( Photo: @queen_esie/Instagram and Adidas)
Some women spend time shaving or waxing multiple parts of their body weekly to biweekly as an unspoken rule to meet the societal and/or personal criteria of beauty. It’s a ritual two body hair activists don’t have to worry about.
Leila Davis and Esther “Queen Esie” Calixte-Bea confidently model their natural God-made state and body positivity through social media and brand advertisements.
Davis, a model, choreographer and professional pole dancer, recently modeled for Adidas where she showcased her armpit hair. She was the leading photo in the Adidas and Stella McCartney collaboration campaign.
The photo of her resting her arms upon her head, highlighting her unwaxed armpits shook the fashion Industry and awakened numerous body positivity activists. However, the post also aroused many trolls shaming the model as disgraceful and unethical.
“So a brand posted some cute pics of me and because I have armpit hair people are PRESSED! You do realise it grows there naturally right??? If its that deep send me your address and I’ll send you some trimmings from my bum crack,” Davis posted on Twitter.
Despite the internet trolls’ critics of the Adidas model, she isn’t the only one getting brand deals to model body positivity.
Calixte-Bea, affectionately known as “Queen Esie,” is an artist and founder of The Lavender Project who has been featured as a cover girl for Glamour UK Magazine for showing her armpit and chest hair.
The Lavender Project is a ‘self-liberating’ and self-shot photography project aimed to examine the natural growth of female body hair.
In an interview with Glamour UK Magazine, Calixte-Bea said, “A project about body hair and femininity, it questioned what being feminine meant while showing that body hair can be beautiful and that I can be beautiful with it. The pictures were posted on Instagram showcasing the lavender-coloured dress I made and wore while showing my chest hair for the first time. From then on, it has become a mission of mine to normalise body hair and to show it in a different perspective, all the while using my motto, ‘We wear our body hair with class.’ Ever since then, my idea of beauty has changed and my relationship with my body continues to develop as I watch my body hair grow and decorate my skin.”
She added, “The biggest challenge I faced in accepting my beauty was the war with myself and having to decide whether I wanted to continue removing my body hair or watch it grow, spread, get darker and thicker. Knowing that beauty standards have changed so many times, I had to realise that redefining beauty was possible; that, instead of conforming to those ideals, I could break free from them and create my own beauty.”
Check out her self-acceptance journey on YouTube, “Queen Esie’s Diary Of A Hairy Woman.”