They handled me like a carcass!’: why are so many men now ‘manscaping’?

Whether it’s a smooth-chested Tom Daley or the full ‘boyzilian’ around the private parts, men are now depilating in droves. Is it worth it? I sent my husband for a wax to find out

Zoe Williams

Zoe Williams

Thu 29 Aug 2024 05.00 BST

You may have seen the adverts before the Paris Olympics. Tom Daley, in what Pink News called a “thirsty” campaign for Gillette, is in his skimpy trunks, washboard abs and … almost no body hair. The new razor for more intimate body parts is, Daley said on Instagram, “for when it really, really matters”. This is fair enough – he is a diver, after all. But then why is footballer Jude Bellingham, modelling Skims underwear, also apparently hairless? And has Love Island banned male body hair altogether?

Hairless men are nothing new, of course. But what makes Daley’s Gillette advert a break from the hairless men of adverts past is that – between the tiny trunks and the close-up footage – the picture invites you to think that this is more than just a trim of unwanted tuftiness: the modern man now shaves everything. “More and more guys across the UK are grooming their intimate area,” a spokesperson for Gillette said, launching the range, “but until today we didn’t offer products with purpose-built features for such a sensitive and complex job.”

Sensitive, complex – yes, I can see that applies physically. But intimate male grooming – or “manscaping” as it’s known – is also culturally sensitive and complex. Nearly half of all British men regularly shave their bodies, according to Mintel. There’s a youth bias, predictably; that same UK research shows 57% of 16- to 24-year-old males trim their pubic hair. And while some women have been shaving or plucking or laser-removing or waxing for centuries, how did we get to a point where men have decided that body hair is their problem, too?

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Smooth operator … Tom Daley for Gillette. Photograph: Gillette

“Gay men for a long time were waxing their chests and trimming their pubic hair,” says Silva Neves, a London-based sex and relationship therapist. “That’s definitely for aesthetics. There is a sense of perfectionism in the gay male scene, and a hairless torso would be considered perfect, just as hairless women are traditionally considered perfect for the male gaze.” In 2012, David Beckham appeared in underwear ads for H&M; of course you couldn’t see whether he’d had his crack and sack waxed, but everything you could see had been depilated. This was considered to spur a gay-to-straight crossover and suddenly everyone wanted a “boyzilian” like Beckham. A survey by Lovehoney, a sex toy company, later found that eight in 10 men under 35 did regular rudimentary manscaping (a trim with a pair of scissors).

Balls.co, purveyor of ball-shavers and body-grooming apparatus, was founded in 2018 by Matt Edge and Tyler Ball, who said they were inspired after a relative confessed to them he trimmed his nethers with a pair of kitchen scissors. Its chief executive, James Weiss, bought the company for an undisclosed sum at the back end of Covid, and will only say business is going “very, very well”. The boom in the manscaping market is part of a wider surge in spending on male grooming, up 77% year-on-year to last January.

Still, there is a certain taboo around manscaping. For the purposes of this article, I have spoken to men who get everything waxed, and men – one man, I love this man – who says he shaves his armpits so he doesn’t have to buy deodorant as often. But not one of the many salons I approached to ask if I could visit to see what was happening would agree to have me (I guess they must have some kind of Hippocratic oath?). Eventually, I had to make my husband go undercover and get his crack waxed. Relax – there is absolutely zero chance I’m not going to tell you how that went.

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‘A lot of the actors we see now tend to be hairless, and it’s a mindset that doesn’t necessarily reflect sexual preferences.’ Illustration: Claudia Chanhoi/The Guardian

Before that, a bit on why and how we got here. It does not appear to be a pornification story – the aesthetics of pornography migrating into the mainstream and affecting what we do with our bodies. “I don’t think it’s nearly as much related to porn as one might guess,” Weiss says. “When we were first looking at this business, I thought: this is going to be 15- to 24-year-old men, lad culture, trying to look as big as possible. That’s not the primary customer set.”

Rather, Neves says, these are actually quite mainstream aesthetics. “A lot of the actors we see now tend to be hairless, and it’s a mindset that doesn’t necessarily reflect sexual preferences.” That’s borne out by a 2021 YouGov survey, in which 51% of women said they actively disliked it when men removed all their pubic hair. That leaves a lot of women who do like a hairless man, though. Alex, 33, got his first crack and sack wax last month, having previously “shaved everything down there, maybe once every two or three months, and got a bit fed up with it”. He does it because his wife likes it – “the less hair down there the better. It doesn’t make a difference to me.” He’s extremely pleased with the results, and has already rebooked.

