
The modification and removal of body hair has been going on for centuries, but our reasons for it have evolved. Some believe it’s more hygienic to remove, others argue it’s against our nature to be so hairless. Norman and Tegan trim the evidence on body hair: leg, armpit, pubic and even inside your nose. References: Trends in body hair removal as depicted through art Getting plucked: the history of hair removal - ABC Effects of pubic hair grooming on women’s sexual health: a systematic review and meta-analysis Bare necessity? Public health implications of removing pubic hair Effect of Physical and Chemical Hair Removal Methods on Skin Barrier Function in vitro: Consequences for a Hydrophilic Model Permeant Using the Hair Removal Laser in the Axillary Region and its Effect on Normal Microbial Flora Shaving of axillary hair has only a transient effect on perceived body odor pleasantness Cadaver research leads to prestigious science award - the Science Show Does nasal hair (vibriss...
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Jacinta Boaler
ABC Listen, podcasts, radio, news, music and more.
Dr. Norman Swan
If this thing is built, it will be a miracle to behold.
Jacinta Boaler
One of science's biggest promises.
Dr. Norman Swan
It would be like the Wright Brothers moment.
Jacinta Boaler
Governments, spies, billion dollar investments and scientific rivalries.
Dr. Norman Swan
The control that's required is rivaled only by what God did in creating the universe.
Jacinta Boaler
Will quantum computers change everything. I'm Jacinta Boaler. Search for science dead and alive on ABC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts. Norman, how many hours a week do you think you devote to body hair maintenance?
Dr. Norman Swan
Not that much, but I do spend some time because I've got a beard, so I'd probably trim the beard two or three times a week.
Jacinta Boaler
Just in general. I'm just going to make a gross generalisation. Men have it so good when it comes to how much they have to think about their body hair compared to women.
Dr. Norman Swan
Do you ever have to do it?
Jacinta Boaler
I mean, what's going to happen to
Dr. Norman Swan
you if you don't?
Jacinta Boaler
The optionality of conforming to societal beauty standards. Man. We are opening a can of worms today here on what's that? Rash. But I'm actually excited for it.
Dr. Norman Swan
Good, because I have my prejudices here.
Jacinta Boaler
All right, well, let's get into it. We are talking body hair today on what's that Rash?
Dr. Norman Swan
The show where we answer the health questions that simply everyone's asking.
Jacinta Boaler
So today we have questions from two people. Arthur and Eddie have both emailed us. Norman. Arthur says, I have seen that in some men's barbershops they offer waxing of ears, eyebrows and noses.
Dr. Norman Swan
Do you know what they do with noses?
Jacinta Boaler
What do they do?
Dr. Norman Swan
Well, I've seen it. Wouldn't let them touch me with it. Is they Dip a cotton tip into hot wax, then stick it up your nose, twist and pull.
Jacinta Boaler
It sounds eye watering.
Dr. Norman Swan
Eye watering doesn't come close, I suspect.
Jacinta Boaler
Well, actually, eye watering is the word that Arthur uses. His letter continues, I had it done once and after the eye watering effect of the procedure had passed, the difference was amazing. I could breathe so much easier. Arthur says, but my daughter told me that this is a bad thing to do and so I've not done it again. As fathers must always do what their daughters say. So how important is nose hair? And also relatedly, Norman, from a scientific perspective, must fathers always do what their daughters say?
Dr. Norman Swan
Well, you're an hope into nothing if you don't, I'll tell you.
Jacinta Boaler
Your daughters would say yes. And Eddie says, what about body hair? In some countries, body hair, especially in the armpit or in the groin area, are removed for various reasons. Some of those reasons are supposedly health or hygiene related, especially as hair traps sweat. Is there a recommended practice from dermatologists or others from the medical fraternity? Please. I also understand that the removal of nasal hair by, say, waxing is not recommended. Ouch. Norman, these two emails have been such a gift to you and me. We are both so excited to talk about hair today.
Dr. Norman Swan
Yeah. And rather than just let my prejudice hang there because people might misread my prejudice, I'll say one more thing.
