There's no average female body hair pattern
Note: When I write "female" or "male" in this post I'm solely talking about averages. I'm not talking about all women or all men unless I specifically state so in a specific case. When I say "female ...
Forum Discussion
@daedaliavallis Yes, you're right that it's quite common for women to have noticeable body hair going higher up than the knee, but it's often (of course not always) not as coarse as the hair below the knee, which I don't feel like the current in-game body hair options give us. The current in-game body hair looks just as coarse below and above the knee, just lighter above the knee. Also, for people with dark blonde hair (or it might be due to ethnicity/race, I'm not sure), it's common to have relatively dark (compared to head hair colour) hair below the knee and no hair (except for the peach fuzz that we all have all over our bodies) above the knee. So, I think you have a point here, and I think we actually need at least two average female leg hair options in the base game, one that doesn't go above the knee and one that goes above the knee but where the hair strands look less coarse, rather than lighter (a little bit lighter also though), above the knee. We might even need more than just two, since body hair can be straight, wavy and curly too.
About the chest hair I've seen a lot of women with hair between the breasts like that, women of different origins and with different hair colours. And when looking at pictures of hirsutism scales, this specific pattern has the lowest or second lowest score (depending on if the scale includes complete hairlessness or not) on all of the scales I can find when googling. This is different from average male chest hair pattern, where hair is much more common *on* the pecs than *between* the pecs.
I didn't add any information on hair around the "peaks" of the breasts, since it won't show (though, maybe it could be useful on male sims). I also didn't add hair on the bikini line, because there's no option for that with the other currently available body hairs, and because it's probably seen as too intimate/indecent to have in a Sims game.
About the chest hair I've seen a lot of women with hair between the breasts like that, women of different origins and with different hair colours. And when looking at pictures of hirsutism scales, this specific pattern has the lowest or second lowest score (depending on if the scale includes complete hairlessness or not) on all of the scales I can find when googling. This is different from average male chest hair pattern, where hair is much more common *on* the pecs than *between* the pecs.
I didn't add any information on hair around the "peaks" of the breasts, since it won't show (though, maybe it could be useful on male sims). I also didn't add hair on the bikini line, because there's no option for that with the other currently available body hairs, and because it's probably seen as too intimate/indecent to have in a Sims game.
As a woman who used to swim, I can tell you that's rather rare to have thick/coarse hair between the breast, most of us just have the peach fuzz that is not noticable. You ought to look up the pattern on wikipedia because it's definitely not considered in the average pattern. I mean, I don't have any, nobody I ever came into contact with has any, and I have PCOS hirsutism. (And I looked up the mod mentioned earlier and I'm like, that is nowhere even near what people in the support group have, that's more extreme testosterone levels. It happens but it's far more rare and I didn't download it because I don't find it a good representative for my condition overall.)
Red/blond women can definitely have thick stuff on the front and back of the thighs though. Coarse hair can be light in color, and still noticable.
As for the rest I was pointing out what seemed to be an oversight, I mean devs consider this stuff even if they don't ship the content with it.
@daedaliavallis I'm not referring to thick or coarse hair between the breast, just thicker and coarser hair, as in not peach fuss.
Since this is something I've seen, in changing rooms and such, I decided to create a poll about this in a facebook group that's exclusive for cis women, trans women, trans men, and non-binary people (so, no cis men). I gave them the options to pick if they have hair between the breasts (not only peach fuss) or no hair between the breasts (only peach fuss). The group has mainly members of Swedish or Middle Eastern descent. I also asked those who wanted to to share more information in the comment section. I'm not gonna share pictures of the comment section of that poll, since it was posted in a private group, but I told them, in the poll description, that I was going to share the result in an anonymous way and only as a summary, not what individual people said.
170 people answered the poll, and 26 people left comments, which isn't much if we look at the big picture, especially since this group doesn't represent people from all around the world, but it can still give us some idea about this. Out of the 170 who answered the poll, 10% said that they had hair between the breasts. In the comment section some people clarified that they don't have hair exactly between the breasts, but somewhere on the sternum (breastbone) area, specifically above the breasts but still on the sternum area. The results of this poll means that it's not rare, at least not where I live, to have hair on the sternum area, but it's not average, as I previously thought, but that was pure anecdotal evidence and I should've thought that through. From what I've learned from studying biology at university, rare can be considered somewhere between 0.01% to 5%, depending on what we measure. I'm not sure what we should considered rare as in this case, but 10% is not rare. Still, keep in mind that it was a small sample group and mainly from two origins.
People who gave the answer that they had hair on the sternum area and are of Swedish descent reported mostly that they had long hair strands there, often blonde, but some reported dark/black hair, and people of Middle Eastern descent reported mostly that they had relatively short hair strands there, but of a darker shade compared to the colour of the peach fuss. Both people with and without PCOS reported hair on the sternum area, and both people with and without PCOS reported that they only had peach fuss on the chest area. Some people reported having hair below the bellybutton but not on the chest area, some reported the opposite. Some reported that their mothers had hair between the breasts even though they themselves don't have it. Almost all people reported that they're cis women.
So, as a summary, I think hair on the sternum area should be included as an option in The Sims 4. It shouldn't be like a lot of hair, but some hair. Also, since the chest area and belly are combined in the body hair category, I think three options would make sense, between breasts + below bellybutton, only between breasts, and only below bellybutton (less hair than the current between bellybutton option that goes up a little bit above the bellybutton and goes a bit far to the sides). This would give us more options for body hair for our female sims (just want to clarify that some of the current options can of course also make sense on female sims, I'm not saying that no women have more hair than what I propose in the thread start), and having more options would also be positive for our male sims, because not every man has a lot of body hair, and in some parts of the world it's common for men to have as little body hair as is common for women to have in other parts of the world.
