Gravure idol Tayu Anio proudly shows her armpit hair (and challenges attitudes)

The gravure idol Tayu Anio has caused a bit of a stir by proudly posting a selfie on social media that features her armpit hair.

The 25-year-old posted the viral image at the end of March. It features not just a few strands of armpit hair, but long hair that she has even dyed to match the color of her regular hair.

It’s not the first time. She has also not hidden her armpit hair in past shoots and selfies, and it seems that her decision to grow her armpit hair led her to leave her agency in 2022 and go freelance.

In 2023, she released a nude photo book (inevitably, her other very fine assets are more eye-catching in those images than any rogue armpit hair).

We think this is one of the first times we have seen a gravure idol with prominent armpit hair, though we should emphasize that Tayu Anio is not a major star, which might make her more inclined to be “experimental” with her body hair — or even deliberately provocative in an attempt to generate publicity.

The issue of pubic hair in Japan is quite complex and navigating the expectations of the opposite sex when dating is stressful for local women.

In general, women do not shave their bush (and many hardly even trim it), leading to quite shaggy scenes down below. Gravure idols and other models who do a lot of underwear and swimwear shoots will likely trim, if not outright shave off, their bush, but that shouldn’t be taken as a standard approach.

It’s hard to confirm porn stars’ attitudes toward their pubic hair, since genitalia is pixellated in legal adult video releases. As such, showing bush (trimmed or shaggy) actually became a sign in its own right of full-frontal nudity, leading to the birth of a label to describe such nude photo books that boomed in the 1990s: the hair nude.

By contrast, though, Japanese women are often more fastidious than their Western counterparts when it comes to removing hair from other parts of their body, such as legs and arms.

Shaved, smooth armpits are a major fetish in Japan (with smell sprays and masturbators available), and AVs often feature armpit-licking scenes. This is possibly a more recent development, since some porn stars famously had hairy armpits in the past.

Attitudes are perhaps changing and it’s common now to see ads offering laser hair removal, and apparently even increasing numbers of Japanese guys now groom their pubic hair.

We haven’t seen any data regarding armpit hair, but perhaps we will see more idols like Tayu Anio emerging in the near future.