Jacinta Boaler
Like an errant nostril hair.
Dr. Norman Swan
Well, that's what it is. I just. So some men have like forests growing out of their nose and their ears and I thought, why? You know, it doesn't take much to actually reduce the forest.
Jacinta Boaler
What do you do?
Dr. Norman Swan
So I remove ear hair and I just have a little machine that goes bzz bz bzz at the front of my nose. But I don't go too high up. So there's no forest ever growing out of my nose.
Jacinta Boaler
That's partly how they measure your biological age, I think. I know you're super into the anti aging stuff.
Dr. Norman Swan
Do you have nose hair tick? You're 85 years old.
Jacinta Boaler
How many millimetres does your nose hair protrude out of your nose?
Dr. Norman Swan
That's right. Well, zero is my case negative.
Jacinta Boaler
So I am interested to pick up on a couple of the words that Eddie uses in that email. This around health and hygiene and other sort of cultural reasons. Because I feel like when we're talking about body hair, well, if we're talking about any hair, we're kind of coming to like a coalescing of beauty standards and ideas around hygiene and then actual health information, of which there are more studies than I expected in this space, which we will get into. And it feels like hair just feels very culturally important. You're meant to have it in some places, you're not meant to have it in others. The hairs that you do have are meant to be a certain length, they're meant to be a certain condition. Finding a disembodied hair is about the weirdest thing you can find. We truly love to get very, very weird about hair.
Dr. Norman Swan
And it's kind of. I woke up to this subject just about a week ago, taking two very young kids to a dinosaur exhibition and didn't realize that dinosaurs actually had vestigial feathers.
Jacinta Boaler
Did you know that?
Dr. Norman Swan
And they look a bit like. Well, you know, they look like birds.
Jacinta Boaler
Yeah, yeah.
Dr. Norman Swan
You know, and you wonder. Well, it's vestigial. Probably didn't do the dinosaurs much good when it came to the bit.
Jacinta Boaler
Well, they died, didn't they?
Dr. Norman Swan
They did.
Jacinta Boaler
That's what you get for having feathers.
Dr. Norman Swan
Yeah, that's right. But anyway, I digress. We digress.
Jacinta Boaler
We are going to continue to digress,
Dr. Norman Swan
I think, but the point I'm making is whether or not we're talking about an evolutionary. Some vestige of evolutionary development or something that's functional. I mean, I think that's at the core of these questions.
Jacinta Boaler
That's a really interesting point. Like, humans are mammal, which means we have skin and fur or hair. And some mammals have a lot of hair and it obviously does have an important function for them. Like, for example, if you're a polar bear, your fur is doing a really, really important job in keep your body warm. Humans mostly hairless. It's harder to sort of know exactly what the function is of it. Beyond cultural functions, which we will get into. I'm also really interested to talk about how far back hair removal goes. It feels like a very modern thing to do, and it is. But there's pretty good evidence that humans have been removing hair for basically as long as we've had historical information.
Dr. Norman Swan
Yeah, because cave paintings, apparently.
Jacinta Boaler
Right, right. So there's. I mean, it's hard to extrapolate from cave paintings, but there are cave paintings that date back to like 30,000 BCE, and it shows men without facial hair, so presumably it was being removed somehow. It's also in art. Like art is a really important way for us to know this because it's. We didn't have photos. This is what you get. These are the visual representations you get. Greek and Egyptian civilizations showed hairless faces and hairless bodies and you get this sort of idea. Of maybe how they did it as well through those artefacts. And in the Greek times, at least, there's a sense of hygiene associated with it. This. The idea was that infestations with parasites maybe were to do with hair, and if you remove the hair, then you were less likely to get lice and that sort of thing.
Dr. Norman Swan
But interestingly, pubic hair did survive in many of these cultures.