Even if trimming, grooming and plucking aren’t what everyone wants, they definitely reflect what we think we want from each other. In 2017 an American study of 7,500 adults found that “the majority of men report grooming in preparation for sexual activity with a peak prevalence of 73% among men aged 25 to 34 years”. It’s not about making sex more pleasurable, but more about looking like you’ve made an effort. Which is a bit of a dicey game; manners are nice, but too much perfectionism is anhedonic. “If you really worry about how good you look while you’re having sex, you’re moving away from the pleasure sensation that’s happening in your body,” Neves says. “You can actually have pretty boring sex, if the connectivity is not felt.”

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Jude Bellingham in his Skims. Photograph: @judebellingham/Instagram

If you’re wondering how dating standards changed, from it being totally normal to turn up as nature made you to a degree of topiary being standard – well, that has partly tracked the homogenisation of dating itself, via the apps. Maybe I’m wrong, but I feel sure that, before Bumble and Tinder, most women wouldn’t have gone out with an expectation of how neat someone’s pubes would turn out to be, still less infer from that whether or not he was a decent guy.

On social media generally, Weiss says, “influencers are so relevant. No question in my mind, if we think about the impacts that have driven the growth of this business, it is about the availability of information. Instagram and TikTok have enabled so many different niches of customer need to be satisfied through custom-built product demand.”

But not everything, not even everything about pubic hair, is about sex: “A much more relevant customer segment is the athlete,” Weiss says. That doesn’t just mean Olympians, but anyone who is working to get better at their sport. “There are plenty of people who have been shaving their legs, their thighs, their groins, their chests, for years,” Weiss says, “for biking, for swimming, for performance. This side of personal grooming is really significant.” He says it also generates a lot of knowledge exchange. Weekend fitness warriors can talk about their performance for ever; they can lose an afternoon debating the merits of an energy drink, so a possible remedy for groin-chafing is definitely up for discussion.

So there are men who trim their balls to be polite for a second date, men who shave their inner thighs to get less drag on a bike and men who wax their chests because they think Bellingham does – but Weiss says the men who will go to a salon for complete hair removal are still the outliers. He doesn’t see waxing as a huge challenger to the trimmer market yet. “For most men, it’s not something they’re willing to invest the time and money into, and there’s always the vaguely homophobic thing: ‘I don’t want another person down in those parts.’”

Yet we know men are getting boyzilians, because salons do offer them. My main worry, when I asked my husband to do it, is that he’d come back sketchy on the detail, the way (some) men are when you ask them what the dog-sitter said, or why their parents divorced. Oh boy. No, he was not sketchy: “In my whole life as a man I have never felt so exposed and on display.” Right. I forgot this about men: he’s never had a smear test or a mammogram, he’s never had his eyebrows plucked, he’s never even had his legs waxed. “I have never been handled like that. Like a carcass!” Do men even take their clothes off, except for when something fun is about to happen (sex, or swimming, or going to sleep)? Not really, I don’t think. I have put myself in the most astronomical debt to him, for an article. And, um, did it hurt? Something else I forgot – he’s had his share of headaches, but he’s never had, like, you know, pain pain. He’s never given birth. It would have been worse if it was his back, the waxer told him, and the most painful area is the chest.

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Beckham fans queue outside a London branch of H&M in 2012 to get their hands on the footballer’s branded pants. Photograph: Sarah Lee/The Guardian

He takes a deep breath, for this unbroken soliloquy: “The hot wax goes on; it’s only just too hot to be pleasant. Then it hits the arsehole and it’s way over the line. If I had to put the pain in order it would be: the astringent added after, the indignity of the position, hot wax on my actual anus, Rock DJ coming on to Radio 2 and then the ripping bit.” Later that day, I was telling a hairdresser about the crack wax, and she said, “You’ve made my day,” and I said, “That’s nothing, I made his hole weak!” Never seen that old chestnut out in the wild before. I felt like the world’s best truffle pig.

To look on the bright side, that sounds like a very professional job of manscaping, unlikely to leave long-term effects which, the Daily Mail recently reported, could include gangrene: it’s a bit of a slippery slope notion, but all the individual steps make sense. First, men tend to shave their own pubic areas, rather than going to a wax technician; so they do it wrong, perhaps using blades that are too sharp, which can lead to folliculitis, where hair follicles get inflamed. There’s also a lot of bacteria in the area, increasing the risk of infection. But the worst case scenario is Fournier gangrene, which eats the flesh of the scrotum, penis and perineum, and is caused by minute wounds in a moist environment. God knows I’m not a doctor, but if I were in the business of dispensing medical advice, I’d say, definitely go to a salon or, at a bare minimum, get a Gillette. That’s what Tom Daley would do.

Does this represent a more equal world, where men put themselves through the same things women do, with the same aim of pleasing a gaze that may exist, or may have been invented by shaving companies? Is this a more sophisticated understanding of gender and sexuality, where body confidence is not about how male or female you look, how gay or straight, but about how you you look? I don’t know yet. Much more field work needed.

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