Skims' New 'Ultimate Bush' Thongs Are a Masterclass in Stunt Marketing—and a Beauty Standard Minefield

 

By Stacy Lee Kong

 
 

Image: twitter.com/kimkardashian

 

I have to admit, I did not anticipate discussing Kim Kardashian and pubic hair this week, and yet… here we are. And yes, I do mean that figuratively (her shapewear company, Skims, just launched what’s basically a merkin) and literally (we all agree that Kim K probably lasered her pubes off years ago, right?). In case your group chat was not similarly obsessed, a quick recap: on Wednesday, Skims dropped the Faux Hair Micro String Thong, a CAD$60 panty that comes adorned with faux hair in 12 different shades and textures, from blonde and straight to black and curly, so that “your carpet can be whatever color you want it to be.” It sold out within hours, naturally. So that’s… something! 

Now, this is obviously a stunt. As online fashion commentator Andriana Andoniou pointed out on X, much like this summer’s face shapewear and 2024’s Ultimate Nipple Bra, these thongs are “nothing more than rage bait products so they bring the consumer in for intrigue of a useless product, but will stay in for the actual ‘basics’ product + they draw attention to the brand in relevancy stock.” To that point, we have no way of knowing how many thongs were in stock in the first place, which makes it difficult to tell whether there’s actual demand for this product. Nor do we have any real insight into Kardashian’s motivations for producing it. So, while its existence may not tell us much about her, or anyone’s, commitment to body positivity, the discourse it sparked is super illuminating. And on that note, here are five things that I thought about while spending far too much time looking at faux pubic hair. (RIP my other deadlines.)

1. This is all classic Kardashian, naturally

This genre of product actually makes a lot of sense for Skims, and by extension, Kardashian. That entire family is great at outrage marketing—and yes, I do mean that in reference to the sex tape, but I’m also thinking about all the other times Kim has managed to attract attention while launching a product or a brand. Before Skims was Skims, it was Kimono—for about six days, a time period when everyone from journalists to the mayor of Kyoto slammed her for cultural appropriation. She promptly apologized and renamed the company, but as marketing experts pointed out at the time, that didn’t happen until it had garnered millions of dollars’ worth of earned media mentions. There have also been smaller controversies around other, earlier ventures, including SKKN by Kim, KKW Beauty and Chroma Beauty. As Fashionista pointed out in 2022, quoting small business attorney Andrea Sager, “the media mogul is ‘very strategic’ about brand awareness. And highly visible legal scuffles are one way to get people talking about your brand.” Whether she’s purposefully seeking out controversy, or just adept at leveraging it when it happens, outrage is definitely one way she makes money.

@ellecanada Sorry, but the bush never left in our household!! #skims #kimkardashian #skimsreview ♬ original sound - ELLE CANADA

But the other thing that feels very familiar is the way she’s capitalizing on women’s insecurities, particularly ones that she has helped create. As culture critic (and my friend) Katherine Singh argued on TikTok this week, these pubic hair-adorned thongs are “a nefarious continuation of the Kardashian family’s—and Kim’s in particular—history of selling specific body norms to their fans. The Kardashians have largely made their careers, and their massive empires, off of selling a very particular body image fashioned after their own.”

I’ve written about this before, so you know I agree. But so does basically everyone else who thinks about beauty standards these days. As fashion and beauty writer Arabelle Sicardi wrote in 2021, “the influence of this family can be traced in plastic surgery trends, in beauty-product categories, in magazine sales, and in scholarly discussions. When Kim ‘broke’ the internet in 2014 by recreating a controversial Jean-Paul Goude photo for the cover of Paper magazine (Goude's signature involves augmenting the dimensions of his subjects to more ‘exotic’ proportions), the obsession with her butt became inextricably linked with rising consumer interest in butt lifts. According to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, between 2000 and 2018, such procedures increased by 256 percent.” 

Sicardi is describing the way the Kardashians’ once-signature slim-thick figures, bee-stung lips and suspiciously tanned skin—or, to be more pointed, their attempts to perform Blackness—filtered down not only to their fans, but also into the wider beauty standards, starting in the late aughts. But more recently, we’ve been seeing a similar impact from their new aesthetics, which are noticeably thinner (and whiter, tbh). The Hollywood Reporter covered what it called the “De-Kardashian-ification of America” last fall, noting that the body type we’ve come to associate with the famous fam—“wasp waist dividing an ample butt and prominent breasts”—is falling out of favour with American women, who now want a more subtle, almost athletic look. But let’s not downplay the fact that the obviously ‘done’ body type is also falling out of favour with the Kardashians, which has certainly contributed to this aesthetic evolution. 

And this absolutely also applies to pubic hair, btw. The Kardashians have not been shy about their distaste for body hair; they’ve talked about their preferred removal techniques in interviews, and even demonstrated them on Keeping Up With the Kardashians and on social media. But now Kim wants to bring back the bush? And she just happens to have a product that we can buy in order to do so? Sure. 

2. It’s interesting to see so many people talking about pubic hair ‘trends’ in 2025

At first, I was a little surprised at just how many people had an opinion on this. Heated op-eds about women’s pubic hair, its grooming and the expectation that we should remove it kind of feel like they belong to an earlier era of feminism, not because the expectation stopped being sexist, but more because there are now so many other infringements on women’s bodily autonomy. But the more I think about it, the more it actually makes a lot of sense that people are reviving this conversation. There are many areas where it feels like we are making negative progress, because things we saw as irreversible civil rights wins—abortion rights, gay and interracial marriages, protecting Black people’s voting rights, and more—are being challenged, if not actually reversed, which makes it feel like old fights are new again.

