I’ve Shaved My Armpits Religiously for 15+ Years. Here’s What Happened When I Stopped for a Few Weeks

To get the most scientifically sound results, I started with freshly shaved pits, smooth as babies’ bottoms. Thinking ahead on the next few weeks, I realized I have, in all honestly, done something like this before, though with less intention. I love backpacking, and while I’ve never gone on a terrifically long trek, I have gone a week in the woods without a shower, which meant no shaving either. But I also have friends who stopped shaving years ago and have just let their natural armpit, leg and pubic hair grow in. “It was just so annoying,” Katie C., an art handler at an auction house in Los Angeles, told me. “And when I thought about it, I realized I was only doing it because people told me I had to. It’s dumb and sexist and people should be allowed to be as hairy or not hairy as they want.” Here, here! cried the feminist in me, and yet I was still unsure exactly how I would feel once things really got going.

This is about how long I let my armpit hair grow before I’ll shave it—noticeable if you’re looking for it but not attention-grabbing.  I was also testing TikTok scarf top tying techniques so had my pits on full display as I twisted and tied scarves into chic, vacation-ready tops. But because I reach this level of growth pretty frequently, I didn’t care much about there being a little scruff.

Now we’re cooking with gas. My armpit hair was really coming in now, but still hadn’t gotten nearly as long as I would have expected after nine days. This was also the point when I started really paying attention to all the questions and concerns I had at the outset of this experiment. Growing out my armpit hair thus far hadn’t made my pits super itchy, as I feared, and I noticed no increase in sweat or B.O. levels. I hadn’t wanted any bias before I began growing, so I waited until this point to actually do some research to see if my fears were legitimate in the first place. Turns out, they were not.

According to a study published in Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, not shaving your armpits has little to no effect on body odor. As long as you’re still regularly showering and using deodorant you should expect to smell the same as you always do. As for sweat, that’s also just a myth. Sweat is released as a cooling method from glands in the body regardless of whether or not there is hair present, and it is actually odorless until it comes into contact with bacteria (hence the importance of regular showers and deodorant).

By day 15 I’d reached an interesting point where my hair looked purposefully grown-out and not like I’d just forgotten to shave or recently returned from a backpacking trek. I felt both liberated and self-conscious about my armpit hair. I kept thinking about the time I went with some friends to a little French restaurant in Seattle where the hostess wore no bra and had luscious, fully grown-out armpit hair. “Well, she’s certainly authentically French,” one of my companions commented once she’d walked away. I kept wondering what my armpit hair said about me, whether people thought I was French or a hippie or trying to make a statement. But as my friend Katie so thoughtfully reminded me, “Abby, who cares? The whole point is that you should do what makes you happy, your opinion is the only one that matters here.”

Two days later, on Day 17, I shaved my pits back down to zero. I did it mostly because I’d assumed I’d want to go back to hair-free armpits at this point (I’d promised three weeks of no shaving for the purposes of this article, so that commitment had come to an end) and because this is a habit I’ve had for what feels like forever. But as soon as I shaved I kind of wished I hadn’t. My hair hadn’t reached the point of being fully grown out and I was kind of curious what that would feel like in comparison to the 0.25 to 0.5-inches of growth I had when I shaved. I’ve since considered stopping again, but haven’t, I think it’s because shaving is such an unconscious part of my shower routine at this point. In much the same way that I’ve occasionally forgotten to shave for an extra day or two, I’ve now forgotten to not shave when I’ve considered growing my hair out again.