'Bold' new underwear design suggests hair down there is back in fashion

Pubic hair on your nether regions is en vogue once again, if the latest product by shapewear label Skims is on to something.

Skims, the clothing brand run by reality TV star and businesswoman Kim Kardashian, has launched what it’s calling its most bold style yet.

“The ultimate bush. With our daring new faux hair panty, your carpet can be whatever color you want it to be," marketing for the new "faux hair micro string thong" reads.

The advertisement on social media platform Instagram shows a 70s Hollywood-style game show hosted by a man, with scantily clad women standing on podiums.

The host describes it as the “game-show that guesses whether the hair up there, matches the hair down there”.

This might seem shocking, and it is - because for centuries women have been told pubic hair is dirty, should be hidden, or not for public consumption, creating the cultural standpoint in the Western world - hairless is better.

Virginia Braun, a body hair expert and professor of psychology from Waipapa Taumata Rau/ the University of Auckland, has studied the topic for years.

“I’m shocked.. But I’m also not shocked," she says.

“It plays around with the idea we can be performative and playful in body hair, but by the same token, it is a place where body hair has been so problematised and real body hair is not something to be fun and to joke about."

She says the Skims product is an invitation to purchase yet another thing to change the female body.

“It contributes and feeds into the same sort of system of consumption and expense.

“Expense to remove body hair and then expense to play around with and replace body hair with one of these, and they just look like the very original old notion of merkins or pubic wigs, and probably a way more expensive one….

“Part of me just goes, why in 2025 do we need this?”

At a price of $NZ69, the 12 different styles with different shade variations and features (curly or straight) are sold out in all sizes from XXS to 4X.

Braun's 2013 New Zealand study found 86 percent of her female sample had removed pubic hair in their lifetime and 69 percent reported 'current' removal.

She thinks that’s because across history, women have been told and sold that’s what they need to do.

Advertisements in New Zealand newspapers in the early 1900s were more like instruction manuals on how to rid yourself of 'unsightly hair’.

"These were quite interesting,” Braun says, “because it was actually teaching people, 'this is disgusting', 'that is unattractive... a feminine woman shouldn't have leg hair’."

But the removal of body hair dates much further back - to prehistoric times.

Women in Ancient Greece thought body hair was for barbarians.

Historians think by the 1500s most European women were removing pubic hair. And some even replaced them with something called a ‘merkin’ which is like a pubic hair wig.

A search of local adult shop Peaches and Cream does not deliver any results for this product, suggesting they have gone out of fashion in the last 500 years.

But maybe Kim Kardashian’s Skims will be the one to do it.

Despite the faux fur underpants appearance of being natural, Braun says they're actually quite far from it.

“It’s a sort of tidied up and contained and, dare I say, feminised version of pubic hair, the kind of imagination of pubic hair, rather than a reality of pubic hair.”

Throughout the rest of their products, Skims models are gleamingly hairless.

Braun recalls a study sample from one of her students, who said they hoped pubic hair didn’t come back into fashion, because they’d had permanent laser hair removal.

“They were now in the situation where they had followed a kind of mandated practice of ‘so- called assumed desirable femininity’... and then suddenly they were kind of realising in this moment that, well, actually, that could all change again.“

"But here we have the Kardashians, producing a perfect alternative or an option for women who have found themselves in that situation. “

But this isn't necessarily a good thing.

“It’s the same narrative as there's a problem that needs to be made different about women's bodies.”