An influencer has hit back at trolls who called her facial hair “disgusting” after she covered the hair above her mouth in mascara in a bid to challenge beauty standards and celebrate her “gender-neutral moustache”.
Joanna Kenny, 32, from the Lake District, was told her partner doesn’t love her and that she was “masculine” and “dirty” for wearing mascara on her top lip hairs.
The skincare expert first started sharing clips of herself on Instagram to promote body positivity in January 2020 when she decided to go foundation free.
After feeling “liberated” by going barefaced, Joanna began to explore the other ways in which she’d felt “shamed” by society – sharing pictures celebrating her belly rolls and facial hair.
But while she grew a fanbase of nearly 100,000 followers, Joanna has been met with a huge amount of hate.
A clip of her highlighting her facial hair in November was viewed 1.1 million times on TikTok proved to be “very controversial” – with one troll even saying she looks like her dad.
“The picture went viral which was a bittersweet moment as the controversy surrounding that initial post was crazy,” Joanna, an aesthetician, told Jam Press.
“It felt like a worldwide debate on my moustache.
“Some people misinterpreted it as attention seeking or trying to set a new trend but the point was to start a conversation about gender inequality surrounding hair.
“Whenever I talk about this, I can’t quite believe I need to normalize body hair in 2021.
“I dedicated the first post to my friends with darker hair than me who have suffered bullying because of their visible hair, but I want women everywhere to know that visible hair is still feminine.”
Joanna believes that her videos and photos of her highlighted moustache receive such a backlash because “visible hair has a shock value as it is hidden from view in both real life and the media”.
She said: “For anyone to have an adverse reaction about something that is entirely human and visible on other genders just demonstrates how needed this conversation is.
“The shame associated with body hair results in women especially going to great lengths to painfully or permanently remove it.
“I’m often criticised as being unhygienic for having visible body and facial hair, and once I would have probably agreed because that’s what I’ve been taught growing up too.
“Since I decided not to remove my hair, I realised I’d been removing it to make other people feel more comfortable viewing my body, not to make me feel comfortable.”
But Joanna’s Instagram account has also had thousands of positive comments, with fans praising her for her confidence in promoting gender-neutral body hair.
Joanna said: “I’ve had PCOS sufferers and people from the transgender community reach out to say how much they needed to see it on social media.
“I’ve had other women who are naturally hairy reach out to tell me that they no longer stress about removing it in the same way they used to.
“And while I’ve had an increase of trolls, I’ve also had an increase of men contacting me because hairy women are their type!”
One person wrote: “You’re so beautiful and inspiring. Wild seeing negative comments! I can’t imagine what it would feel like to want to put someone down in that way. I really don’t get the urge of commenting anything negative on a person’s face – I don’t really understand.” [sic]
“Her body, her choice to keep hair or not. Can we please stop judging women who have body and facial hair? Let’s normalise HUMANS having body hair instead of body shaming women,” another user said.
Someone else commented: “The amount of people commenting on your body, when you didn’t ask is ridiculous. Thank you for having the capacity to share your journey of self-acceptance and for encouraging others.”
Joanna added: “As my account grew, I realised how many people were letting body insecurities stop them from living a full and happy life.
“This empowered me to keep sharing and challenging the unrealistic beauty standards that contribute to body image issues.”
The influencer says her husband Chris, 33, is her “biggest cheerleader”, and although they both “struggled” to adapt after Joanna stopped removing her body hair, they believe it is important for other people to see that her “existence as Chris’ wife” isn’t about how “attractive” he finds her.
She added: “His love for me can’t be wavered because of something as superficial as body hair.”
Despite her positive outlook, Joanna says that even she is not immune to the pressures of society’s beauty standards.
She said: “I’ve felt the effects of society’s beauty standards from a very young age.
“As a young teen, I remember a boy I liked wouldn’t date me until I stopped wearing as much makeup and fixed my hair differently.
“But it wasn’t until I realised how my skin condition was affecting me emotionally and mentally that I started thinking about where those feelings came from.
“It took a long time to unlearn everything I’d been taught to hate about my body. Even I’m not body positive 100% of the time.”
Joanna began her career working in the beauty industry, but found that even then the emphasis on looking good was held as too much of a priority over feeling good for clients.
While working as an aesthetician, she found that her clients were also struggling to accept their own skin after comparing themselves to others online – prompting her to take to social media with her message.
Joanna said: “As filters and editing apps became the norm and clients were demanding “poreless” skin, I realised the world needed real skin reminders!
“That’s when I started the #poresnotflaws movement, posting images of myself holding a mirror whilst using a filter, to demonstrate Instagram vs reality.”
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