The bald truth
DESPITE our so called equitable lifestyle, body double standards still exist. It’s still taken for granted that women have two very special priorities: to look as decorative as possible no matter how decrepit the men they associate with and to conceal as swiftly as possible any bits of dodgy flesh the minute their body shape ceases to meet current aesthetic standards.
Whereas men can (and do) swan around fondly imagining that their waist is six inches smaller, which produces that strange frontal overhang perennially in fashion with men of a certain age.
Then there’s the insistence of some to don a wig when found to be less well endowed in the sprouting follicle department. One chap I spotted being interviewed on TV recently wore a ‘rug’ that made him look like Ronald Reagan playing King Lear, clad in a covering that must have cost all of thirty pounds from the local novelty shop. Warning: it is one thing to be prematurely follically challenged quite another to end up with a sudden full complement of youthful curls when the rest of you looks only slightly younger than a Galapagos iguana.
Then there’s the vogue for side winding. This is a truly awful ‘alternative’ approach in that side winders will always look in the mirror and see a man with a bristling head of hair. Sadly, everyone else just sees a baldie with a long strand of hair coiled like a sleeping slug atop his head.
For some, thinning hair, or Alopecia Androgenetica, is distressing enough to go all out in search of a miracle cure, with the Victorian’s swearing by a daily drink of ‘rising sap’ collected from the silver birch tree, another from that well known amateur Egyptian trichologist Cleopatra who proposed that men so afflicted should douse their heads daily in a mixture of mice, horses teeth, bear grease, and deer marrow.
Or, there’s the modern Elton J approach to the problem which is to fling oodles of money at the receding hairline, including the ubiquitous hair transplant. This I’m afraid to say regardless of how much it costs, always ends up with a scalp resembling a cerebral Bonsai nursery, its as if some mad seamstress had used a sewing machine to make a series of (very painful) holes in the scull, from which sprout baby clumps of immature furry shoots, (truly distasteful).
A wig, rather than the painful and expensive transplant route seems to be the automatic path a male follows when nature and his ego conspire. For those still interested in false coiffure but do not fully embrace ownership of a ‘rug, dead bat, toupee, head merkin, phoneytail, or fumet (akin to dried deer dung) then the only other option is the hairweave. One form of weaving involves a light net of silk being laid over the offending bald patch. The hairs around the edge, plus any that may still be fertile are carefully drawn through the net, thus giving the impression of a full head of hair. Hair weaves do have the distinct advantage over the ordinary wig in that they are practically impossible to dislodge, and being so technically super-glued, are therefore immensely popular among, all in wrestlers, windsurfers, porn stars and goatherds who milk by hand.
Of course once ‘weaved’ you then have to maintain a long term intimate relationship with ones ‘weaver’, returning every six weeks to wash the said article in situ, if, however you wait too long or heaven forbid, miss months before going for this after sales service, big problems do (literally)‘arise’.
It’s so easy to forget that as one’s own hair grows, the ‘weave’ will then begin to rise from the top of one’s head like some eerie, hirsute soufflé, thus inviting truly negative comments from friends, colleagues, and your local newsagent. This is known as the brillo effect, and is one excellent reason for leaving one’s hair (or the lack of it) very much unwoven.
That said, there are still millions of desperate middle-aged men out there who foolishly believe that by employing weaving, plaiting, stitching and cementing they will at long last click with a passing piece of potential arm candy. Mind you, having thought about it, there might just be something in this, as all agony aunts agree, one foolproof way to get a woman into your bed is to make her laugh. If that’s the case, any guy wearing a wig or a weave is bound to be on to a raging certainty.
Finally gents, there is only one fully-guaranteed way to halt rampant hair loss in its tracks and on the plus side it doesn’t require you to coat your pate in chicken manure. And the minus side? Castration.
