Meet the Hairy Porn Star Determined to Make Women Rethink Their Razors

(Photos NSFW, obviously) 

If you ask porn director, producer and star Nikki Silver, hair doesn't only belong on women's heads. 

Silver, tired of the clean-shaven performers she saw in mainstream porn, created Naughty Natural, a porn site featuring hairy women and genderqueer people. 

In an interview with Cosmopolitan, Silver discussed her new book, Unshaven, which brings women with full bushes and tufts of armpit fur off the Internet and, hopefully, onto people's coffee tables.

"My hope is that people will feel more comfortable showing it to their friends, maybe their family," Silver told Cosmopolitan. 

Silver also shared her ideas on what beauty means. Rather than saying women should dump shaving, she said women simply shouldn't feel like they have to. "There are many options available to them in terms of what they look like. Porn gives a narrow view of what bodies are supposed to look like and what hair is supposed to look like," Silver told Cosmopolitan. 

Silver said many women shave only because the hairless woman has become so normative in beauty standards. "It's so ingrained in people now," she told Cosmopolitan. "For young people, they don't even think otherwise."

Silver told Vice she began working in adult shoots at age 18. Averse to shaving, she sought gigs that wouldn't require her to trim her natural body hair. However, that meant a lot of big studios refused to work with her. 

"I started sort of resenting the big companies," Silver told Vice in 2014. "I felt like I was mistreated." 

Now that she calls the shots, Silver's making sure she makes room for many kinds of bodies. 

"The beauty industry is based on people being insecure about different parts of their bodies," she told Cosmopolitan. "I don't think it's all bad or anything — I don't think taking care of how you look is negative. But when you're striving for an unreachable ideal, I don't think that's positive."

Though she embraces a more natural look, Silver told Vice that she understands the practical reasons for shaving. 

"You have to push through it, you're moving hair apart... Things look bigger, labia look bigger," she told Vice. "But having hair is a signifier of being sexually mature, and a signifier of, you know, being an adult woman. Or person, really."

Silver had nothing but positive things to say about the armpit hair-dying trend of 2014. "I think that any representation of body hair on women in the media is positive," she told Cosmopolitan. But, if you're looking to grow out your hair at home after years of shaving, she has a tip for you. "Lots of exfoliating and lots of moisturizing," she told Cosmopolitan. "Like, more than you think is reasonable."