Last updated on August 4, 2020
Question:
I have gone through all the stages of puberty. My body is fully developed but incomplete. I have some amount of pubic hair. I have a thick growth of hairs under my arms. I have some facial hair, but not chest hair. I don’t sweat much. I would like to have more hair in my armpits, so I shave occasionally for growth. Many girls and boys in my area have fully developed hair under their armpits, but I don’t. I want to grow more hair naturally, but my hair growth is very slow. Why is this? I want to be bushy and hairy. I am bald under my arms and all my friends are bushy. I want to be like them.
Please don’t ignore this note. Please help me.
Answer:
The amount of hair produced by a male is primarily determined by the genes he inherits from his parents. If your skin does not contain a large number of hair follicles, nothing that you do will change this. “… you cannot make one hair white or black” (Matthew 5:36). A secondary factor is how well you eat. While nutrition can’t give you more or less hair, it will affect the speed in which your hairs grow and the thickness of those hairs. Very poor eating habits can even cause you to lose much of the hair that you have. Good eating habits will give you up to the maximum your body can produce, but no more than this.
Shaving your armpits won’t make your body produce more hair. All you are doing is trimming off the finer early hairs. I suspect that if your friends are of the same basic national origins as you, then the thicker hair that you are seeing is more of an illusion. They haven’t shaved their armpits, so the hairs are long and curly creating a thick nest. You are keeping yours short so you don’t see much. If you see a person with a very short hair cut, they appear to have little hair. You can see their scalp between the hairs. But if they let it grow out a bit, their hair appears to be thicker and fuller because the length of their hair blocks your view of their scalp. The same thing happens under your arms.
One of the hard lessons of life is learning to be content with who you are and not to constantly striving to be who you are not. “Let your conduct be without covetousness; be content with such things as you have. For He Himself has said, “I will never leave you nor forsake you”” (Hebrews 13:5). Too many people place conditions on their happiness. I would be happy if only I was taller, skinnier, more muscular, darker, paler, smoother, or hairier. You are as God made you, so make the most of what you have been given.
We all have a built-in desire to be liked by those around us, but we mistakenly think that we have to be exactly like everyone else to be accepted. But look at each of your friends and notice that every one of them is different in some way. Some are taller, some shorter, some paler, some darker. Those differences are not curses, they give us individual identities. Imagine a world where everyone looked exactly the same. Wouldn’t that be hard to hold a conversation, since you would always be wondering to whom you were talking? Accept the fact that the sum of things which are different in you from your friends makes you unique, just as each of your friends is unique in his own way.