I'm a woman with facial hair - and I'm proud of it (2023)

Lipstick is a must for Annalisa Hackleman. A bold red is her choice, but some mornings it will slide over a soft pink or even a deep purple. She also plays around with her hair color; Right now, her long locks and straight-cut bangs are a bright teal and lavender ombré. Still, Hackleman says her beauty routine is pretty basic: She washes her face, puts on mascara and maybe eyeliner, light lipstick, and every now and then she rubs a little balm on her face and beard.

“I like to feel ready to leave the house,” she says. "I want to look good."

Annalisa Hackleman has shaved every day since she was 13, but three years ago she decided to embrace the beard.

That being seen with facial hair means looking good would be inconceivable to many women. But not Hackleman. No longer. She has proudly sported her beard for about three years now. Today, she is bigger than her husband. The makeup saleswoman from Reno, Nevada, even entered a beard competition in 2015: “I've wanted to go to this event for years and never had the courage to grow a beard to do it. It ended up being a complete blast.”

Women who openly display facial hair are rare, but women with facial hair are not. Hackleman has a condition calledhirsutism(opens in new tab), defined as excessive hair growth in a male pattern, such as on the upper lip, chin, chest, back, or upper abdomen, in females. It is the result of the body's overproduction of androgens (generally considered the male sex hormone, although all women naturally have androgens), which is usually a symptom of polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), a condition that affects hackleman.

Hirsutism affects up to 17% of women, according to thehair encyclopedia(opens in new tab)🇧🇷 Doctors even refer to it as "common".

"Some members of my family have mustaches and they get different beauty treatments to make sure they don't show," says J.D. Samson, an artist and musician best known for her work with the bands Le Tigre and MEN, who, thanks to her high levels of androgens, has a mustache. She has become an icon in the world of women with facial hair. “Before I was proud of my facial hair, I tried to mask it as much as possible. I definitely followed my mom and sister's advice on when to bleach."

For all women, "there are genetic factors that determine how much hair you have," explains George T. Griffing, MD, an endocrinologist and professor of medicine at St. Louis. Louis University, noting that some ethnic groups are naturally hairier than others. Light-skinned Europeans and North Asians have less terminal hair (the darker, thicker type that doesn't grow on the head), while Middle Eastern, South Asian, Hispanic, and Mediterranean women naturally have more. There is even an Italian saying: "Donna barbuta, semper piaciuta", which is sometimes translated as "everybody loves a woman with a beard."

It's a lovely sentiment, but it's not true. If it were, hirsute women wouldn't avoid social situations because they are self-conscious about their hair, as 68% of them do, according to a study inJournal of Psychosomatic Research🇧🇷 It doesn't take a logical leap to believe that, like theInternational Journal of Female DermatologyIn the United States, excess hair can cause significant psychological and emotional distress in women. ONEUK search(opens in new tab)found that 30 percent of women with a beard are depressed.

Samson uses the word "humiliated" when recounting how she felt in ninth grade when a boy made fun of her for having to bleach her mustache. And for Alma Torres, a 24-year-old photographer from the Bronx, living with PCOS-induced facial hair as a teenager "was like a deep depression." The first time he took it off was for the eighth-grade prom: “I shaved my sideburns, they were thick and long. It was a bad idea. They grew thicker again." But Torres thought she was doing a good job hiding in plain sight. It wasn't until a counselor pulled her aside and asked if someone was teasing her about her facial hair that she realized that other people noticed it as much as she did. "After that, it all went downhill. It was like everyone was talking about it. It was so bad, I stopped going to school. Drop out."

Torres says he shaved regularly for eight years, spending hours in the bathroom to get rid of his 5-hour shadow. He got multiple nose and lip piercings to distract people from his beard and rash.

Hackleman used to shave three or four times a day to hide his facial hair, a process he began at age 13. “My husband would do everything possible to help me. I shaved my face, but I couldn't control it. I didn't want to leave the house. I didn't want anyone to see me. We didn't even go to family events." That was just five years ago and, for Hackleman, it was "a low point both physically and emotionally".

We tend to think of waxing, facial or otherwise, as a by-product of modernity, the result of smooth skin celebrated in advertisements, movies and, yes, pornography. But women have been striving to remove unwanted hair since time immemorial. (We're probably just spending more money these days: waxing will cost the average American woman more than $27,000 in her lifetime.) Waxing dates back to prehistoric times when women used the sharp edges of rocks as razors. or together to create tweezers. In ancient Egypt, Greece and the Roman empire, women removed all body hair, and recipes for doing so have been around since at least the time of the pharaohs, says Jill Burke, PhD, senior lecturer at the University of Edinburgh and author. of the next bookThe Italian Renaissance Nude🇧🇷 "In the Renaissance there was an explosion in facial appearance treatments," he says, "and waxing became more popular around this time due to a new emphasis on the nude form." In addition to pubic hair, women shave hair from their legs, underarms and upper lip, explains Burke.

Beauty standards existed then as they do now. And all women, shaggy or not, can feel like the world is constantly telling them they have too much hair. “There's a reason why the hair removal industry makes billions and billions of dollars,” says Hackleman. “They are there to make money if you feel like you need to shave.”

Gender is, as always, at the heart of the matter. To state the obvious: since more men have facial hair than women, facial hair is considered categorically masculine and ipso facto cannot be feminine.

Her band MEN was originally called Hirsute, says Samson, in reference to women with facial hair and the idea of ​​being a "feminist in a power suit."