Jacinta Boaler
I think something that's interesting about artistic depictions of anything is that you're not necessarily capturing something as it is, you're capturing something as you wish it was, or that you sort of feel like you're allowed to depict. And the reason I'm getting kind of philosophical about this is because there's this particular painting by Goya, a Spanish artist in 1800, and it's called La Maja des Nuda, and it's a woman who's lying back on some sheets and there's sort of a pair of paintings. One of them she's closed in a similar position, and then one of them she's naked. But it's like the first depiction in Western art of female pubic hair. And I wonder whether it is truly that everyone was removing it, or whether perhaps there was something around the depiction of it that felt naughty or too explicit in some sort of way. And this. This was a really controversial painting at the time.
Dr. Norman Swan
And then, you know, you've got photography coming in and pornography coming in. And while, you know, again, there was this contradiction going on, underarm hair in women was considered erotic and then not erotic. And a lot of fashion is deployed here.
Jacinta Boaler
Yeah. And again, I think it's this sort of push and pull between depicting things as they are, which is what you're doing in photography, and then also kind of creating standards that other people want to meet. And so as soon as you've got sort of a way of capturing someone's body on camera, you have this ability to sort of show a body to a bigger audience than it would normally be received by. And you can also do that classic marketing thing of creating a problem and then creating a solution to it, which is what happened. We've talked about this in our deodorant episode, this idea of basically creating this self consciousness around the way your body smells and then being like, ta da, we've got this thing that's going to fix it for you. And in a similar way, a lot of the fashion magazines mostly targeted at women from, like the early 20th century, like 1915, that's how early we're talking, are kind of looking at hair Unwanted body hair as this sort of scourge, this real, like, disfiguring thing that must be fixed.
Dr. Norman Swan
And some would argue that we are at peak hair removal right now.
Jacinta Boaler
I mean, probably it's very easy to remove a lot of hair. There's lots of ways that you can do it permanently now and we can get into in a little while about the sort of techniques that we used back in the day. It's probably safer than it used to be. Which I guess brings me to this idea of safety, like, health wise. Do we have a clear idea as to whether a hairless or less hairy body is cleaner than a hairy one?
Dr. Norman Swan
Well, let's start with the nose.
Jacinta Boaler
Let us indeed start with the nose,
Dr. Norman Swan
because that's had a bit of research, not always the best research attached to it. So the idea here is that your nose hairs are there to capture rubbish that's coming in from outside, capture infections, capture allergens. And the idea is that it might help to prevent infection or even reduce allergen load if you've got a tendency to asthma. And the research has gone backwards and forwards on this. And of course, it depends on how much you're removing. So there is some research that suggests if you remove. If you've got a lot of nasal hair and you remove it, you get better airflow. The question is whether.
Jacinta Boaler
Well, that's what Arthur said in his email to us, that he had this nose waxed and he could suddenly breathe.
Dr. Norman Swan
Yeah. The question is, what do you lose by that? And the evidence goes backwards and forwards on this. If you actually look at the physics of this and the size of particles, nose hair is going to capture big things that are not so microscopic and be obvious, like dust. That's right. If you've ever been sanding things, you know, it does go up your nose, unless you're wearing a mask.
Jacinta Boaler
And then when you blow it, it all comes out again and you're like, disgusting.
Dr. Norman Swan
But viruses and allergens tend to be small and probably escape the hairs. And so the evidence goes backwards and forwards as to whether removing all your nose hair is bad for asthma, is bad for allergens, is bad for infection, and the evidence isn't conclusive. And I suppose where you would land here, just to get past the nose hair thing, is if you're going to trim your nose hair, you just trim it in that very outside part of your nostril and you're leaving the hair that's inside to do whatever job it was designed to do on the hairs
Jacinta Boaler
that you're Leaving there. One of my favourite pieces of research in this space was, was about figuring out how many nose hairs we actually have. So this actually won an Ig Nobel prize in 2023. You know, the prizes that they make you laugh and make you think. Anyway, the researchers realised that when they were looking at anatomy textbooks, they couldn't see any detail on nose hair. They didn't know how many hairs there were, they didn't know how far back in the nose they went. And so they decided it was their job to investigate this and put an end to the question marks that have plagued nose hair knowledge on living people or dead. Great question, Norman. They did it on cadavers. So they, among other things, they sourced some cadavers and counted their nose hairs and found that the human nostril has between 112 and 120 hairs in it. I realized I should have made you guess. I think when I saw. I would have thought more. I thought that too. I thought it would be more. I don't know how many more. It's not a huge piece of real estate and inside of a nostril, but I really did think there'd be more than 120 in there.
