Earlier this month, true to form, Kim Kardashian made headlines yet again when her apparel brand Skims released an array of thongs covered in 12 hues of synthetic pubic hair.

They were accompanied by the catchphrase: “Your carpet can be whatever colour you want it to be.”

The gimmick — which follows similar product launches including bras with prosthetic nipples and a “collagen yarn”-infused face wrap — worked, and all $32 “merkins” sold out within hours of launching. According to communications agency Novos, Google searches for “pubic bush” nearly tripled last week, while searches for the phrase “pubic hair care” rose 17 percent.

It’s the latest in a series of fashion trends embracing the imagery of untamed body hair. On Oct. 5, Duran Lantink’s controversial Spring/Summer 2026 debut for Jean Paul Gaultier included three skin-tight looks featuring screen-printed body hair on the chest, legs and pubic regions.

Imitation hair’s fashion moment, thus far relegated to PR stunts and the runway, seems to correspond nonetheless with genuine changes in women’s grooming habits.

The bush, which was all the rage in the 1970s, began falling out of fashion in the following decade as hairlessness became increasingly associated with youth and hygiene. But it may be making a resurgence, in reaction to rising tides of social conservatism. Last year, beauty writer Jessica DeFino polled over 14,000 people online via her Substack The Review of Beauty and found that only 15 percent of respondents reported going completely bare while 29.5 percent sported either a full or just slightly trimmed bush. A 2024 Women’s Health survey of over 500 women in the US found that just 23 percent were fully bare.

In an increasingly conservative global climate, women’s bodies may be more policed than ever before in recent years. But many women are rejecting arbitrary aesthetic standards and the notion that beauty must necessitate pain. The shift has had commercial repercussions for those in the business of bare skin: European Wax Center estimates that it will implement 28 to 50 net location closures in its fiscal 2025, and the waxing franchise also recently reported a 6.6 percent year-on-year revenue slide on Aug. 13, its fourth consecutive quarter of decline.

“I don’t worry at all about the closures that we have this year,” chief commercial officer Katie Mullen told The Business of Beauty, saying she was “optimistic” about the future of waxing and the business’s growth. The salon chain had a quick-sprint response to Kardashian’s stunt launch, posting ads in its stores last week and above the Holland Tunnel in New York that read: “We’ll take it from here, Kim.”

Body Hair Goes ‘Upscale’

The merkin trend may invigorate more beauty brands to display real body hair in their marketing campaigns.

In 2018, shaving company Billie created the first razor ad to feature women’s body hair, rather than models shaving already hairless legs. The nine-year-old skincare brand Fur, which explicitly markets products like its Fur Oil and Ingrown Concentrate for the pubic region, regularly features body hair in its advertising. The company’s strategy around marketing imagery is to depict body hair as “elegant and upscale,” Fur co-founder Lillian Tung said.

Tung explained, “We really wanted to avoid that association of ‘body hair is gross and disgusting,’” she said, adding that the refrain is still widespread on social media. Tung hopes to open the conversation around pubic hair, regardless of one’s personal grooming preferences, and ultimately end their associated stigma.

Fashion content creator and trend forecaster Mandy Lee, whose list of 2025 fashion industry and trend predictions included the merkin in January after she spotted its usage in the Maison Margiela Spring/Summer 2024 haute couture show, is sceptical that the average person will begin flaunting their natural bush.

Lee sees the merkin as something “for fashion, for performance, possibly the red carpet,” she said. “As much as people want to be like, ‘Bush on main,’ I don’t see it happening in real life.”

She cautioned against mistaking the usage of pubic wigs for body positivity. That the mere facade of a bush seems to serve as a punchline, especially in close proximity to Halloween, risks appearing disingenuous and denigrating. (One TikTok user even joked about dyeing their Skims merkin green for an Elphaba costume.)

Though body hair preferences are evolving behind closed doors, the burgeoning pubic care market remains scant.

Skims’ viral launch was, after all, a marketing gambit from a brand whose founder is nearly synonymous with breaking the internet. The bet didn’t just pay off in sales alone, but in a significant influx of online conversation quipping about and dissecting the drop, which, according to Launchmetrics, gave Skims a $10.1 million boost in media impact value during the week following the release.

“For Skims to release a seemingly provocative item of clothing in a time where provocation is policed heavily does raise a lot of red flags to me,” Lee said. “Who is this for? What is this for? I think they just want our money.”

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