‘Full Bush In A Bikini’ Is Trending On TikTok. Here's Why It's A Thing.
We come bearing five words you never thought you’d hear together, but that Gen Z has made go viral nonetheless: full bush in a bikini.
In a TikTok video posted in early January, Gen Z artist Sujindah intones those words ― practically screams them ― at the viewer: “Full bush in a bikini!” she says excitedly. “Full. Bush. In. A. Bikini.”
The video, which has over 15.4 million views, was inspired by an Etsy review Sujindah saw a woman leave for a homemade bikini. In the review, the woman included a photo of herself wearing the swimsuit, with tufts of pubic hair coming out from the sides.
To forgo shaving, then casually drop a photo of your pubes on Etsy ― a site where stay-at-home moms and indie artisans sell knit hats and bespoke Taylor Swift friendship bracelets ― felt almost revolutionary to Sujindah.
“I got radicalized by that Etsy review, for real!” she says in the TikTok, without posting the Etsy review or the woman’s username, lest she blow up the woman’s spot.
The video struck a nerve for many women on TikTok, which didn’t surprise Sujindah.
“I think women are fed up,” the artist told HuffPost in an email interview. “Life under capitalism keeps getting harder, and we still have to dedicate time to shave or invest in monthly, painful hair removal treatments,” she said. “Why? To be considered appealing? To whom? To what an unevolved man wants? To accept the misogyny that gets recycled down from our mothers and peers?”
While Sujindah knows that feminism means women can choose to do whatever they want with body hair, she also believes “it’s important we examine the context” of what we collectively consider beautiful.
In the pictures of women’s bodies that I fell in love with on Tumblr from [the ’70s], women had bushes, so it was never something I felt needed to change in myself.Jessie Patrick-Hooper, a Gen Z-er who embraces body hair
She’s not the only Gen Z-er who feels that way. Many say they’re kind of over manicuring everything downthere, whether it’s through waxing, shaving or lasering it away. Many women in the age bracket say they’re more than happy with a little happy trail, visible armpit fuzz or an unkempt bikini line.
“I’ve always preferred to keep all of my body hair, even since I was young. It just feels beautiful to me,” said Jessie Patrick-Hooper, a 24-year-old who also posted about going “full bush in a bikini” on TikTok.
“I enjoy my soft female human animal body,” she told HuffPost. “Without my hair I don’t really feel connected to a more wild side of myself that I’m always trying to get closer to.”
It probably helps that Patrick-Hopper grew up browsing the feminist side of Tumblr, at a time when young women on the photo-centric blogging site were deep in the throes of a 1970s aesthetic obsession. In that era, women’s dress and body hair became the sites of cultural battles as part of the emerging second wave feminist movement.
“In the pictures of women’s bodies that I fell in love with on Tumblr, women had bushes, so it was never something I felt needed to change in myself,” she said.
It helped, too, that pop stars and even supermodels that people her age grew up seeing often eschewed shaving: Singer Miley Cyrus casually showed armpit hair at award shows, and model Emily Ratajkowski wrote a personal essay in Harper’s Bazaar that touched on the inherent feminism of doing whatever you want with your body hair.
Other Gen Z women on TikTok have shared what it’s really like to go “full bush in a bikini” in public, including Cherry, a 26-year-old content creator and model who asked to use her first name only in this piece to protect her privacy.
“This is what it’s like as a hairy girl who doesn’t shave to go to a European spa,” Cherry said in a TikTok video.
As she walks around the outdoor spa, Cherry admits that a few years ago she “would have been mortified to wear [her] bathing suit with an unshaved bikini line, hairy legs and no pedicure” in front of groups of strangers. Now, it’s no big thing.
The only real issue she had was a creeper who sneakily tried to take her picture, which another guest alerted her about.
“Besides that, it’s never been an issue in Europe or the U.S.,” Cherry told HuffPost. “Once I realized that no one cares, then I stopped being afraid of it. The hair sticks out the sides, and I don’t try to hide it. It is what it is.”
She, like some women who purposely don’t shave, feels like shaving it all off infantilizes her body: For her, an entirely hairless body brings to mind a prepubescent girl.
“The only women who are naturally totally body-hairless are under 12,” Cherry said. “I truly believe that shaving is supposed to make us seem youthful to men, and that’s disgusting. There’s really nothing ‘feminine’ about being hairless.”
And it’s not like most men have complaints about visible pubes. They’re just happy to see a woman naked.
In her TikTok video, Patrick-Hooper notes that she’s only ever had one partner take exception to her public hair, and only because he was new to sex and probably heavily influenced by the more airbrushed, tidy look he saw in porn.
“I genuinely think that men having a preference for shaven pubic hair is a sort of manufactured myth that we largely believe and then perpetuate amongst ourselves,” she said.
Patrick-Hooper said she’s reminded of Gustave Courbet’s “L’Origine du Monde,” an 1866 painting that features bold, in-your-face female genitalia. (The woman in that very NSFW-linked painting would absolutely show full bush in a bikini, had they existed.)
“It is warm and tender and beautiful, and painted by a man,” she said, noting that there’s a love and appreciation for women in the work, apparent even in the title: “The Origin of the World.”
