SHOWING nipples or pubes or being too sexually explicit can backfire if you are planning to produce a nude calendar for charity, an expert on the topic says.

A University of Tasmania lecturer who completed her doctoral thesis on the calendars says a UK spinners and weavers guild lost $34,000 after having to pulp 9,000 calendars "because they displayed their nipples".

Dr Pamela Turton-Turner said the Matildas calendar was frowned upon because Australia's elite female football players were seen as being "too sexually explicit" - not funny".

However Queensland's Yummy Mummies Bare All calendar was successful because they presented themselves as children with toys, teddies and pigtails but covered their genitals and breasts, Dr Turton-Turner says in her thesis Naked Charity.

"Experience has shown that in the successful calendars the bodies must be sanitised - non-erotic, maternal, coy and covered," she said.

"That is, they are de-eroticised because they are accepted as maternal, giving and nurturing."

Dr Turton-Turner also warned potential charity calendar nudes they risk ridicule.

She researched many Australian and international charity calendars for her PhD thesis.

Dr Turton-Turner, who lives in the isolated village of Wayatinah in the Tasmanian highlands, found that the humour and appeal of such calendars was based on the stark comparison between the ageing, sometimes bizarre, non-classic bodies of the men and women in them compared with the classic, idealised and erotic bodies of people in movies and advertising.

People who buy these calendars find them humorous because the bodies in them are not beautiful but ageing, comedic and even bizarre, she said.

For example, the Bare to be Different calendar, created by the elderly women of South Arm, Tasmania, to raise funds to buy red velvet curtains for their town hall was a success.

It worked because their ageing, wrinkled bodies were on show but nipples and pubes were covered humorously with tea-cups, flowers or prudent framing. They raised $100,000.