People Can’t Stop Hurting Themselves While Grooming Their Pubes

Photo: Dan Herrick/Lonely Planet Image/Getty Images

Should we blame the beauty industrial complex? Cable television? (We should probably blame porn.) But somewhere along the way in the last few decades, patches of pubic hair have shrunk in size. This has led to all sorts of interesting quagmires — vajazzling, if you will — but the most hazardous result is that pubic-grooming injuries have become the norm.

A study published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association cites that 24 percent of men and 27 percent of women have injured themselves while grooming their pubic hair. Researchers looked at a representative sample of American men and women between the ages of 18 and 64 and found that over two-thirds of men and over 85 percent of women admit to grooming their pubic hair. Of the groomers, 1.4 percent experienced injuries so severe that they had to seek medical attention. And self-proclaimed super-hairy men were most at risk of injury. (The study did not mention the metric of determining hairiness.)

The injuries varied from cuts, which accounted for 61 percent of accidents, to burns from hair-removal creams, which took up 23 percent of the reported injuries. Of this injured bunch, 2.5 percent said they needed surgical intervention to drain abscesses or close sutures, for example. However, most abrasions were minor.

And what exactly are folks injuring? For men that would be the scrotum; the pubis — the area surrounding the pelvis — was the most likely injury spot for women. Of course, all of these injuries could have been avoided if people left their hair alone — but then again, the ’70s are long behind us.

A Lot of Folks Are Getting Injured While Grooming Pubic Hair