Dr. Norman Swan
And the current theme in this WhatsApp rash is going to be the health risk is probably more from removing the hair. The process of removing the hair rather than being left with no hair.
Jacinta Boaler
Yes.
Dr. Norman Swan
You do not want to get a tissue infection inside your nose. Not a pleasant thing and sometimes difficult to treat.
Jacinta Boaler
Yeah. Inside your nose and maybe other places that people are removing hair as well, which I suppose leads us to STIs. If you're doing pubic hair removal down
Dr. Norman Swan
below, as they would say. So this is men as well as women are doing this.
Jacinta Boaler
It's actually very, very common. So we do have data on how many people are removing pubic hair or doing things to their pubic hair. 30% of women, 10% of men are removing all of their pubic hair. 65% of women and men engage in some degree of pubic hair removal. And so that's a. Again, it's hard to know whether they're just trimming those hairs or if they're going right down to the skin. But once you are going down to the skin, you're potentially damaging the skin along the way.
Dr. Norman Swan
Yeah. So there have been studies of, for example, sexually transmissible infections and pubic hair removal, finding that maybe there is an increased rate of STIs in pubic hair removal, but they're not well conducted studies and have not Adjusted for sexual activity. So it's hard to know whether because you remove pubic hair, you're more likely to have sexual intercourse, for example, and therefore be more exposed to sexual transmission infections. And it's hard to see how really how removal of pubic hair is going to increase your risk of gonorrhea and so on. It's going to come from sexual activity. So you'd have to take that with heaps of. But like, let's say, pinch of depolitory.
Jacinta Boaler
I was going to ask, though, like, anyone who's ever shaved or waxed knows that you are not leaving behind perfectly intact skin every single time. Sometimes it can be irritated or you can nick yourself. And that is always going to be a potential site for an infection to enter, whether it's an STI or just a normal other non sexually transmitted infection.
Dr. Norman Swan
Yeah, and we're going to have a link to the American Academy of Dermatology. It's got a very good set of instructions in terms of hair removal, how to make it safer, and then in terms of health consequences. We know that hair and hair follicles are places where bugs live, bacteria, fungi, viruses and so on. In other words, your external microbiome. And the question is whether removing hair, just plucking it or shaving it, or indeed laser therapy is changing the microbiome in a good way or a bad way.
Jacinta Boaler
Right. So we were talking about pubic hair before. I don't know about those studies, but armpit hair and armpit smells have been much more extensively studied than I expected them to be. So there's quite a few different studies that we found where people. People had shaved armpits or non shaved armpits or shaved armpits that were then allowed to grow.
Dr. Norman Swan
Yeah, they had one armpit shaved, one armpit not.
Jacinta Boaler
And then they got women to sniff the armpits and then decide whether not only the quality of the smell but also the attractiveness of the smell was part of what they were searching for there as well.
Dr. Norman Swan
So there's pheromones sitting in this story as well.
Jacinta Boaler
Definitely. We'll definitely come back and do pheromones at a later date and do it properly. And so I guess to kind of bring the armpit studies to a close. I'm not really sure I was convinced. What if there was a preferred way?
Dr. Norman Swan
We'll give the results. People can make up their own minds. These studies where one armpit shaved, one armpit, not the shaved armpit smell better. I've heard anecdotes from people who've had laser treatment to their armpits that they don't like the result because they feel it's harder to control body odor without that. So I've heard that that's just an anecdote, but I think overall it's considered lower amount of auxiliary hair, lower amount of bacteria that produce body odor. But I would refer you back to our. What's that ra. Where we deal with this.
