Whether you first learned about it through Toby Flenderson from The Office or a friend who went from clean-shaven on Halloween to a full beard by Thanksgiving, Movember has been around for over a decade. The charitable movement, which encourages men to grow facial hair throughout the month to raise awareness and funds for prostate cancer research, has only grown bigger and more impactful with the rise of social media.
With all the stigma surrounding women and body hair since, well, forever, female-identifying people have generally been left out of the Movember conversation — until now. Billie, the shaving brand that created the first-ever women's razor campaign to show people actually shaving, has a brand new initiative that reminds everyone that women have upper lip hair, too.
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Starting today, the company is doing its part to welcome women into the Movember movement with a video that normalises facial hair. In the clip, women are seen showing the great lengths to which we go to remove our 'staches, from waxing to laser, and call on women to embrace them instead. "'Cause a 'stache is a 'stache, and we shouldn't let our perfectly good ones go to waste," the women in the video say.
Billie is also walking the walk by matching 100% of contributions up to $50,000 to be donated to the Movember Foundation, which supports projects focused on prostate cancer, testicular cancer, mental health, and suicide prevention for men. The organisation behind Movember already calls on its "Mo Sisters" to rally by encouraging conversation and fundraising, but it hasn't encouraged women to participate by growing their own hair. Billie's campaign is the first to do exactly that.
"Women are just opting to keep their hair, similar to how a man might like to shave his beard or not," Billie co-founder Georgina Gooley previously told Refinery29. "As we see more of this imagery, and as society becomes more accepting that the choice shouldn't be imposed on women, hopefully we see all types of body hair and it’ll get to a point where, whether you see it or not, you won't be raising your eyebrows." And what better reason than charity to let your facial hair grow wild and free?