TEN years ago, only 2 per cent of Australasian women were getting Brazilian waxes.  Today, that figure has jumped to 40 per cent, according to the Cosmetic Physicians Society of Australasia, and half of those people are opting for permanent hair removal.

Celebrities such as Paris Hilton are fans and the world now knows Britney Spears gets it done - even if we didn't particularly want to know.  In fact, the painful and confronting practice has become so popular that what was once a taboo topic is now being researched by academics and studied by experts in the field. Michelle Mars and Jeanie Douche, senior lecturers at Massey University in New Zealand, are calling it the ``designer vagina'' phenomenon.  The pair teamed recently to write a paper about the obsession with having the ideal vagina in contemporary culture, titled ``A Nice Clean Look''. Mars says the ``designer vagina'' has infiltrated pop culture, thanks to popular media and pornography, so that people are starting to believe having hairless genitalia is the normalised way to be.