3. Why is women’s body hair so taboo?

There is also something specific to women’s body hair, though. Part of the reason Skims’ faux hair thong has gone so viral is Kardashian’s hypocrisy, for sure. But even if we haven’t been talking about it as much in the public sphere in recent years, pubic hair remains contentious—there’s something about the idea of celebrating, or even just showing, it that still feels salacious, which in turn sparks a desire to defend it, and I think that tension is contributing to this news cycle, too. 

I say that while fully acknowledging that we are in a pretty pro-bush era—earlier this year, young women on TikTok were enthusiastically embracing the full bush in a bikini trend, which is exactly what it sounds like and kind of amazing. It also looks like removing body hair is becoming less popular among Gen Z women, just overall. But I don’t think that undoes centuries of messaging around women’s pubic hair, especially when that messaging has largely revolved around ideas of desirability, cleanliness, civility and decency. 

As Rachael Gibson, an editor and content creator who runs The Hair Historian, an Instagram account devoted to the intersecting history of hair and art, told CR Fashion Book last year, “the ancient Greeks considered pubic hair uncivilized and in later European societies keeping pubic hair trimmed and neat was considered more refined and therefore linked to class and status.” And back in January, Dazed quoted author Rebecca M. Herzig, who says in her book, Plucked: A History of Hair Removal, that “in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, there was an unprecedented effort to make hair removal mandatory for women in the U.S. As white men became increasingly fixated on controlling white women’s beauty regimens, hairlessness became re-signified as a symbol of racial progress and superiority.” 

Take these longstanding cultural ideas, and the fact that hairless vulvas have become the norm over the past 40 or so years thanks to a combination of pop culture and porn, and it kind of makes sense that pubic hair is still perceived as taboo, or at least controversial. 

4. We have to talk about the sex worker references

There’s also this other part of the discourse that I’ve noticed, and to be very clear, do not like. Naturally, a lot of people are comparing the Skims thong to a merkin, or pubic wig, which makes sense because that’s basically what it is. But, they are specifically doing so by referencing sex work, and that’s where I start to feel a bit icky. The history of the merkin is, ahem, murky, but the widely accepted lore around its invention has to do with sex workers. According to the Guardian, “the Oxford Companion to the Body points to 1450 as the year the word ‘malkin’ first appeared—from which the name for a pubic hair wig derives. During the 15th century, pubic hair was a symbol of health and nobility. As a result, some people, including sex workers with sexually transmitted infections, began to wear merkins to conceal shaving and scarring.” 

So now we can see how the Skims thong is capitalizing on, and subject to, a double dose of taboo, first over the mere idea of pubic hair, but also because of the allusion to sex work. This is not new; merkins have been popular motifs in fashion from time, for exactly these reasons. Playing with transgressive ideas can be fertile creative ground, as we saw last year with the John Galliano-designed, and very well-received, Maison Margiela SS24 couture runway show, which took inspiration from the work of French-Hungarian photographer Brassaï. (As a sidenote, yes, Galliano is basically uncancelled following his early 2010s fall from grace due to his racism, antisemitism, fatphobia and allegations of sexual assault. Which is perhaps also a sign of the times??) Per the Guardian's deputy fashion and lifestyle editor, Chloe Mac Donnell, “Galliano was captivated by the ‘voyeuristic portraiture of Brassaï’… who documented Paris after dark between the first and second world wars. The show’s set reflected the Montparnasse neighbourhood Brassaï once roamed[,] and the denizens he captured at dimly lit bars, street corners and inside brothels were also reflected including ‘three painted muses,’ complete with hair bearing mon pubis.” On the runway, those muses were wearing merkins made from real human hair embroidered onto silk tulle.

It did not take fashion lovers, or just the extremely online, much time to make the connection between Galliano’s merkin-wearing models and Skims’ new thong—or to reference “syphilitic prostitutes” in their critiques. Now, that language is dehumanizing and pretty fucking gross to begin with, but it feels especially problematic to imply that Kardashian is a syphilitic prostitute, as I saw some people do.  We definitely don’t have to like her, or even to think her business practices are ethical, but I think we can critique her without using language that is specifically intended to feel degrading and almost violent in its disregard for her humanity.  

5. Lastly, I don’t love that there are pubic hair trends at all

I totally acknowledge that this is a lost cause, because there have been pubic hair trends for basically ever. Elsewhere in that CR Fashion Book story, Gibson notes that, “we can safely say that people all over the globe have chosen to remove, groom or otherwise tend to their pubic hair for thousands of years,” before pointing out that people of all genders removed their body hair in ancient Egypt, and there are historic examples of hair removal among women in many Indian, Arab and African countries, as well as some Native American cultures, too.

Fast forward to today and I don’t even have very strong feelings about pubic hair, for or against. However. I would like there to be just one single thing about our bodies that we can decide for ourselves, perhaps based on what is actually the most comfortable for us, instead of on other people’s ideas of what is desirable, hygienic and/or ‘good.’ That’s just so much more interesting to me than whatever thing Kim Kardashian is trying to sell us this time.

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CelebrityStacy Lee KongKim Kardashian, Jean-Paul Goude, Khloe Kardashian, Kylie Jenner, Rob Kardashian, Kendall Jenner, John Galliano