This Is the Latest Bizarre Trend Going Viral With Women

Pink, green, blue, purple — the options are endless. No, we're not talking about crayons. We're talking about armpit hair.

In an interesting twist, the debate over whether or not women should shave their underarms seems to recently have evolved beyond razor talk. Indeed, it's no longer about whether or not you shave, but rather what you do with the hair you do keep. 

While receiving mixed reviews on social media, fans say this is about more than just personal expression and a creative use of hair dye: This is about body positivism.

Hair stylist Roxie Hunt recently experimented with dyeing her colleague's armpit hair and detailed the process in a recent blog post, ultimately celebrating her success. "We laughed and marveled at the beauty of her blue pit hair," she wrote. "It was too good to be true. The color in her pits perfectly matched the color on her head. I felt a major win for body hair."

And Hunt isn't the only dyed-armpit-hair enthusiast. A quick search on social media reveals dozens of women proudly showcasing colorful tufts of hair under their arms.

As can be expected with any new trend — especially one that bucks traditional views of femininity — there's been a fair amount of pushback from women and men alike on social media. Most of these critics, not surprisingly, have focused on the "ewww" factor:

But according to Hunt, dyeing armpits is much more than a simple "hot trend." It's about body positivism. 

"My hope is that the trend is not about colored pit hair, but about stepping outside the box and making independent style decisions that feel right to you," she told Mic, "and encouraging people to celebrate their bodies and their unique differences, as they are."

Lest we forget, the idea that a hairless body is a sexy body is a largely cultural concept in modern countries. As Mic noted earlier this year: 

"Even though body hair has a biological, evolutionary purpose — it traps and wafts pheromones, announcing our sexual and reproductive availability — society dictates that for females, it's not just unnerving, it's nasty. When you take this cultural attitude, coupled with ubiquitous beauty and shaving products marketed to women, it's no wonder women spend up to 72 days of their lives shaving."

Indeed, the dyed pit phenomenon has quickly evolved into the Free Your Pits Movement, which Hunt describes as "a way to encourage women to make conscious choices about their bodies [and] experiment with their personal sense of style, and to start a conversation about normalizing the concept of the natural hair that grows on women's bodies."

In that case, here's to hoping we see more colorful armpits. Every woman should embrace her body regardless of prescribed social stereotypes that dictate what we "ought" to look like.