By day 15 I had reached an interesting point where my hair looked deliberately grown out and not like I had just forgotten to shave or had recently returned from a backpacking hike. I felt both liberated and embarrassed by my armpit hair. I kept thinking about the time I went with some friends to a little French restaurant in Seattle where the hostess wasn’t wearing a bra and had luscious, fully grown armpit hair. “Well, she is definitely authentically French,” commented one of my companions once she had walked away. I kept wondering what my armpit hair said about me, if people thought I was French or hippie or if I was trying to make a statement. But as my friend Katie so kindly reminded me, “Abby, who cares? The whole thing is that you do what makes you happy, your opinion is the only one that matters here.
Two days later, on day 17, I shaved my pits to zero. I did it mainly because I had assumed I wanted to go back to hairless armpits at this point (I had promised three weeks without shaving for the purposes of this article, so that commitment had ended) and because it It’s a habit I’ve had for what seems like forever. But as soon as I shaved, I kind of wished I hadn’t. My hair hadn’t reached the point of full growth and I was a little curious what that would look like compared to the 0.25-0.5 inches of growth I had when I shaved. I’ve since considered quitting again but haven’t, I think it’s because shaving is such an unconscious part of my shower routine at this point. The same way I sometimes forgot to shave for an extra day or two, I now forget not to shave when I plan to regrow my hair.
