Earlier this month, true to kind, Kim Kardashian made headlines but once more when her attire model Skims launched an array of thongs coated in 12 hues of artificial pubic hair.
They had been accompanied by the catchphrase: “Your carpet can be whatever colour you want it to be.”
The gimmick — which follows related product launches together with bras with prosthetic nipples and a “collagen yarn”-infused face wrap — labored, and all $32 “merkins” offered out inside hours of launching. According to communications company Novos, Google searches for “pubic bush” almost tripled final week, whereas searches for the phrase “pubic hair care” rose 17 p.c.
It’s the newest in a collection of style tendencies embracing the imagery of untamed physique hair. On Oct. 5, Duran Lantink’s controversial Spring/Summer 2026 debut for Jean Paul Gaultier included three skin-tight seems to be that includes screen-printed physique hair on the chest, legs and pubic areas.
Imitation hair’s style second, to date relegated to PR stunts and the runway, appears to correspond nonetheless with real adjustments in girls’s grooming habits.
The bush, which was all the rage in the Nineteen Seventies, started falling out of style in the following decade as hairlessness turned more and more related to youth and hygiene. But it might be making a resurgence, in response to rising tides of social conservatism. Last 12 months, magnificence author Jessica DeFino polled over 14,000 folks on-line through her Substack The Review of Beauty and located that solely 15 p.c of respondents reported going utterly naked whereas 29.5 p.c sported both a full or simply barely trimmed bush. A 2024 Women’s Health survey of over 500 girls in the US discovered that simply 23 p.c had been totally naked.
In an more and more conservative international local weather, girls’s our bodies could also be extra policed than ever earlier than lately. But many ladies are rejecting arbitrary aesthetic requirements and the notion that magnificence should necessitate ache. The shift has had business repercussions for these in the enterprise of naked pores and skin: European Wax Center estimates that it’ll implement 28 to 50 internet location closures in its fiscal 2025, and the waxing franchise additionally not too long ago reported a 6.6 p.c year-on-year income slide on Aug. 13, its fourth consecutive quarter of decline.
“I don’t worry at all about the closures that we have this year,” chief business officer Katie Mullen informed The Business of Beautysaying she was “optimistic” about the way forward for waxing and the enterprise’s development. The salon chain had a quick-sprint response to Kardashian’s stunt launch, posting adverts in its shops final week and above the Holland Tunnel in New York that learn: “We’ll take it from here, Kim.”
Body Hair Goes ‘Upscale’
The merkin pattern might invigorate extra magnificence manufacturers to show actual physique hair of their advertising campaigns.
In 2018, shaving firm Billie created the first razor advert to characteristic girls’s physique hair, relatively than fashions shaving already hairless legs. The nine-year-old skincare model Fur, which explicitly markets merchandise like its Fur Oil and Ingrown Concentrate for the pubic area, frequently options physique hair in its promoting. The firm’s technique round advertising imagery is to depict physique hair as “elegant and upscale,” Fur co-founder Lillian Tung mentioned.
Tung defined, “We really wanted to avoid that association of ‘body hair is gross and disgusting,’” she mentioned, including that the chorus remains to be widespread on social media. Tung hopes to open the dialog round pubic hair, no matter one’s private grooming preferences, and in the end finish their related stigma.
Fashion content material creator and pattern forecaster Mandy Lee, whose checklist of 2025 style trade and pattern predictions included the merkin in January after she noticed its utilization in the Maison Margiela Spring/Summer 2024 high fashion present, is sceptical that the common particular person will start flaunting their pure bush.
Lee sees the merkin as one thing “for fashion, for performance, possibly the red carpet,” she mentioned. “As much as people want to be like, ‘Bush on main,’ I don’t see it happening in real life.”
She cautioned in opposition to mistaking the utilization of pubic wigs for physique positivity. That the mere facade of a bush appears to function a punchline, particularly in shut proximity to Halloween, dangers showing disingenuous and denigrating. (One TikTok person even joked about dyeing their Skims merkin inexperienced for an Elphaba costume.)
Though physique hair preferences are evolving behind closed doorways, the burgeoning pubic care market stays scant.
Skims’ viral launch was, in any case, a advertising gambit from a model whose founder is sort of synonymous with breaking the web. The wager didn’t simply repay in gross sales alone, however in a big inflow of on-line dialog quipping about and dissecting the drop, which, based on Launchmetrics, gave Skims a $10.1 million enhance in media impression worth throughout the week following the launch.
“For Skims to release a seemingly provocative item of clothing in a time where provocation is policed heavily does raise a lot of red flags to me,” Lee mentioned. “Who is this for? What is this for? I think they just want our money.”
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