Female office workers in Japan have a thing for English soccer star David Beckham. They like him so much, in fact, that the hip thing to do is to have their pubic hair styled to match Beckham's hair.

"All women put a lot of care into their hair, but they don't do so much with the hair down below. About the most they'd do is brush it back from behind the bikini line," Yuri, a 22-year-old electronics company employee, tells Shukan Jitsuwa. "(Pubic hairstyling) can make the difference for a girl when she's competing with another girl whose looks are about the same as hers."

Minako, a co-worker, concurs.

"Some women's magazines have carried articles about styling your pubic hair and they referred to the Beckham look. But we'd been doing it for a while before those stories came out," she says. "By the way, I like (crew cut Japanese midfielder Shinji) Ono, but I don't think I want to copy his hairstyle down there."