“I think men who are into women are drawn to and love women’s bodies as they are,” she said. “And if they aren’t, either they’ll get over it, or you’re going to break up over him for not being able to get past you having your natural body hair, which, in my opinion, doesn’t seem like too much of a loss.”
Here’s what’s driving the pro-pube movement.
The pro-body hair movement ― this one, anyway, as the trend has come in waves in the last few decades ― is partly due to the pandemic, which had women second-guessing some of their more arduous or painful beauty habits: rising early to put on makeup before work, wearing a bra, keeping those regular waxing appointments.
But even before COVID, the beauty industry category for shaving body hair had dropped 5% in just one year back in 2019, according to market research company NPD Group.
Catering to tastes, a number of body haircare companies have sprouted up: Fur Oil offers products to soften pubic skin and hair, for instance, while another company, Fruit Pharm, sells a jojoba-based “Hooha Oil” at Walmart.
We should feel free to keep or remove our body hair if we want to, but I think women should have no delusions about the fact that the beauty industry relies on manufacturing insecurities and then profiting off of them.Jessie Patrick-Hooper, a 24-year-old who also posted about going “full bush in a bikini” on TikTok.
When you don’t shave, you shave down on spending, too. As gender and sexuality studies professor Rebecca M. Herzig notes in “Plucked: A History of Hair Removal,” over the course of a lifetime, American women who shave with razors (the cheapest way to rid yourself of hair) will spend, on average, more than $10,000 and nearly two entire months of their lives simply managing unwanted hair.
Women who choose to wax once or twice a month will spend more than $23,000 over the course of her lifetime (and this was all in 2008 dollars).
That’s not lost on Patrick-Hooper.
“We should feel free to keep or remove our body hair if we want to, but I think women should have no delusions about the fact that the beauty industry relies on manufacturing insecurities and then profiting off of them,” she said.
Growing body hair has long been associated with refusing and resisting patriarchal power, said Breanne Fahs, a professor of women and gender studies at Arizona State University, and the author of “Unshaved: Resistance and Revolution in Women’s Body Hair Politics.”
As Fahs previously told HuffPost, shaving in Western culture is a relatively new phenomenon. Prior to the 1920s, outside of the context of colonial conquest, women didn’t usually remove their body hair voluntarily.
Shaving for women came about in the early 1920s as a result of several different factors: “The advent of fashion photography, the end of WWI and men coming home with their (mandatory) razor kits, the 1918 pandemic moved bathing from communal settings to individual household bathrooms for middle-class households, and the Gillette razor company making a conscious decision to market razors to women and sell them on the ‘grossness’ of body hair in order to make money,” Fahs explained.
Since then, latter day feminists have argued that the expectation to be hairless is simply another effort to constrain women’s lives ― a mechanism of “gendered social control,” one exerted in proportion to women’s rising economic and political power, as Herzig writes in “Plucked.”
But there’s an interesting twist to that belief: While U.S. women acknowledge the unfair pressures on them to remove their hair, and say they believe other women are influenced by those gender norms, most say they’re motivated to shave or wax for other reasons: In other words, that’s why she does it, but not me.
“Women asked to explain their own hair removal habits instead point to increased sexual pleasure, attractiveness, and other goals of ‘self-enhancement,’” Herzig writes.
At the end of the day, studies suggest that the vast majority of women (90%) opt to remove underarm and leg hair. The figure for pubic hair grooming is about 80%.
Given those figures ― and the pervasiveness of the Brazilian wax since the ’90s ― just leaving it can be a radical act. While seemingly mundane, hair is often a site of political struggle and personal expression, said Samantha Kwan, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Houston and the co-author of “Under the Knife: Cosmetic Surgery, Boundary Work, and the Pursuit of the Natural Fake.”
“Think of Punk anti-establishment aesthetics ― bright colored, shaved or spiked hair ― and the natural hairstyles of African Americans to symbolize Black pride ― Afros, cornrows,” Kwan said.
The fact that the pro-body hair movement is having another resurgence just as Trump is taking office again has meaning, Kwan said. The first Trump administration paved the way for the undoing of federal abortion rights protection. Divesting from shaving for a partner, men or societal expectations is a way to wrestle back some bodily autonomy.
It’s precisely because these norms are socially constructed that they can be bucked, the professor said.
Pubic hair protest, Kwan added, could be seen as “a stand against hegemonic femininity norms of beauty and sexuality, the conservative powers that regulate them, or even the mainstream porn industry that reinforces the norm of hairless or shorn pubic hair and that has a longstanding history of exploiting women, normalizing violence against them, and promoting gender, racial, and ethnic stereotype.”
Fahs put it more simply: “When women feel their own disempowerment growing, they will use their bodies to revolt.”
Sujindah, the artist who created the first TikTok celebrating “full bush in a bikini,” said she recognizes that pube choices are the least of women’s collective, global problems right now.
But at the very least, burgeoning social trends give people the opportunity to question the norm, and ask themselves whether they’re doing something because it’s the expectation or because it feels truly authentic to them.
“After the ‘full bush’ social media posts have been dissected, at the end of the day it’s just about letting your body exist,” she said. “For me, it’s about seeing the beauty we as women have always naturally had.”