Facial Hair And Fitting In: Inspiration From Frida Kahlo

Australian cartoonist Gavin Aung Than draws inspiration from Frida Kahlo and sets it to a story about a young girl with a unibrow to break stereotypes.

Notions of what is considered beautiful don’t exist in a vacuum. They are regularly enforced and reinforced by television, movies, celebrities as well as ordinary people. Body hair is no exception: societies have rules around how much hair is acceptable, where is it acceptable and more. Norms around beauty and hair apply disproportionately to women because of the value placed on women’s beauty as a measure of their worth. Young girls are not immune to this influence either. This desire for smooth, hairless limbs and faces play themselves out in many ways and not confirming is not easy. It often leads to taunting and bullying, especially among adolescents, and many young girls find themselves compelled to remove facial and body hair to fit in.

In this comic strip, Australian cartoonist Gavin Aung Than adapts a quote by Frida Kahlo and sets it to a story about a young girl with a unibrow. Frida Kahlo, a Mexican painter, was famous for her self-portraits, flaunting her unibrow and her fearless approach to life. Read on and find out how this young girl and mother deal with the girl’s desire to get rid of the unibrow.

Frida Kahlo’s image courtesy here

Shruti Saxena

I think of myself as a feminist development practitioner with a strong interest in issues

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