Hair has great social significance in human beings. It can grow on most areas of the human body, except for the palms of the hands and the soles of 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, nose, ears, 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 masculinity 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 (important in evolutionary biology)
• Hair colour and texture can be a sign of ethnic ancestry
• Facial hair is a sign of puberty in men
• White hair is a sign of age, which can be concealed with hair dye
• Male pattern baldness is sign of age, which can be concealed with a toupee or perhaps reversed with minoxidil (marketed as Rogaine or Regaine) or finasteride (marketed as Propecia); see Baldness treatments
• Hairstyle can be an indicator of group membership:
  • Beatle "pudding-bowl" haircuts
  • Punk mohawk haircuts
  • Skinhead haircut
  • Mullet hairstyle
  • Dreadlocks
• Some groups, for example male Sikhs and orthodox Jews, never cut some or all of their hair

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.

Hair, power, punishment and status

• Surf Hair (the "cool" style)
• Samson and Delilah
• Shaved heads in concentration camps
• Head-shaving as punishment - especially for women with long hair.
• Military haircuts, monastic tonsures
• Extremely long hair of some Indian holy men
• Regular hairdressing as sign of wealth
• The dreadlocks of the Rastafari movement

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

In Hindu culture, it is believed that the base of the hair shaft contains certain hormones that stimulate the opposite sex. This, combined with the notion that the woman's hair is the most attractive part of her body, was the reason behind tonsuring of a woman after her husband's death, so that no person would be attracted to her and thereby secure her chastity. This is the reason why the son tonsures his head after his parents' death, it instills a sense of detachment from worldly pleasures in him for the duration of mourning.

See also

• Haircut
• Head shaving
• Depilation
• Human physical appearance
• Glabrousness

Anthropology | Sociology | Human appearance