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that humans have removed facial hair since prehistoric times, pushing the edges of two shells or rocks together to tweeze. The ancient Turks may have been the first to remove hair with a chemical, somewhere between 4000 and 3000 BC. They used a substance called rhumsa, which was made with arsenic trisulphide, quicklime and starch. In The Encyclopedia of Hair: A Cultural History, author Victoria Sherrow explains that women in ancient Egypt, Greece and the Roman Empire removed most body hair, using pumice stones, razors, tweezers and depilatory creams. Greeks felt pubic hair was “uncivilized” — they sometimes removed it by singeing it off with a burning lamp. Romans were less likely to put their genitals in such peril, and instead used plucking and depilatory creams. When in Rome...
    That means that though I’d like to place all the blame on advertisers, maybe they were just jumping on an inherently human trait, and exploiting it legitimately.
    I called up anthropologist Nina Jablonski, a professor at Penn State, to find out if there would be any reason, evolutionarily speaking, why women might be viewed as more attractive when they are hairless.
    “Things that are considered to be attractive are also most childlike,” she said, “and hairlessness is something we associate with youth, children and naked infants.”
    She obviously hadn’t seen my baby pictures.
    Jablonski went on to explain that women who are considered attractive often have facial attributes that exaggerate youthfulness and are reminiscent of children — thinner jaws, longer foreheads, big eyes relative to the rest of the face, plump lips, small nose and shorter distance between mouths and chin.
    “In MRI studies, a huge part of the brain indicates affection, love and an outpouring of positive emotion when a person lays eyes on a child,” she said, “So these same responses could be elicited in a man when he sees a woman with childlike attributes.”
    Interesting, I thought — but I didn’t particularly like to hear it. I was suddenly starting to feel like I might want to embrace my natural state at last, and didn’t want evolution to get in the way of what was considered beautiful.
    So I asked Jablonski why facial hair on a woman is more taboo than any other hair on the body — taboo to the point that we not only hide it, but hide that we got rid of it. I was hoping that her answer might help me at last divulge my darkest secret to Dave.
    First, she assured me that having some facial hair in women was normal.
    That was a fabulous and very comforting start to her answer.
    She went on to explain that it’s because the follicles on men and women’s upper lip are more sensitive to androgen and especially testosterone. She said that “peach fuzz” is seen on the upper lip of a pubescent male as his testosterone ramps up and before the appearance of the larger-diameter hairs of the mustache and beard. Because women also have androgen, though at lower levels than a male, peach fuzz also develops on their upper lip.
    “That is the normal state in many mature women,” said Jablonski.
    So my mustache that I flipped out about as a high school junior was actually a normal symptom of puberty? Sweet! Though a little late.
    But wait. Jablonski then noted that there remained reasons why women would feel compelled to get rid of it.
    First, she offered the obvious notion that most women don’t want to be mistaken for a pubescent male.
    “It gives mixed sexual signals,” she said.
    Mixed?
    Second, she said that women, as they get older, have more androgens and fewer estrogens.
    “Facial hair becomes more visible and less ‘peachy’ as women age,” she said. “And they get even more obsessed with removing it because they want to look ever more youthful.”
    So basically, I gathered that women with less facial hair appear younger and since more facial hair is correlated with menopause and therefore a higher age, having less could essentially give