Gone today, hair tomorrow

Yesterday, my iso-beard felt normal. It wasn't itching, or catching on my scarf, it was just... there. So I called it: this is the day it has to go. 

When I started, this is what I asked myself: 

I'm so curious. Can I stand it? This might be my only chance to see what shape my chin-line is: am I full and shaggy or scrappy and wispy? There's so much beard action out there, shall I take this on as a feminist body-image art project or just a chance to give up my last act of conscientious grooming?

I thought about this a lot. I'm not a very hairy person, and the stuff I do have is like baby-hair: soft and fine. So scrappy and wispy was the bet. 

Actually, it surprised me. There were two distinct patches on either side of my chin that grew sort of coarse, curly and thick --  not total coverage like a man's beard, but distinctly beard-like, more so than the bum-fluff my son got at puberty. The hairs were annoying, and itchy, and I stroked them a lot as if to keep them contented. I also had 'weird hair' moments, some that I'd suspected from years of tweezing, and some that took me by surprise. I mapped them: 

a. Chin hair: single strong white hair under centre of chin. 

b. Mole hairs: old friends

c. Neck hairs: fine, long, dark, sparse. Usually plucked if I can see them but often get really long before I notice them. 

d. Single hair that came out of a scar under my bottom lip WTF

e. Moustache hairs, nestled in mouth corners, old nemeses. 

f. Thick clump of chin hair: strong, long, mix of brown and bright snowy white. Old friends, but they usually stagger their appearance so was shocked at exactly how many there were. 

g. Patches of fine long brown hairs. Suspected but rarely seen. 

This is how it looked: 

Oops, no, that's me with the Visiting Kitty. Although you can see a shadow on the left of the photo next to the golfball bit of my chin. That's it. 

This is how it actually looked, with apologies for photo quality, it was actually quite hard to capture because of the tonal extremes of the dark brown and the snowy white. None of them does it justice (but snaps to Megan Watson for trying in the colourful one). 

So it looks smaller than it FELT. OMG, especially when out in public, it felt huge. But by the end, I was wearing it without trying to hide it under my scarf or a face-mask, although I have been wearing a face-mask quite a lot because I've been nursing an early-Winter sniffle and it's just more urgent than polite to not spread your germs these days. 

I just decided to own it, wear it as a part of my face, and not look like I gave a shit. When I made demonstration videos for online teaching for my lovely art students, I only showed my hands, but my chin, from the side, would pop into frame at times, and it was definitely visible: a halo of fuzz with the light shining through it. 

I did some reading about facial hair on women. I had read a lot of things back in the 80s as a Womens Studies student and also backwards to the 70s, both decades a time when women debated their general appearance in much more nuanced and interesting ways than they do now. It all got killed by the declaration that You Can Be a Feminist and Wear Lipstick Too in the 1990s and it doesn't seem to have moved in any other direction except Fat Pride. Of course, in this Gender Fluid era, a beard (or absence of one) is the Golden Ticket to 'passing' as the gender you identify with. I think I would have been stared at a lot more in the last few weeks if I had dressed in a more feminine way, but as a dedicated adherent to the 'classic/retro butch' look, I probably just looked like I was in transition. All of which is good and fine. 

I looked at academic sources, but I was actually more curious about an everyday search. Here's the results of the Google search term WOMEN + "CHIN HAIR", done on 31/5/2020: 

Page	Contents
1	Top of the page is Healthline, with 'Chin Hair: causes, meaning and removal. The whole page is variations of this apart from a listicle by Cosmopolitan from 2017 saying that chin hair could mean SIX THINGS: You have PCOS, You are OLD, You are SICK, You are having a reaction to MEDICINE, You are FAT, You are ETHNIC. Ermaghad. Suddenly all the entries after that say 'WHY YOU ShOULD NEVER IGNORE CHIN HAIR'
2	More freak-outs about hormones, articles about the 'best way to secretly get rid of chin hair' and lots of ads for hair removal.
3	Lots of hair removal, one warning page and a hilarious link to Chin Hair Shutterstock images.
4	Lots of hair removal sites. I start noticing the terminology: UNWANTED. FINAL FRONTIER. STOP.
5	Etc etc. Highlight: When the battle of chin hairs becomes a war.  And an entire website called PREVENTION.com. Doesn't that just sum up everything?  HIRSUITISM
6	More personal ads, fewer 'clinical' ads. Things like 'HOW I GOT RID OF...' with an alt-text of [Brown skin girl before and after chin hair removal] And the appearance of my fave vomit word LADIES plus the holy grail of grooming motivation: EMBARRASSING
7	Back to the 'some hair is ok but...' warnings plus ooh! a CV-19 'story'.
8	The invasion of the Mommy-bloggers starts here with a Mamamia 'warning' article about not ignoring chin hair. Fasten your seatbelts, ladeez.
9	Lots of PCOS (Polycystic Ovaries Syndrome) articles, and lots of mommy articles, one from Canberra (scarymommy)   HORROR. DISGUST.
10	Hair removal ads, lots of vitamin ads. CLEAN. SMOOTH. SANITARY.
11 12 13	Same same, except for an interesting article on Jewish women and facial hair and a recurrence of the word HONEST
14	Ooh! Another CV-19 story, this time about lockdown, mostly talking about body hair because the target audience is fairly young.  REALITY.   PRESSURES.
15	Yay, now the feminist body-positive stuff starts appearing. Alongside hair removal ads, of course.   BODY-POSITIVE.
16	And here's an article that got me very excited until the last para, which I bet her editor made her add and made me throw a shoe across the room.... aaaaand then the list shifts to male issues.  ETHICS.

Well, that was exciting, wasn't it? Are you as shocked and awed as I am? SARCASM FONT where are you in my life? This is actually a good argument for digitising some of the early feminist and uni student newsletters and journals and collating fresh articles about historical attitudes towards these topics. Because if it ain't on the internet, it seems never to have happened in history, for a lot of youngsters. 

This is one of my favourite quotes out of that mosh, and it comes from an article spruiking “sugaring” as a way to remove body hair: “hair removal is a moral neutral, something that’s only important in the context of a system that assigns value based on adherence to norms.” Yes. Yes it is, but it's weird stating something like that and then turning around and making people think that they have to do it. 

I must, for the sake of transparency, state at the outset that this is not random facial hair. I had lots of wayward hormones and multiple and massive fibroids before they were ripped out many years ago, plus I'm getting older and I'm not thin. Hence my overwhelming curiosity at what I've been dealt. 

You actually know the reason why my beardie bits had to come off, I mentioned it in a recent post about my hair collection. It's nothing to do with feeling smooth (although I am stroking my bald chin lovingly at the moment because of the sheer novelty of it): it's to do with distraction. It just fricking distracted me, and that makes me cranky. I also missed the habit of tweezing, which has for a long time replaced smoking in terms of something to do while thinking. 

If I get to live to a ripe old age (and these days I'm starting to wonder if I actually want to), I now know what is going to happen to my face when I can't see to tweeze or I run out of f*cks about concentration levels. I'm ok with it.  And of course, I've kept my beard for my 'hair collects'. Because documentation is what, children? FUNDAMENTAL. Yep, I declare this iso-beard project a personal success.