Before Razors: What Women Actually Used to Remove Body Hair

For most of American history, women didn’t shave their legs or underarms. Not because they couldn’t — because nobody had told them they should.

The habit that feels like basic hygiene today is about a hundred years old, and it traces back to a specific product, a specific campaign, and a specific change in sleeve length. What came before is stranger than most people expect, and one chapter of it went badly enough to end up in a medical journal warning.

• Body hair removal wasn’t a common expectation for American women until the early 1900s.
• Gillette launched the first razor marketed to women, the Milady Décolleté, in 1915.
• The underarm campaign came two years later — and it sold the problem before it sold the product.
• One method offered in beauty salons in the 1920s used X-rays. It worked. It also injured and killed women.
• The useful part of this story isn’t the horror. It’s the pattern, which hasn’t gone away.

Before 1915, body hair wasn’t a problem to be solved

Hair removal itself is ancient. Roman women used tweezers, pumice stones, and depilatory pastes made from resin and beeswax. Bronze razors existed. None of that is new.

What was new, in the early twentieth century, was the expectation — the idea that smooth underarms and legs were a matter of hygiene and decency rather than personal preference. Before that shift, most American women simply had body hair, and no one considered it a flaw.

The shift didn’t come from doctors. It came from sleeves.

What women used before the safety razor

Between the Romans and Gillette, the toolkit was uncomfortable and largely improvised:

• Pumice stone, used to abrade hair off the skin — effective, and rough on the skin.
• Tweezers, for the face, one hair at a time.
• Depilatory powders and pastes, mixed with water and left on the skin. A 1908 advertisement for X-Bazin’s Depilatory Powder, headlined Personal Comeliness, promised to remove the “misery attending growths of hair on the face, neck, or arms” — the sales pitch was already emotional a full seven years before the first women’s razor existed.
• Straight razors, designed for men’s faces and genuinely dangerous on curves.

Note the direction of that sequence. The products arrived first. The shame arrived with them.

1915: the razor built for a woman’s arm

Gillette introduced the Milady Décolleté in 1915 — the first razor marketed specifically to women. It was small, and the handle curved, because it was designed for the underarm rather than the face.

The design followed fashion. Sleeveless and sheer-sleeved dresses were arriving, and an arm that had never been visible in public suddenly was.

1917: selling the problem

The campaign that changed American habits ran in McCall’s in 1917. It didn’t describe a product benefit. It described an embarrassing personal problem — underarm hair — and then offered the solution.

By 1922, women’s razors and depilatories appeared in the Sears, Roebuck catalog. That was the same year the company began selling dresses with sheer sleeves.

Within roughly seven years, a habit that had not existed became something close to a social requirement.

The method that went badly wrong

Here is the part of this history genuinely worth knowing.

In 1924, the Tricho Sales Corporation began selling a hair-removal service to beauty salons. The Tricho System was a mahogany booth containing an X-ray tube. A client sat in front of it and received roughly a four-minute dose of radiation, often once a week, for months.

It was marketed as painless and needle-free. And it worked — the hair frequently never grew back.

It also caused, over the following years, wrinkling, skin atrophy, white and brown fibrous patches, keratoses, ulcerations, carcinoma, and in a number of cases, death.

Tricho was one company among dozens offering X-ray epilation in the 1920s and 1930s. A 1947 investigation concluded that thousands of Americans had passed through Tricho’s booths alone. Many injuries appeared years after the last session, long after the salon had closed.

What this history is actually good for

It would be easy to end here with isn’t the past horrifying — and that would waste the story. The pattern is what matters, and it still repeats:

1. The problem was sold before the product. The 1908 depilatory ad and the 1917 underarm campaign both created discomfort first, then relieved it commercially.
2. “It works” and “it’s safe” are different claims. X-ray epilation genuinely removed hair permanently. Effectiveness was never the issue.
3. The harm was delayed, so the feedback loop failed. Women who were injured often couldn’t connect the injury to a treatment they’d had years earlier.

You don’t need to be suspicious of everything to use this. You need one habit: when a beauty or wellness product promises a permanent result, ask what the long-term evidence is — not whether it works, but what’s known about what it does over years. In 1925, nobody in that salon could have asked that question. You can.

Sources

1. National Museum of American History (Smithsonian). Hair Removal collection — Milady Décolleté (1915), X-Bazin’s Depilatory Powder advertisement (1908), Sears, Roebuck catalog (1922). https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object-groups/health-hygiene-and-beauty/hair-removal (accessed 2026-08-31).
2. McGill University, Office for Science and Society. X-Rays and Hair Removal — Tricho Sales Corporation, the Tricho System, dosing, documented injuries, and the 1929 JAMA warning. https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/science-science-everywhere-you-asked/1920s-hair-removal-method-widely-advertised-absolutely-painless-and-needle-free-became-medical (accessed 2026-08-31).
3. Journal of the American Medical Association, 1929 — warning on X-ray epilation injuries. Quoted here as cited in the McGill review above; the original 1929 issue was not retrieved in this research session.