The fairer sex didn’t always have to spend time grooming their underarm area. Women didn’t shave their pits before about 1915 because no one ever saw that part of their body. According to Mental Floss, even the word “underarm” was considered scandalous before that time. But then designers cooked up a dress without sleeves, and an ad in Harper’s Bazaar said that to wear the style, women first needed to attend to “the removal of objectionable hair.” And we all got out our razors. [Mental Floss]

During the ascent of the now pervasive male hipster style, we’ve fretted over mustaches gone wild, and hemmed and hawed over Galifianakis-ish hirsuteness. But men who remove all that hair are coming out of the closet, with a little help from grooming marketers, says The New York Times. Will the increasing popularity of manscaping (Diddy and Jay-Z are already converts) foretell the doom of dude body hair as we know it?!

Gillette thinks some men need assistance with not drawing blood while they shave their groin area, so its crack animation team put together this instructional “How to Shave your Balls” YouTube cartoon. The video’s basically just an infomercial for the Gillette Fusion Power razor and shaving cream—but don’t forget to use, as the voiceover dude intones, some common sense, too. 

Hey, anything that keeps our teeth from getting flossed when we go down for a beej is A-OK with us. But Gillette knows that to get men to spend money on shaving down there, it has to tell them what they want to hear: “You might say when there’s no underbrush, the tree looks taller.” (It makes the claim not once, but twice.) We’ll believe it when we see it…in the hair-free flesh.

We’re shedding our winter clothes (and showing some skin) now that the temperature is heating up. But since we live in an area that is chilly for more than half of the year, we have to relearn how to dress and groom for warm weather every year. Here are the rules to avoid fashion faux pas, embarrassment, and offending others after the jump.

Women, take note: when the appearance of men’s toenails suggest that we are either vying for a Guinness World Record—or preparing for an underground cage fighting match—feel free to mention that they’ve gotten a tad long. We don’t mind.

If you ask a man what he looks for when he meets a vagina, besides a great sense of humor of course, he will probably suggest many of the same delusional qualities he wants in his total fantasy female package. Easy on the eye, morning, noon, and night; perfumed to perfection; tantalizing to the taste buds; demure blushing rose bud one day; insatiable quivering tigress purring, “Sic ‘em Rex” the next.

Dear Angelina,
I commend you for your charity work and for adopting children of different ethnicities. However, I’ve noticed that you seem to require a little help with grooming little Zahara’s hair because you’re going about it all wrong. The only hairstyles you or her nanny seem to create on Zahara are two ponytails or a free-spirit curly Afro. But there are so many other styling options. And I’ll reveal some grooming secrets that will make your life, and hers, a lot easier, after the jump.

This weekend, when I was in Atlantic City, one of my fellow ragers asked me if she could borrow my tweezers so she could pluck a nipple hair. A nipple hair? She had nipple hair? “Yeah, don’t you?” I honestly didn’t know. She also said she waxed above her lip. Crap, I’ve never waxed my lip. Have I been walking around with a ‘stache for years and no one has ever told me and that’s why I can’t get a rebound to save my life right now?!

On last nights episode of “The Hills” the female ‘stache came back to haunt me—Lauren Conrad had a very obvious dusting of facial fuzz about her lip. If Lauren Conrad has a mustache I must have it too. This morning, the grooming obsession continued when I discovered a horrendous ingrown hair bump, um, you know where. Eww. Maybe I should start listening to the lady mags and actually wax from now on. Especially since I am about to jump back into the dating pool—with that in mind, I decided to ask the dudes on my IM about what they look for, grooming-wise, in a bed mate. I didn’t tell them about my ingrown hair though. I’m hoping it’s gone by the time I sleep with any of them.

I’ve always found it funny that as the Brazilian—and I’m talking waxing here, people—has became more popular among women, it’s beards, mustaches, and facial scruffiness that has become more in vogue for men. I can’t help but wonder why the women of my generation are hacking off their bushes while the men are letting their face hair grow wild. I’ll admit it. I’m a victim of pubic hair peer pressure. I mean, if you go to the beach, you have to go “there.” Once, I even had a waxident. However, now that I can put my bikini back in storage, I’m wondering, as a single lady on the loose, what the social obligations are to my crotch? I bet if we ask those non-manscaping guys if they’re going to start shaving as we back off waxing, we’ll find a hairy double standard.

Manscaping isn’t just a trend, it’s a bare necessity. While women have been waxing and plucking their eyebrows for ages, gentlemen are finally catching on and it’s become an eye-opening phenomenon. Salons and barbershops across the country are reporting record numbers of guys getting their brows waxed, tweezed, shaped, and shaved. Even Sephora is offering special products to de-unibrow dudes and even enhance their arch—like Gaultier’s $18 Monsieur Groomer gel. But is too much of a good thing, like manscaping, not a good thing at all?