Jacinta Boaler
So as part of my research for this episode, Norman, I actually, I have a really good friend who has alopecia universalis. So basically no body hair at all. And she lost her body hair as an adult. And I was. I wanted to know if any of this rang true for her.
Dr. Norman Swan
And I suppose if you said to this person, you know, how much would you pay to have your hair back despite all these people trying to remove hair? She'd pay a lot of money to have her hair back, I would suspect.
Jacinta Boaler
But the thing that surprised me and I think surprised her, one of the most annoying places that she lost her hair from was her nose. Like we were saying before, that sort of function of nasal hair. She was saying that she notices that her nose is way more drippy than it used to be. She feels like she's more susceptible to hay fever than she used to be. And then in close second place, after the nose hair was eyelashes and eyebrows, stuff getting caught in her eyes, sweat dripping into her eyes.
Dr. Norman Swan
You know, you start to see how hair does protect you.
Jacinta Boaler
So let's talk about. We've talked a little bit about safe hair removal before, Norman. So I didn't get a chance to really, like, discuss you with some of the early hair removal substances. Of course, there was at least one that was like ground ivy, ant eggs, burnt leeches, and frog's blood. Not as popular these days as it was 100 or so years ago. Unfortunately, no.
Dr. Norman Swan
I could see it making a comeback along with red light therapy, but we
Jacinta Boaler
have been using razors and tweezers for. For millennia. Do we have best practice hair removal?
Dr. Norman Swan
Well, best practice hair removal is really your preference. But, you know, people who look to this, you know, dermatologists would say the three main types are, well, four, if you like, are. Well, five. Let me just go through here. But you've got shaving and so done carefully. Shaving is safe, but it comes back quickly. You've got plucking and other forms of mechanical hair remover where the hair may not come back or comes back more slowly, depending on whether you've got to the root of the follicle associated with that. You've got laser hair removal which is expensive and painful, but by and large the hair does not grow back. Although you need repeated therapies. You've got waxing which lasts longer, leaves you with smoother skin and you've got depolatories, you've got chemical ways of doing that, usually with a substance called thioglycolate associated with an alkali which effectively dislodges the hair chemically. All of them have their risks versus benefits. All of them have got to be done carefully and for much of it is preference but also being aware that some of those techniques, the hair will not grow back. And so you've got to be careful. Eyebrow plucking is classic where if you over pluck you will permanently change your eyebrows and there's no going back.
Jacinta Boaler
Yeah, many a woman who came of age in the 90s knows this all too well now.
Dr. Norman Swan
But there is one technique that I haven't included in this.
Jacinta Boaler
What are you talking about? X rays? Yes, X rays for hair loss. Yeah, it was a thing for a while. There was that beautiful. It was that moment in the early 20th century where everyone was just obsessed with X rays. It was like, oh, look, look at this. You can like look inside someone's body. The X rays are so good, they can do anything. One of the things that the X ray could do was remove unwanted hair. But as we now know, repeated X rays can be really, really bad for your health. And so it was, it was promoted as the most scientific method of hair removal available. And it was actually used for about 40 years, which is way longer than I thought in the us. Way longer than I thought. And there were doctors making warnings about it and people didn't listen. As is often the case when we're talking about things that are beauty related, we love to ignore the evidence if it doesn't align with what we want to look like.
Dr. Norman Swan
Or even, as I discovered recently, longevity. People are doing all sorts of stuff which we might paying the price off in 20 years time.
Jacinta Boaler
So our original questions were inspired by Arthur and Eddie, who both seem to be quite fixated on nasal hair specifically. What is our bottom line to them?
Dr. Norman Swan
Bottom line is do what I do. Get one of those little buzzy machines and just do the outside of your nose. You don't want to look like the forest growing out of your nose and just disgust everybody around you. And don't go too deep, don't go too deep.
