Queen Esie is 29 years old and lives in Montreal. For years, she shaved her legs, underarms, and chest, and also underwent sessions of electrolysis that she herself describes as painful.
Then she noticed something that made no sense: as she told PEOPLE, the more she shaved, the more hair she had. She began to wonder why she was doing it and for whom. She concluded that beauty standards are always changing and are made up. There was nothing wrong with her: she was simply hairy.
She later discovered that her body hair comes from her Ivorian Wè tribe, that the women in her family are very hairy, and that in her great-grandmother’s time, this was considered beautiful. In 2019, she created the Lavender Project, a self-portrait photography project on Instagram to open up a conversation about female body hair. She sewed a double-sided lavender dress: one side shows the hair on her chest, and the other covers it. Her idea was to get people to ask why it is normal on a man but not on a woman.
