I stopped shaving and the internet lost it!
Unplugged is back!
⚡️In this newsletter:
The latest video
Video's cheat sheet
Note from the Unplugged team
Video's sources
What's next!?
📹 Video of the week:
I stopped shaving and the internet lost it
Well, the title pretty much says it all, hey!
Imagine making a personal decision about your body only to have strangers on the internet make comments about just how sickening your choice makes them feel. But how did we even get here? Exactly why do women shave and why do we have SO MANY opinions about people who don’t? We explore these questions in this week’s video!
📊 Video's cheat sheet
These figures particularly blew our minds this week…
$30,000
Is the average amount a woman will spend waxing their legs over the course of their lifetime…
$8,000
Is the average amount a woman will spend shaving their legs over the course of their lifetime…
8 weeks…
Is the amount of TIME women spend shaving over their lifetime!
Imagine how high these numbers and statistics were if they included the ENTIRE world population 🤯🤯🤯
📝 Note from Unplugged team
Unsurprisingly, propaganda and advertising have played a key role in bringing shaving into the zeitgeist of modern-day women. We looked at advertisements over the last 100 years, their key messages, how the imagery has changed over time, and how they made us (as women) feel about our bodies.
For a really great modern-day comparison between how razors are marketed differently to men and women, check out the two videos below. Some questions you might want to ask yourself are:
What words are repeated by the actors and what do these words mean?
What are the actors doing in the videos? Who are they with?
What music is used? How does it create a certain mood?
How is the act of shaving portrayed differently in each video?
We have also included a small gallery below of some of the older newspaper clippings we collected for the video. With hindsight, we think these ads are quite funny, but at the time they were published they were very effective in playing to women’s insecurities.
📚 Video's key sources
Marlen Komar, Bustle, The Sneaky Manipulative History of Why Women Started Shaving, 2016
Marlen Komar, Bustle, Photos Of Shaving Ads From The Last 100 Years, 2016
Rebecca M. Herzig, Plucked: A History of Hair Removal, 2015
Kirsten Hansen, Hair or Bare?: The History of American Women and Hair Removal, 1914-1934, 2007
Lauren R. Harrison, Shaving and Fashion: A Storied History, 2010
Gabrielle Moss, Bustle, Pubic Hair Trends, From Ancient Greece To Today, 2014
Shivali Vora, New York Times, It’s Just Hair, 2021
Jill Burke, Did Renaissance Women Remove their Body Hair?, 2012
Phil Edwards, Vox, How the beauty industry convinced women to shave their legs, 2015
🚀 What's next!?
And that’s it from us this time! We will be back very soon with another instalment of Unplugged (the next video is a secret!). In the meantime, stay tuned to our Instagram for the latest updates.
This is a young project in its first year, we are super curious to hear your reaction, feedback, and thoughts, so do not hesitate to write us back to this email.
Thanks for being part of the unplugged tribe ❤
It's amazing how we all just shave without much thought. While watching your video, The Capital in the Hunger Games kept popping up in my mind. All the "elites" in the Capital were basically hairless minus dyed hair on their heads.
I led yoga for years and when a student who didn't shave, including men with chest hair, joined class, inevitably another student would complain to me. It was so bizarre to me why anyone cared, and also did they expect me to hand out razors as part of a yoga class?
As a bald headed woman, I couldn't care less about hair! And those figures are insane. Never in my lifetime.