Their strange relationship with body hair
As you can probably guess from looking at the statues and other works of art they left behind, the Ancient Greeks weren’t a fan of bodily hair. For them, the ideal body, especially for women, was smooth all over, and they spent a lot of time and effort trying to achieve this. There is, of course, some academic debate over whether hairlessness was the norm for the typical Greek man or woman or just for the upper classes (and so those people who would have been immortalized in statue form). But whoever went for wax in Ancient Greece would have been in for a rough ride.
Since they didn’t have modern waxing solutions or even lady razors, the simplest way of achieving the beauty ideal was to simply pluck out individual hairs one by one – a painful, not to mention time-consuming process. Fancy a swifter solution? Well, how about burning all your body hair off, as well also the custom in Ancient Greece. Failure to keep up such standards would have led to social disapproval. According to the customs of the time, only ‘uncivilized’ women had hair on their bodies. And if it’s one thing a Greek wouldn’t want to be seen as being it’s uncivilized.
Strangely enough, however, the ‘less is more’ rule didn’t seem to apply to the eyebrows. Indeed, a monobrow on a woman was seen as highly desirable and something to be prized and envied. Or, to be more specific, the Greeks liked eyebrows that almost met in the middle, but not quite. There are a number of surviving texts from the time that attest to this. Of course, not every woman of the time could cultivate such a blurred brow, so they looked for help. Fake eyebrows or clever make-up application usually did the trick, allowing them to fulfill societal norms of being smooth all over, except up between the eyes.