From the Middle Ages to the 17th century, it was believed that "hair was a way for men to get rid of the bad stuff in their bodies, like a kind of excretion," says Burke. So if a woman was hairy, especially if she had facial hair, it meant she "had an imbalance that made her manly," not just in her appearance but also in her disposition, explains Burke. Contemporaries would have found her “discussable and disagreeable; It's not good to get married, basically, if you're hairy."

Fast forward to Charles Darwin's 19th-century heyday, hair was "profoundly pathologized," writes Nadine Ajaka inthe Atlantic(opens in new tab), explaining that for women it was associated with a “primitive” ancestry. As pronounced differences between the sexes were considered an indication of evolutionary superiority, males were allowed to be hairy. That hasn't changed.

But women like Hackleman, Torres and Samson, who chose to ignore all these prejudices and embrace their natural states, are proving that having a beard doesn't make them any less feminine. “It's sad that women feel like they have to live under a restrictive ban on facial hair,” Samson says of how narrowly we define femininity. “In college, I was visiting a friend and I hadn't bleached my mustache in a long time, and she said, 'I think it looks great. You must let this be your thing. Since then, I never thought about changing it. For the most part, I'm very comfortable with my identity as a woman, but as a different type of woman."

Samson is sometimes mistaken for a little boy, but she isn't hurt when people misunderstand her, just aware that what may upset them more than the way she presents herself is the fact that she comes first. . "I don't look in the mirror and think, 'I'm doing this as a protest,' but it definitely came from that place," he says. “I celebrate my mustache and I think people are bothered by it. I think they feel uncomfortable around confident people."

One such confident pioneer is Harnaam Kaur, a Sikh woman from Britain and arguably the most famous bearded woman today. kaur has almost100,000 followers on Instagram(opens in new tab)and even walked the runway at London Fashion Week last year. Her posts of her usually show her living a normal life—Snapchat-filtered flower crown selfies or close-ups of her smoky eye—like most 20-something women, she also has a beard. “Harnaam also has PCOS; she is one of the women I look up to,” says Torres, who cites Kaur as her inspiration for finally embracing her own facial hair. “It shows women that having a beardcan be very beautiful(opens in new tab).”

This empowerment is having a ripple effect around the world. Torres became a source of inspiration after meeting Kaur and deciding to stop shaving; that day, he took a bunch of pictures and posted them online, captioning them with PCOS facts. I was flooded with responses. “I thought I wasn't going to get the support I got, which is crazy,” he says. “People from all over the world write to me asking how I did it, how I feel so comfortable, how I don't care what people think. I tell you it wasn't done overnight."

In recent years, awareness campaigns such asconscious furry(opens in new tab)ywe can face it(opens in new tab)they released data on the causes and consequences of female facial hair and encouraged women to accept what they have. Then there's the Ohio nativebalpreet kaur(opens in new tab), another Sikh woman who criticized her decision not to remove her facial hair for religious reasons (the Sikh faith instructs acolytes not to cut their hair). And 15-time Grammy winner and complete goddessAdele even admitted to growing a beard(opens in new tab)post-pregnancy "I actually have a beard but I'm proud of it," she announced to fans at a concert in Glasgow last year. I call him Larry.

These women may be brave to stand up proudly, but they aren't the first to be celebrated for exactly what makes them different. Catholic women who want to get out of a bad relationship can invokeSan Wilgefortis, a girl who lived sometime between 700 AD. and the 11th century and who, according to legend, grew a beard and mustache after praying for help to escape his engagement to the pagan king of Sicily.Madalena Venturait became famous in the 17th century, when Jusepe de Ribera painted her breastfeeding her son, with her long dark beard falling around her neck.

But bearded women are never portrayed in modern popular culture, except as witches or a circus sideshow. The fourth season ofAmerican Horror Story: Freak Showfeatured Kathy Bates as the "bearded lady" Ethel Darling. And, of course, there's a bearded woman in the P.T. movie barnumthe greatest showman, now in theaters.

Considering how common hirsutism is, affecting up to 600 million women worldwide, this is not a fair description. And it's part of a vicious cycle that perpetuates the shame of female facial hair.

“There are times when I forget I have a beard and I see people looking at me and I realize that most people have never seen a woman with a beard,” says Torres.

“I hope that beauty standards finally change for women and men and that people have the opportunity to do what makes them feel good about themselves,” says Samson. “I'm lucky to have people who support me for who I am. And I'm lucky that people think I'm pretty with or without a mustache."

This support system was essential for Hackleman, whose husband was her biggest supporter. “It got to the point where he was like, 'You know what? Just let go. Let your skin heal. Let it grow'. It's not that I needed permission, but I think I needed reassurance that there's nothing wrong with me."

Many men may not be confident enough to stand proudly next to a partner who exhibits a stereotypically masculine trait. For Hackleman, it improved the marriage. “It's not some weird fetish. It's not that I love my beard. If I had to shave my face, fine,” she says. "But it really strengthened our relationship that I didn't cry every day."

As counterintuitive as it sounds, each of these women gained self-esteem when they finally stopped caring about their conventional beauty. “I like my beard because I feel more comfortable,” says Torres. “I don't have to hide behind all the piercings, I don't have to hide behind my crazy hair colors. I can actually feel like myself."

photographed byKatie McCurdy(opens in new tab)/ video ofhide serbal(opens in new tab)/ To J. D. Samson: Bathroom byDana Boyer(opens in new tab)/ Special thanks toseagull room(opens in new tab)&main drag music(opens in new tab)🇧🇷 For Annalisa Hackleman: Grooming by Jenny Partridge / Special Thanks toNevada Humane Society(opens in new tab)🇧🇷 For Alma Torres: Hair forRuby Jones(opens in new tab)/ Makeup byKate Mellinger(opens in new tab)/ Special thanks toICP no local(opens in new tab).