What Facial Hair Removal Looked Like in the 80s
Women in the 1980s were absolutely removing facial hair.
What they weren’t doing was booking face laser hair removal appointments, because that simply wasn’t an option yet.
So, what were they doing? Well, if a woman was dealing with upper-lip hair, a few stubborn chin hairs or brows that needed tidying, she had to work with a much more analog beauty toolkit.
Here’s what that toolkit looked like in practice—and what women had to work with instead.
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Tweezers Were Doing a Lot of Heavy Lifting
Got three mysterious chin hairs that seemed determined to return forever? You probably reached for tweezers.
Tweezing was one of the simplest and most accessible facial hair removal methods in the 1980s, especially for isolated coarse hairs around the chin, brows or upper lip.
And honestly, this part hasn’t changed that much. Plenty of us still have that one pair of tweezers we guard with our lives.
The main difference was that tweezing wasn’t competing with a dozen high-tech alternatives. If you had a few unwanted hairs, you plucked them and moved on.
Eyebrows were handled similarly, although usually with considerably more restraint than they would be in the 1990s. The iconic 80s brow was fuller and more natural (Brooke Shields deserves at least partial credit here).
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Sometimes Women Didn’t Remove Facial Hair at All—They Bleached It
Here’s an option that feels almost strangely elegant in retrospect: instead of removing upper-lip hair, women could simply make it harder to see.
Facial hair bleaching products were already well established by the 1980s. A woman with fine but dark hair above her lip might use a crème bleach to turn it blond enough to blend into her skin.
The problem is technically still there. Visually? Much less so.
It made particular sense for softer facial hair, where repeatedly plucking every individual strand would have been both tedious and mildly unhinged.
Bleaching also tells us something intriguing about beauty standards at the time. Women weren’t necessarily chasing completely hairless faces. Often, the objective was simply: don’t let the hair be noticeable.
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Depilatory Cream Was the Drugstore Solution
Ah, the depilatory cream. The wonderfully chemical middle ground between shaving and pulling hairs out individually.
Products such as Nair were already deeply embedded in American beauty culture by the 1980s. Facial formulations allowed women to apply cream, wait a few minutes and wipe away unwanted hair.
Convenient? Yes.
Luxurious sensory experience? Perhaps not.
Anyone who has used older-style depilatory creams will know there is a very particular moment when you start wondering whether the smell means the product is working or whether you have accidentally begun dissolving yourself.
Still, the appeal was obvious. No needles, no appointment and no painstaking tweezing session.
Pretty excellent, if you ask us.
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Electrolysis Was the Serious, “I Want This Gone” Option
If tweezing and creams were maintenance, electrolysis was the bigger commitment.
By the 1980s, professional electrolysis was already an established method for women seeking long-term facial hair reduction. A very fine probe was inserted into individual follicles and electrical current was used to damage them.
Yes, individual follicles.
So you can immediately see the downside: treating a meaningful amount of facial hair could require many appointments, considerable patience and money.
There were even home electrolysis gadgets marketed to women, because apparently every era needs beauty technology promising that you can become your own technician.
Still, professional electrolysis filled an important role. A woman with persistent coarse chin or upper-lip hair could actually pursue something more permanent rather than endlessly repeating the same grooming ritual.
Laser simply wasn’t there yet.
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Shaving Was Possible (But Culturally Complicated)
Women absolutely could shave facial hair in the 1980s, and despite the enduring myth, shaving does not make hair grow back thicker.
But culturally? It was complicated.
Female facial shaving wasn’t packaged as the chic skincare ritual we now call dermaplaning. Razors were strongly associated with men’s beards, so a woman regularly shaving her chin or upper lip could feel much more self-conscious about it.
Beauty culture therefore offered her plenty of alternatives: bleach it, dissolve it, tweeze it, wax it or pursue electrolysis.
Waxing itself was available too, particularly in salons, although it had not yet reached today’s every-shopping-center ubiquity.
And that’s probably the funniest thing about looking back at 1980s facial hair removal. The concern feels completely familiar. The tools feel half familiar, half archaeological.
Women were dealing with the same stubborn hairs.
They just had fewer ways to tell them, permanently, to leave.