Jacinta Boaler
That's what you hear from Dr. Norman Swan. Well, if you have questions for us. Our email address is thatrashbc.netau so what's in the mailbag? So last week, Norman, we were asking people to tell us their N equals 1 experiments, and Michael very excitedly replied to our call out, saying, the first one, the first N equals one that Michael has participated in is creatine, which we have done a WhatsApp rash episode on. Michael says, it took me from being an average master cyclist who could not sprint to win a race to one who could. Michael's actually done Multiple n equals 1 studies. He's written blogs about different interventions he did to become a stronger cyclist. Didn't just take creatine. Also made other changes to his training. Strength training, increased his protein. But he says a shout out to the ABC's Dr. Carl, who inspired me to do this. As Dr. Carl would say, the difference between anecdote and data is writing it down.
Dr. Norman Swan
And we'll put a link to our creatine episode in our show notes. But it's important to say that creatine doesn't do much for your muscles unless you are actually training.
Jacinta Boaler
Also, in our mobag, there was a young man called Norman Swan who told me a story this week, and I wonder if he'd like to tell it again.
Dr. Norman Swan
Norman writes in saying he woke up recently with some of the worst cramps he'd ever had in his life.
Jacinta Boaler
What did you do to. I mean, Norman. Do to participate these cramps?
Dr. Norman Swan
So Norman, in his agony, got his partner to go upstairs to the fridge and bring down some pickle juice from the pickled cucumbers.
Jacinta Boaler
You did it. You did the pickle juice thing. We talked about this in the cramps episode. Did it work?
Dr. Norman Swan
Bloody amazing is all I can say. I was in agony and I could just feel the cramp disappearing.
Jacinta Boaler
I just. Okay, so not only did you have a cramp, which. Thank you for doing that for all of us because now we get to tell this story, but you had the wherewithal.
Dr. Norman Swan
I could only just get the words out. I could only just get the words out. Pickle juice. Pickle cover. Juice.
Jacinta Boaler
Pickle juice.
Dr. Norman Swan
Between my screaming and I did it the way you're supposed to do, which is that you take quite a lot of it so that the back of your throat, you almost gag. Because that's the theory here. I just find it amazing. It could have been that they were ready to go anyway because I'd been suffering in agony and it would have disappeared, but I could almost just feel it disappear.
Jacinta Boaler
That is not an anecdote that I expected to hear. So this is my n of 1.
Dr. Norman Swan
Well, this is Norman's anecdote. Whoever Norman is.
Jacinta Boaler
That's what the N in N of 1 stands for. Is Norman. Okay, I can't remember what we said about pickle juice in our Cramps episode.
Dr. Norman Swan
We actually gave it credit for some evidence.
Jacinta Boaler
Did we? Well, there we go. Adding to the vast quantity of evidence on pickle juice is Norman's N of 1. Pickle juice worked.
Dr. Norman Swan
If it's good enough for Jannik Sener, it's good enough for me.
Jacinta Boaler
Fair enough. Oh, well, thank you, Norman and Michael and anyone else who wants to send us an email that WR crash@abc.net au
Dr. Norman Swan
see you next week.
Jacinta Boaler
See you then.
Podcast Summary: What's That Rash? – "Body hair removal: healthy or not?" ABC Australia | Aired July 28, 2026
This episode of "What's That Rash?" dives into the health implications, cultural context, and practicalities of body hair removal. Hosts Dr. Norman Swan and Jacinta Boaler respond to questions from listeners about nose, ear, armpit, and pubic hair — examining both historical practices and what the science says today. They discuss the intersection of beauty standards, hygiene myths, and genuine health considerations, all while maintaining the show’s trademark mix of wit and rigor.
Societal & Gender Expectations
Historical Evidence
Media Influence & Marketing
For more listener stories, see the episode’s mailbag segment, including a lighthearted discussion of pickle juice as a cure for cramps.
Bottom line:
"Do what I do—get one of those little buzzy machines and just do the outside of your nose. Don’t go too deep." — Dr. Norman Swan (20:57)
Useful for anyone questioning whether to ditch their razor, reach for the wax, or simply stay au naturel, this episode brings clarity—and a few laughs—to a hairy subject.