Social role of hair

Hair has great social significance in human beings. It grows on most areas of the human body, except for the palms of the hands and the feet, but hair is most noticeable in most people in a small number of areas that are most commonly trimmed, plucked, or shaved. These include the face, head, eyebrows, eyelashes, legs and armpits, as well as the pubic region.

The highly visible differences between male and female body and facial hair are a notable secondary sex characteristic.

Hair has had social and sexual significance in a number of societies, as a sign of manliness in men, and femininity in women when in the "right" place, and as a sign of effeminacy in men and unfemininity in women when in the "wrong" place. Where the right and wrong places are differs from one culture to another.

Hair as indicator

• healthy hair indicates health and youth
• hair colour and texture can be a sign of ancestry
• facial hair as sign of puberty
• white hair as a sign of age, and hair dye
• male pattern baldness as sign of age, the toupee, Rogaine
• hairstyle as indicator of group membership:
  • Beatle "pudding-bowl" haircuts
  • Punk mohawk haircuts
  • Skinhead haircut

Growing and removing

• Romans, Greeks and shaving
• Hair as item of female beauty
• Hair length for men: Cavaliers and Roundheads, long hair in the 1960s, skinheads, mullets and other hairstyles, the uncut hair of Sikhs
• Hair length for women: trends and fashions
  • The bobbed hair of flappers
• hairy arms and legs, regional variations in hirsutism
• depilation, eyebrow plucking, unibrow, etc.

French civilians shave the hair of a young woman as punishment for having personal relations with Germans, August 29 1944

Hair, power, punishment and status

• Samson and Delilah
• shaved heads in concentration camps
• head-shaving as punishment
• military haircuts, monastic tonsures
• extremely long hair of some Indian holy men
• regular hairdressing as sign of wealth
• The dreadlocks of Rastafarianism

Concealing and revealing

• keeping women's hair hidden: headscarves, the hijab in Islam, head-shaving and wigs in Orthodox Judaism etc.
• keeping men's hair hidden: the turban in Sikhism
• displaying women's hair: hair fashions in Western society
• displaying men's hair: facial hair in Islam, ringlets in Orthodox Judaism
• hair ornaments
• keeping pubic hair hidden or shaven

See also

• haircut
• head shaving
• depilation
• human physical appearance