Give 'Em The Old Vajazzle-Dazzle
A journey through the aptly-named "Bush Years"
Note to readers: if you don’t want to hear about pubic hair — specifically, the era when pubic hairstyles looked like Fred Durst’s goatee — you may want to skip this one!
The ‘00s were not an easy decade for our genitals. I mean, I guess what decade was? But the ‘00s seemed especially rough on the ol’ downstairs.
In the ‘90s, who even knew what anyone was doing with their pubic hair? Letting it hang free and easy, like the glorious mane of Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder? Wearing it in two pigtails, a la Baby Spice? Beats me. Pube styling was simply not part of the public conversation.
But around the turn of the millennium, it suddenly was. There were suddenly a TON of pube hair styling options, and you had to hear about ALL of them, ALL of the time!
If you picked up a women’s magazine in 2004, you could hardly get to the article on “Jessica and Nick: An Eternal Love” without first coming across some breathless coverage of all the new pube styles: Do you want to do a landing strip? Do you want to do a teeny-tiny mini-landing strip, giving your vagina a bit of a sassy Charlie Chaplin/ Hitler look? Do you want to get a full Brazilian and get rid of EVERYTHING (and then, when the hair starts growing back in a week, itch so badly that you’ll become convinced that you contracted an STD from a Holiday Inn Express hot tub)???
This era also brought us casual labiaplasty, widespread anal bleaching, and the brief-yet-memorable time when you could buy neon pink pubic hair dye at your local beauty supply store.
But for me, one trend sticks out above and beyond every other genital fad of the aughts: vajazzling.
Oh, what’s that? You don’t remember “vajazzling”? Let me jog your memory:
This was also vajazzling:
And this, too, was vajazzling:
How and why did we get to a cultural moment where covering your genitals in rhinestones was seen as kind of normal (rather than a sign that you had a nervous breakdown in the glue gun aisle at Michael’s)? Let’s have some vagina dialogues, baby!
Shakespeare in Love (with Your Vagina)
This is a story that begins where all good stories begin: in Gwyneth Paltrow’s nethers.
But before we get there, let’s set up some historical context. I know, BOOOORING, sorry!
The HIV epidemic made sex seem fairly terrifying throughout the ‘80s and first half of the ‘90s. But by the late ‘90s, safer sex and drug use practices meant fewer people were contracting HIV, and newer, better medications meant that folks who did contract it were less likely to be vulnerable to HIV-related illnesses. Thus, America at large was starting to feel less scared of sex, and more free 2 b horny.
By 2000, half of all US adults were online, which meant more and more people had easy-peasy access to porn (and the pubic hair stylings therein).
At the same time, a backlash was brewing against mid-’90s feminism, replacing “1992: the Year of the Woman” with, like, Woodstock ‘99 and The Man Show.
Please do recall that in 1999-2005, mainstream American pop culture was still absolutely heteronormative as fuck.
And it all set the stage for…the Brazilian!
In 1990, New York City’s J Sisters Salon began offering a new service — waxing every damn hair off both ya holes, which they dubbed a “Brazilian wax.” Though the wax grew in popularity over the decade, it didn’t hit the mainstream until 1999 — when La Paltrow, hot off her 1998 Oscar win for Shakespeare in Love, gave the salon a signed photo in which she credited their waxes with “changing her life.”
It was an instant hit in newly horny and porn-obsessed America! Suddenly, vag waxing was everywhere. I, like many of you, learned about it from a 2000 episode of Sex and the City, which pushed it out into the larger world. Obsessive women’s magazine coverage and the newly-established sex blogging culture helped push it even farther. By 2005, in almost any strip mall in America, you could find a woman willing to brutally strip hair off your taint.
I believe the Brazilian’s popularity — like so many trends aimed at women around this time period — came down to the hearty mix of feminist and misogynist messaging around it.
On one hand, the Brazilian was supposed to increase your sexual pleasure, and be an instant turn-on to any partner — so getting one was empowering, a way to show that you were sexually bold. Plus, the popularity of the Brazilian was forcing people to have public discussions about women’s bodies, body hair and sexuality, all of which were historically absolutely fucking taboo subjects.
