Grooming injuries are sending people to the hospital

Keeping it nice and pretty down there can be a hassle, and a new online survey finds that a lot of people are ending up in the hospital due to pubic hair grooming injuries–ouch! Cuts, burns, and infections are reported more than a quarter of the time, according to the online survey of more than 7,500 U.S. adults.

“In another study, we found that 3 percent of all adults who were seen in the emergency room for urinary injuries had injuries related to pubic hair grooming,” said lead researcher Dr. Benjamin Breyer. He’s an associate professor of urology and epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco.

In this latest report, Breyer and his team found that nearly 67 percent of men and 85 percent of women said they groomed their pubic hair. Among those who did so, nearly 26 percent said they had injured themselves in the process. Injuries were more common among women (27 percent) than men (24 percent). Slightly more than 1 percent of the injuries required medical attention, the researchers said.

In general, the injuries are minor, Breyer said.

But one serious danger of grooming your pubic hair is that an open wound might increase your risk of getting a sexually transmitted disease, Breyer added.

Breyer isn’t sure why pubic hair grooming or removal has become popular, but he speculated that it’s associated with sex because it has been commonly seen in pornography.

One recent study in the American Journal of Men’s Health found that removing pubic hair is associated with sex in general and oral sex in particular.