Januhairy
Januhairy is a campaign that encourages women to grow their body hair. In the representational image, actress Traci Dinwiddie from the film 'Find Love' poses for a portrait at the Getty Images Portrait Studio during the 2006 Sundance Film Festival, in Park City, Utah, Jan. 23, 2006. Gettyimages/Mark Mainz

Januhairy, a campaign that encourages woman to quit shaving and waxing their body hair for the month of January, has completely taken the social media by storm. Several women from across the world posted pictures of their hairy body parts on Twitter to show their support.

This campaign is the first of its kind and was started by Laura Jackson, a 21-year-old student from the University of Exeter in southwest England. She got the idea in May 2018 while preparing for her drama degree which demanded her to grow her body hair. Jackcon said she received negative comments from many people when she stopped shaving off her body hair, the Independent reported. The incident made Jackson think about the taboo in the society that wanted women to shave off their hair to fit in its definition of beauty.

Jackson created a Twitter account named Januhairy to get support for her campaign from across the globe.

Speaking about how society demeaned women with body hair and pressurized them to look in a certain specified way to be suitable to the eyes of others, told BBC, “I realized that there is still so much more for us to do to be able to accept one another fully and truly. I just want women to feel more comfortable in their own beautifully unique bodies. This isn't an angry campaign for people who don't see how normal body hair is. It is an empowering project for everyone to understand more about their views on themselves and others."

Through this campaign, Jackson aimed to raise around £1,000 ($1,274) for Body Gossip, a project to “empower everybody to be the best version of themselves”. She created a page called JustGiving to garner support. The page had 33 supporters and raised £499 ($635) at the time of writing the article.

The major idea of launching the campaign, according to Jackson, was to make the society realize the true and natural beauty of every woman and not always force them to conform to a set of rules.

Many women took to Twitter to show their support:

However, some Twitter users were not so in favor of the campaign:

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