The (gendered) history of the shaver

The history of the shaver
John Francis O’Rourke applied for a patent on the first electric shaver in the United States in 1898. Sales weren’t very good, though, and it wasn’t until 1931 that Jacob Schick launched the first successful shaver. Schick was a colonel in the US Army and it was the mechanism of a machine gun that gave him the idea of developing an electric razor. The ‘Schick Magazine Repeating Razor Company’ created a shaver that loaded blades into the device itself. It also enabled you to shave without hot water and soap. The device was powered by a separate motor attached to the shaving head by a cable but the company soon integrated the motor in the handy device itself. In the late 1930s, the American manufacturer Remington then developed the shaving foil, which proved to be an important innovation. By fitting a thin layer of perforated foil above the razor, the skin could be protected during shaving. The principle of the design hasn’t changed to this day. The same goes for the rotary shaver that Philips developed in 1939, which is still widely used.

Gendered market for shavers
The first electric razors, including Jacob Schick’s, were aimed at men as a convenient way of shaving their chins, upper lips and cheeks. But it wasn’t just men who used shavers, women did too. Manufacturers swiftly recognized the market opportunities for female shaving products. Gillette, for instance, launched its ‘Milady Décolleté’ safety razor in 1910. The company offered the perfect solution to women’s ‘embarrassing’ body hair. In those days, it was actually their forearms that they were most likely to shave: smooth legs were not yet the norm and were still hidden beneath stockings. This would soon change, however: by 1940, it was already much more common for a woman in the United States to show her smooth legs. And it had even become the norm by 1950 for women to shave their legs and also their armpits. In the decades since, more and more women have begun to shave their pubic hair too.

Price
The opening up of the female market for shaving products meant that something else changed as well, namely the relative prices. Research by Atria, an institute for women’s history, shows that women pay substantially more than men for the same product. Shaving foam ‘for men’ is no less than 25% cheaper than foam ‘for women’. The difference between them? The colour of the can: shaving foam for men often comes in dark-blue or grey cans, while foam aimed at women is packaged in pastel colours. This phenomenon has been referred to as a ‘pink tax’. By playing on male and female stereotypes and then offering different products for them, companies make more money from female grooming products. The same goes for the shaver, which now comes in all sorts of men’s and women’s versions.

One of the better-known examples is the Philips LadyShave: a shaver that works the same way as ‘male’ devices. There’s just a slight difference in shape, which allows the device to follow the ‘contours of the female body’, the knee and armpits, more effectively. In other words, the design assumes that women depilate the whole of their bodies. Smooth legs, arms and armpits are considered ‘feminine’. Men don’t have to worry about such things. They mostly shave just their faces, given that body hair is associated, after all, with masculinity.

Resistance against the social norms around body hair
Feminists have been battling this double standard for decades. They find the socially imposed norm of hairlessness oppressive for women. The ‘male gaze’, which determines how women interact with their bodies, is fundamental to this. Viewed from this perspective, body hair is unattractive, unfeminine and even unhygienic. All the same, national and international celebrities are increasingly appearing in public with body hair. The LGBTQIA+ community has played a key role in this regard: by shrugging off norms surrounding gender and sexuality – and treating body hair, its removal and its styling as a matter of personal expression – it has called the male gaze into question. The idea that body hair is a natural part of being human (and hence of all genders) is liberating. Some shaving brands have recognized this too. The Billie company, for instance, sells gender-neutral shaving and grooming products and points out on its website that hairlessness is not the norm.

All the same, visible body hair is not perceived the same way for everyone. Some feminists have therefore called for an intersectional normalization of body hair, which means that not only gender, but other factors such as faith and skin colour have to be discussed too. A celebrity like Miley Cyrus, for example, might be praised for having the ‘courage’ to let her armpit hair grow, but women of colour report a very different reality. According to the writer Nadya Agrawal, white women are less likely to receive negative reactions to their body hair than women of colour, because they have less of it or else it is lighter coloured. The same goes for white men with facial hair: unlike Muslim men and men of colour, they are less likely to experience a negative response to their beards. Since 9/11, dark beards have regularly been associated with terrorism in Europe and the United States, with the result that bearded men of colour often find themselves treated in a racialized way.

The future of the shaver
Removing beards, moustaches, armpit hair, pubic hair and leg hair or leaving it to grow are subject to social and cultural standards. Although feminists and the LGBTQIA+ community have enjoyed increasing success in combating the socially imposed ‘body-hair ideal’, manufacturers continue to sell millions of razors specifically aimed at ‘men’ or ‘women’. A few, more progressive brands supply gender-neutral shaving products. What the future of the shaver will bring remains uncertain. But it is safe to say that facial hair and body hair will always have a part to play in human life.