Gynaecologists in Sydney and Melbourne have begun to flag the way repeated waxing alters the natural microbiome of the vulva, raising the risk of yeast infections and bacterial imbalance, especially when hair removal is paired with tight synthetic underwear or sweaty gym leggings. None of these risks rule out hair removal for anyone who genuinely enjoys the smooth feel, but they do push back against the idea that going bare is automatically cleaner or healthier.

A useful reframing is to treat hair removal as a cosmetic choice with cosmetic consequences. That reframe shifts the burden away from the individual who keeps her hair and onto the industry that profits from the assumption that bare is better.

Hair Removal Across the Lifespan

Conversation about body hair tends to focus on young, straight, cisgender women, yet the question affects a much wider group. Trans men, non-binary people, survivors of sexual trauma, wheelchair users, swimmers, dancers, and older women navigating menopause all sit inside a culture that has very rigid ideas about what hair should and should not exist.

A woman in her sixties who waxes regularly does so for very different reasons than a twenty-two year old heading to a hens night in Fortitude Valley. Likewise, an athlete in a swimsuit may approach the choice through the lens of speed and visibility, while a woman who has spent years shaving out of habit may simply be waiting for a quiet moment to ask herself whether she actually likes it. Exploring what your menstrual cycle can teach you about setting boundaries can open up surprisingly useful territory for thinking about these layered decisions.

The point is not that one of these choices is more enlightened than another. It is that flattening the conversation into a single youthful script ignores the realities of many bodies.

Reclaiming the Choice as an Adult

Feeling positive about whatever happens in the bathroom mirror usually starts with mapping the influences that got someone there in the first place. The partners, the magazines, the workplace, the family group chat, the comments from a mother or sister, all leave fingerprints. Naming them out loud is often the first move toward making the decision for real rather than by default.

Australian feminist educators in cities like Brisbane, Hobart, and Newcastle now run workshops that treat body hair as a literacy topic. Some are tied to local events that mix art, storytelling, and practical skills, including how to trim safely, how to shave without irritation, and how to push back against a waxing technician who tries to talk someone into a more thorough job than they came in for.

The wider project of Cherish The Cunt treats exactly this kind of consent and bodily literacy as part of its core mission, framing vulvas and pubic hair as worthy of celebration rather than shame or aggressive cosmetics.

A practical takeaway that travels well from Byron Bay to Perth is to treat the next hair removal decision the same way you would treat a wardrobe choice. Ask whose body you are dressing, what the occasion really demands, what the long-term skin cost looks like, and whether the person making the recommendation actually has any say in your knickers. Once the decision lands on your side of the mirror, it tends to stay there.