'Determined to discover if the stories of her deformed foot were true, he (Solomon) arranged for a stream of water to flow onto the glass beside his throne (in the Quran, he had running water with fish swimming about it under clear glass), so that Sheba would lift her skirts as she approached him.
When she did so, he noted the hair on her legs, and told her, "Thy beauty is the beauty of a woman, but they hair is masculine; hair is an ornament to a man, but it disfigures a woman."

He then invented a depilatory' (described elsewhere as a mixture of lime and arsenic)

Targum Sheni, retold in Ginzberg, (1913) p.145, in Ginzberg (1956) p.562, in Silberman in Pritchard, pp. 70-71. Also appears in ben Yosef, Sadya, the Ma'ase Malkath Sehba, THE TALE OF THE QUEEN OF SHEBA, and in the Qu'ran

Another perspective on the legend from Ruth Fainlight whose collection of poems, Burning Wire, (published to coincide with the exhibition `The Queen of Sheba: Treasures from ancient Yemen' at the British Museum 2002) contains a long sequence inspired by the legend.

'The prime symbol of the challenge Sheba presented, and the sense of fear, mystery and repugnance it produced, is her hairy legs. To establish the truth of rumours that her mother had been a demon (because no fully human woman could possibly be so self-sufficient, and demons always have hairy legs), Solomon received the queen in a court where his djinns had magicked the floor to seem a pool of water.
Deceived, Sheba raised the hem of her skirt to stop it getting wet. Solomon's reaction to the sight was intensely erotic; and yet as though he must suppress any flicker of homosexual arousal, he ordered his demons to concoct the first recorded depilatory ointment to make Sheba feminine enough for his attentions.

A hairy woman is a threat not only sexually but also politically, and his need to seduce her was as much an attempt to neutralise the power of a rival as to dominate her as a man....

Sheba's challenge was first posed millennia ago, but the fear that, by claiming sexual and political parity, dangerous women will upset the balance of the universe still dominates masculine thinking - and sensible women should never forget it.'