Why posh girls are letting their pubes run free

Too posh for bush? Nonsense, says Layla Cambridge, who has always maintained a full pelt and is delighted that her 'freedom bush' is back in fashion...

17 Oct 2016

They say that 99 per cent (or thereabouts) of people stick with the bank that they started out with. I opened my NatWest account for the china piggies that they gave to new investors, and have remained with them ever since, despite the fashion for upstarts like First Direct.

It is the same with my pubes, or 'bush' as we shall say here, because that is a more pleasing word. When I was young, when the Seventies aesthetic was still very much alive, I would occasionally find my father's weathered copies of Penthouse and Playboy and even Oui magazine shoved down the side of the sofa and would eagerly turn the pages, marvelling at the soft-focus images of tits and bottoms and bushes - resplendent, full, tufty, unkempt bushes. There was a wild, womanly, nature-lover, self-confidence about those bushes. They were freedom bushes, liberated and modern. They were what I thought a bush should be.

As a teenager I would wax the bottom of my legs and the bits that strayed outside my pants, but that was all (I clearly remember a friend of mine saying of her mother, 'Her pubes grow HALFWAY DOWN HER LEG, it's disgusting,' and understanding that they were barbaric, these escaping pubes, and that I should never allow my own to run brazen down my thighs). But inside my pants? Full Bush. Always.

Then I reached my early 20s, a time of Baywatch and thongs (so evil), of plucked eyebrows and lipliner. Waxers became a thing, people traded details of theirs and soon enough we had Brazilians. Girls were having everything taken off (full) or leaving a 'landing strip', a sort of narrow Hitler moustache. My friends discussed balancing on all fours on a beautician's bed as the must-have waxer just flown in from Ipanema inspected their splayed parts and tutted; they told stories of surgeons about to operate saying, 'Gosh, you're hairy'; of the tear-inducing pain, the intimate burns, the itchy regrowth, the humiliation. But it was all worth it, they insisted, for the plastic, Barbie-like smoothness, and their boyfriends loved it.

I did not waver. Not even once. Occasionally I would trim, just so that I looked better in a bikini, but the margins did not shift. One time a date did say to me, 'I love your pubes', like he had never seen the fucking things before, as if they were some rare and exotic delicacy, like summer truffles... I remained resolute.

In the run-up to my wedding I went on a bit of a personal presentation spree: pedicures, manicures, eyebrow shaping, all that jazz. And then it came to the question of bush. One drunken night, some friends tried to persuade me. One of them even got hers out, literally waggled it under my nose: 'Look. Look how neat and lovely it is.' Ha ha, I laughed nervously. No thanks, not for me. The beauty editor on the magazine I worked for at the time organised a pamper day for me, the works, and without telling me she instructed the beautician to remove all my pubic hair, to kidnap me and sedate me (not really) and give me a Brazilian. 'Where are you going with that hot wax? Back off, bitch!' I shouted.

Sometimes I felt like one of those Japanese warriors, fighting the world, alone, dedicated to a personal code they would rather die for than betray. On my wedding night my bush was as nature intended, and my husband did not express displeasure. But the universe is a strange place. The sun orbits and the world turns and trends come and go. Suddenly, I find that where once I was alone, I now have fellow travellers. The bush has become fashionable again, celebrated by millennial models, Miley Cyrus, Scout Willis and Lady Gaga. Brazilian waxes feel dated, from a more finickity time, when we were obsessed with depilation because we had nothing else to worry about. I think it started with Cara Delevingne's eyebrows, thick and fierce. If eyebrows should be thick and fierce shouldn't a bush be too? What kind of strong woman has a Hitler moustache, suggesting sexual submission and a constant, unnatural state of prepubescence? Not me.