The first time I walked past the subway platform poster advertising products by Betty, I didn’t quite process what I was seeing. Giving it nothing but a cursory glance, I kept on walking, determined not to be late. After a couple of metres though, I stopped, turned back, and went to look at the poster again, hoping against hope that I had imagined it.
    My eyes had not deceived me. The product being advertised, “Betty”, was indeed “colour for down there”. I stared, mouth open and eyebrows raised, for a few seconds and then, realising that people were staring at me, I kept walking.
    As I walked away, pushed my way through the turnstiles with perhaps a little more force than was warranted, and stalked up the stairs into daylight, I thought, “Great, now I have to write another post about pubic hair, and my parents have barely recovered from the last one”. As much as I’d like to spare my parents the awkwardness of standing in the frozen goods aisle of the supermarket, where they tend to run into old friends, and revealing that their younger daughter is writing about sex, pornography and pubic hair, I simply have to write about Betty.
    It pains me that by writing about a home pubic hair dye kit (complete with wax and stencils, because who doesn’t want their pubic hair waxed into the shape of a lightning bolt, flower, star, or lips?), I’m essentially giving free publicity to what I really think is an awful product. I also realise that some people will think I’m joking, just as some people thought news items announcing the opening of Phit, New York City’s recently opened vagina gym, were spoofs. I wasn’t joking then, and though I really wish I were, I’m not joking now.
    Of course, it’s not the products themselves that anger me – if I were to write about every offensive beauty product out there, my own pubic hairs would be greying by the time I finished – it’s what they represent, and the message they send to women (and men) about women’s bodies.
    Betty products are yet another way to tell women that their bodies, already plucked, waxed, powdered, treadmilled, shaved, blowdried and gelled according to what Cosmo tells us is appropriate this month, are still not good enough. It’s another way to tell women that the huge amounts of time, money and energy many of us spend on keep our bodies under control and within the boundaries of what’s acceptable, still don’t cut it.
    Explaining why she developed the product, “Chief Betty Officer” Nancy Jarecki explains that many of her clients were longing to be “true” blondes, that is, to match their pubic hair to their hair on their heads. Here, the emphasis seems to be on appearing “natural”. The goal is to appear to have dyed nothing by dying everything. The need to appear naturally blonde reflects the phenomenon revealed by a 2004 study at DukeUniversity: effortless perfection. Not only must women be beautiful (or in this case, blonde), they must do it without any visible effort. This is the idea behind bed-head hair, nude lipstick, and the countless other “natural-look” makeup products out there; the idea that women should spend hours of their time and hundreds of their dollars to look as though they’ve barely tried at all.
    The other half of Betty’s client base, the website informs us, consists of women who woke up one morning and were horrified to find that at 40, they no longer looked like 20-year-olds. Now, I understand that aging is traumatizing and should be concealed at all costs (tell me something Olay and Loreal haven’t been shoving down my throat since I was 13). I have a great deal of sympathy for women who, having hit 40, see no one in a magazine who looks like any more, no one on TV who is even close to their first grey pubic hair, no one in the public eye who makes them feel like it’s alright to age naturally and gracefully. So I can understand how, without those kinds of images to bolster them, and with the constant refrain of anti-aging advertising ringing in their ears, they might pounce on a product like Betty.
    To those women, I say: maybe it’s not you that has to change. Maybe 40-year-olds aren’t meant to look like 20-year-olds. Maybe we need more images of truly natural, and aging women in our magazines and on our billboards. Maybe we need to change the way we think about women’s bodies, so that we don’t just imagine them as terribly flawed and in desperate need of “fixing”, be it with dye, wax or makeup. Maybe, if we changed the way we thought about our bodies, we’d find that Betty is not the answer.