Long, long ago, and far away, a caveman had the bright idea of taking two sea shells held together to pluck the hairs from his face. Such was born the first body hair remover.

Woman Body Hair Remover at Bikini Beach

To Egyptian males, a clean face was a status symbol. Both male and female Egyptians preferred a smooth pubic region and often plucked their pubic hair to give it an appealing shape.

It’s known that Julius Caesar had his facial hairs plucked.

From the mid-Fifteenth Century through Elizabethan times, women plucked their front hairs to have a high forehead. In the 1700s, Native Americans used two clam shells held together and electronic tweezers were developed during the late 1950s.

Tweezing

Tweezing is a method still used today mostly by females for their eyebrows, although there have been reports that some people still use tweezers on their pubic area. There’s evidence that cavemen also used a sharpened rock or flint blade as a body hair remover.

Because of the extreme heat, both Egyptian men and women shaved their heads. Razors of sharpened bronze have been found in tombs dating back 3,000 years ago. Greek, Roman, and Asian women shaved their pubic region. Even in India, chest and pubic hair were shaved. Ancient Chinese, Greek and Roman erotic art from thousands of years ago are proof that some form of body hair remover was being used in the pubic area by both males and females.

Razors

In 1762, a French barber designed the first safety razor. There was a real hair removal revolution when a razor with disposable blades was created in 1903.

A wet razor continues to be the most used body hair remover today. An alternative tool we now know as a depilatory, (from the Latin, “completely deprive of hair”), sugaring, was also used thousands of years ago.

Depilatories

In Europe during the early eighteenth century, homemade depilatories as a body hair remover included applying a paste made of “quick lime”, a caustic substance from limestone or shells that develops active, burning properties when mixed with water, and basically, burns the hair off.

North American women in the 1700’s used poultices of caustic lye to burn away hair.

Powdered depilatories as a body hair remover were marketed in the United States by 1844.

Wartime shortages of stockings meant legs went bare. The result was the first modern body hair remover depilatory in 1940.

The depilatory is still used for certain parts of the body today.

Waxing

Derived from the ancient process of sugaring, the wax strip body hair remover appeared in the late 1960s.

Another to remove unwanted hair is sugaring, warm/hot wax arrived in the 1980s from Australia.

To remove unwanted hair, waxing remains a mainstay.

Electrolysis

In the late 1800s, physicians developed a device that involved inserting and twisting a barbed needle with sulfuric acid into the hair follicle. The precursor of our modern-day electrolysis.

And nowadays, we even have the body hair remover method of laser treatments, which is quite controversial at best.