The bush is back! How celebs like Doja Cat and Julia Fox are bringing back pubic hair
This haute new trend is pulling ahead — by a hair.
Harkening back the au natural age of the ’70s, a full bush is back en vogue — thanks to A-list endorsements from the likes of multi-hyphenate Julia Fox and musician Doja Cat.
At the 2024 Grammys, the “Demons” rapper arrived on the red carpet leaving little to the imagination in a sheer Dilara Fındıkoğlu number. Her most noticeable accessory — other than a host of new body art and a nipple-bearing bodice — was a bush, visible through the gauzy fabric.
Months later, Julia Fox hit the streets for New York Fashion Week sporting graphic bikini bottoms with hyperrealistic labia and pubic hair printed on the skimpy garment, which was also adorned with the word “closed.”
Multiple salon owners told The Standard that “the full bush is making a comeback,” with more women requesting bikini waxes and minor clean-ups of the pubic region instead of opting to be completely hairless.
“People all over the globe have chosen to remove, groom or otherwise tend to their pubic hair for thousands of years,” Rachael Gibson, known as The Hair Historian, told the outlet, adding that a lack of hair, at one point, was a symbol of “class and status.”
Further cementing the trend, luxury fashion house Maison Margiela made a case for the bush on the spring/summer 2024 runway earlier this year, presenting a collection of airy, transparent fabrics that proudly displayed a wooly merkin on models’ pubic bones.
The hairy display was a far cry from the recent heyday of Brazilian waxes and laser hair removal popularized in the ’90s and early aughts, when being hairless was haute.
“Historically, when more of the body is on display, there’s more of a feeling that any visible hair should be removed,” Gibson explained. “So at the start of the 20th century, when hemlines rose and sleeveless garments became more popular, we see women’s razors being advertised in magazines and features warning women of how unsightly body hair is.”
With the resurgence of women’s body hair — from pits to pubes — those who permanently removed it decades ago are in a hairy situation.
Online forums like Reddit are seeing users express removal regret, while others inquire about the possibility of regrowing a bush.
“I just wish I’d still have a strip or a triangle or something,” sex columnist GG Sauvage told Dazed, adding, “just something I could style or dye cool colors.”
Now, doctors and salons are offering treatments that could potentially help regrow the hair down there. New York City hair restoration surgeon Dr. Gary Linkov told Dazed that, while some women may attempt minoxidil or microneedling to restore hair, it is “usually futile.”
Instead, the doc offers pubic hair transplants at his practice, which “involves taking hair from the back of the head and transplanting the grafts into the pubic area.”
Pointing to recent survey data, Jessica DeFino, the founder of The Review of Beauty, told The Standard that a “majority” of women are choosing to keep most of their pubic hair.
“They’ll do a clean up on the sides, but a lot of people were proud to be sporting a nearly full bush on top, which I think is pretty different from what we see in beauty coverage,” she explained. “There’s a huge gap between expectations set by beauty media and what’s actually happening out there in the real world.”