Bring the bush back: these photographs find beauty in vulvas with merkins

Kitty carpet. Fur bikini. Downstairs toupee. When it comes to the vagina wig, professionally known as the merkin, people love getting creative with their euphemisms. But outside of period films with tasteful nudity and Japanese sex stores you don’t see a lot of merkins around. That’s where Pablo Kuemin comes in.

The Swiss hairstylist and wig extraordinaire usually sees his creations topping the heads of Adwoa Aboah, Aweng, and Fecal Matter but recently he has been experimenting with the vagina wigs he first came across in a sex shop in Tokyo. “I'm obsessed with hair and always try to keep my eyes open to get inspired by things I see or experience,” he tells us. “That’s where the whole idea started.” 

Kuemin created the merkins himself, ventilating lace wigs hair by hair for as natural a look as possible. “For the perfect fitting, you get a plaster cast of your model's vagina and this will be your base to work on,” he explains. “You should also study the natural hair growth of pubic hairs.” 

For the project, the hairstylist teamed up with photographer Jesse Laitinen and model Tessa Kuragi, creating a series of striking black and white images that exhibit the range of styles from playful curls to neat braids. “The beauty of it to create something that's never really been done before and stepping into an area people normally don't talk about makes me always excited,” Kuemin says. “Hair for me has no boundaries.”

Photography Jesse Laitinen, hair Pablo Kuemin, model Tessa Kuragi