On the other hand, as soon as the Brazilian went mainstream, plenty of folks started extolling it as the new “hygiene” standard, the bare minimum you had to do to be considered heteronormatively desirable — “You’re not gonna find the trucker-hat-wearing man of your 2004 dreams with a messy bush, young lady!”
Plus, though certainly not everyone who got them or liked them was interested in the weird “this makes it look like you are too young to have pubes” element…there was a lot of it floating around out there, totally normalized, and it was EFFED.
The intense emotional conflict of both of these totally opposing viewpoints, speaking to our hopes and fears, all wrapped up in one salon procedure…how could it not be a hit??
Plus: low-rise jeans.
But even with all those factors in play, after a few years, people did what they always do: they got bored. Enter: the vajazzle!
The Vagina of the Future…Today!
Though the Brazilian was popularized in the ‘00s, it wasn’t a new creation. I mean, people shaved off all their pubes in ancient Egypt. The Brazilian was just a rebrand, like New Coke!
The vajazzle, however is a unique 2000s invention, just like the iPhone, the birth control patch, Limewire, and those videos where a zombie screams at you. It’s part of our cultural heritage!
The first mention of vajazzling I could find was in a June 2001 issue of the New York Observer:
“A few years after the Brazilian bikini wax tore through the city, New York women were ripe for a new gimmick — something extreme to justify the pain and indignity of that half-hour, totally denuding procedure. So some genius came up with the idea of arranging tiny, self-adhesive Swarovski crystals on the newly revealed expanse and charging $65 to $105 for the ordeal.”
However, the style still stayed niche for the rest of the decade. Much like John Mayer, it didn’t really hit the big time until it hooked up with the ghost (vagina) whisperer herself: Jennifer Love Hewitt.
If you are like 10 out of 10 Americans, you do not remember that in 2010, Jennifer Love Hewitt inexplicably published a book entitled The Day I Shot Cupid: Hello, My Name Is Jennifer Love Hewitt and I'm a Love-aholic.
But J-Lo-Hew’s most lasting cultural contribution may come from this very tome, where she became the first national figure to speak about getting vajazzled. Then, she went on Conan to talk about it:
Around the same exact time in the UK — where they call an elevator a “lift,” a truck a “lorry,” and Jennifer Love Hewitt “Sienna Miller” — the reality show The Only Way is Essex was also touting vajazzling, with star Amy Childs performing the procedure on another cast member on air.
And then boom — the vajazzle hit the big time. Oh, you don’t believe it went mainstream? Well, then, what about this obviously very true and real 2012 Daily Mail headline?
But even if it reached the same level of mainstream awareness as the Brazilian, the vajazzle never quite picked up the same steam in terms of people actually getting them.
Some of that is practicality, I’m sure — it’s not necessarily sexy-feeling to walk around with tiny rhinestones falling out of the bottom on your pants.
But some of it is that you just couldn’t fit it into the same highly charged cultural framework as the Brazilian. You may be able to sell someone on the idea that vajazzling is sexy and bold, but you simply cannot convince someone that men will find them unclean and undesirable if they don’t have “Party Girl” written over their vag in Swarovski.
I feel absolutely deranged typing this, but I genuinely believe it…vajazzling was an attempt to wrestle the ‘00s pubic hair discourse away from the male gaze!
I’m not saying it’s feminist activism to turn your labia into a disco ball. But there’s absolutely no cultural mandate to do it — if anything, the opposite. The vajazzle took the public conversation about pubic hair, which was often very shaming towards women, and turned it into something weird and whimsical that you were mostly doing to amuse yourself.
Like all the very best parts of 2000s culture (The Real Cancun, The Darkness, Trix Yogurt), vajazzling feels to me like a fever dream, a fantastical break with reality. It served no purpose except to be frivolous and fun, pointless and dumb — that’s the feeling I think we’re yearning for, whenever we yearn for the 2000s. And was anything ever dumber or more pointless than the vajazzle? God bless every one of those stupid-ass tiny rhinestones.
Also, just in case you were curious, Betty hot pink pubic hair dye is still being made — in fact, you can get it from Amazon with 3-day shipping! If one of you venmos me $20, I will do it and report back.
Subscribed. ❤️
The Breaking Dawn photo gets more alarming the more I look at it.
(Fun side note: I shaved a landing strip in my youth after watching an episode of CAT HOUSE. Yikes all around.)