out my hair...

I didn’t really notice that I was losing my hair until I was already in my twenties and when my idea of a haircut was already clippers all over.

I think I might have been more upset by the whole thing if I had:
a) been younger, or
b) had been still trying to work any kind of a hairstyle.

I actually saw a middle-aged guy in Gare du Nord in Paris last month with a man-bun…. well, they’re quite the thing, aren’t they? Closer examination as he walked towards me revealed that this was a man-bun that was gathering together all the spare hair on the side of this guy’s head in an attempt to hide his bald spot.

I’m quite tall, so I tend to (literally) see through these little deceptions, but they often make me wonder about the state of someone’s mind to think that this was ever a good idea. I don’t go to my gym very much anymore, but it was a source of amusement to me to see younger men in front of the huge mirrors in the changing rooms, carefully and delicately and lovingly teasing their hair into position before they went up to the main gym for their workout. Often, I was tall enough to see that they were ultimately wasting their time and energy on what was likely to become a lost cause.  Bless them. I suppose you can't blame them for trying.

I was away from the office the other day, working in a store. Apparently, that lunchtime, they had a demonstration from a visiting company of a product that they shake onto a balding head that they then set with a blow-dryer to give you an incredibly full head of hair. The results, I’m told, were amazing and it was such a shame I wasn’t there to have this magical product demonstrated on me. I don’t get it: no matter how amazing this stuff might make you look, you’re still going bald, aren’t you? If your apparently full head of hair does magically attract a mate, then when you wake up the next morning, or when you have a shower, or when you go for a swim, or whatever, then you’re going to have some explaining to do, aren’t you?

That’s not to say that my hairloss doesn’t exert a kind of fascination for me too; I’m not completely indifferent to the rolling back of the tides. For many years, I had a little scar just clinging onto the shoreline above my right eyebrow. My hairline would retreat ever further backwards up my head, but this little scar seemed to cling on, offering me some small comfort that at least that boundary seemed secure from the ravages of time and tide. No more. That little island has been submerged in the high tide of my ever-growing forehead. I was also a little taken aback the other day to catch sight of a CCTV camera screen, showing the view from a camera located immediately above and behind me. 

Only now, at the end did I understood what my wife meant as we lay in bed one evening and she gazed lovingly at me for a while before whispering in my ear, “gosh, you really are going bald aren’t you?”

Who says romance is dead?

golden, fallen heart

...and so it seems that I'm not bald enough already.

Some days, I wonder if it might not be kinder just to shoot me.

I was so pleased when that barber in Whangarei gave me a NZ $2 "half head discount" in 2010.  I should go back: I reckon I might qualify for a few more dollars off by now.

I used to wet my hair when I was at school to dampen it down.  I was told at the time that this would lead to baldness in later life, and I laughed in their faces because this was clearly nonsense.  Well, I'm not laughing now.  Just think, that might have been caused by a stray raindrop.

Learn from me and make sure you always -- ALWAYS -- wear a shower cap (or a hat, if you're outdoors and feel a bit self-conscious in a shower cap outside your home).  I'm not 100% sure it will protect you from blemishes that lead to bald spots (or, as I like to call it, my mange spot)... but you can't be too careful.

golden, fallen heart...

I had my hair cut at the weekend.

This is not a remarkable or unusual occurrence. It happens every three or four weeks. I like to keep my hair short, and this means pretty regular trips to the barber. I do own a pair of clippers, but the only time I ever tried to do it myself, I made a mess of it and haven't really be inclined to do it again since. C. used to do it for me, but although it saved me £8 a time, the cost was high in other ways (mostly that my hair is incredibly spiky and gets bloody everywhere when cut) .... and anyway, I don't mind a little natter with the barber once in a while.

Normally, I go on my own. But this week, C finished her coffee in town early and was waiting for me whilst I was still in the chair. An old colleague of mine was there too, and as we went to his wedding, my wife was happily making conversation with him as the final touches were put to my new 'do'.

When I joined them, C. cast a glance across my head and made some remark about how I now seemed to have a secondary bald patch developing, and that the two would surely meet before too much longer.

Charming, right?

She's right, of course.  There's not much point denying it.  I haven't had a fringe since about 1994.

The thing is though, I just don't care.  I realise that running a weblog with lots of pictures of myself might lead you to think otherwise, but I don't think I'm an especially vain man, and hairloss doesn't really bother me at all.  I actually started having my hair clippered before I realised that I was going bald (which wasn't until I was about 22 anyway), and it's been getting shorter and shorter ever since.  It's only this long now because of the beard.  When I'm clean-shaven and my hair is properly short, my wife likes to call my overall appearance my "chemotherapy look"... no hair and sunken cheeks.  Charming again, no?  She's a keeper for sure.

Thinking about it, it's remarkable that only two people in the last couple of years since I've had the beard have amusingly suggested that my head is on upside-down.  But as the bumper slogan on a Wicked Camper we saw in Australia put it, hair is a waste of testosterone anyway.  Have you seen what young people do with their hair?

I am my hair...?

So there I was, minding my own business lying in bed, when my wife finishes cleaning her teeth, wanders into the bedroom and starts to settle down. Just before she turns the light out, she looks at me:

“Tip your head a bit this way”
I’ve got my eyes shut at this point, but I compliantly move my head in her general direction.
There’s a short silence, then:
“You really are going quite bald aren’t you?”

Apparently, so she went on to tell me, she hadn’t really noticed before, but as my hair is a bit longer now (well, it’s still only a grade 2, but you can hardly have a grade zero and grow a beard, can you?) she’d really started to notice how thin I was on top.

Um. OK.

To be honest, it’s not really news to me and there’s nothing I’m planning to do about it. Thanks for bringing the matter to my attention though.  Love you!

The following weekend, one of my (bald) friends told me how had planned to get me some Regaine mousse as a joke birthday present in March, only to look into it and decide that it wasn’t really £60 funny.

No. But I wouldn’t use it if had been given it or even if it was entirely free. What would be the point? I know some people have their self-esteem tied up in their hair, but I just haven’t got the energy.

 I fret over a wide variety of things, but my hair isn't one of them.

you had one eye in the mirror....

It’s Fresher’s Week at the University of Nottingham this week. This means that not only was the supermarket full of students, many squeezing a last trolley’s worth of cash out of their anxious parents, but the gym was full of them yesterday too. They’re pretty easy to spot, on the whole: they’re the absurdly young, skinny ones talking about when their first assignment is due in.

You have to wonder about their priorities. Apart from anything else, the membership to the gym costs them somewhere between £30 and £40 a month (the university gym, by way of comparison, costs £195 a year for full access to the gym, playing fields, pool and fitness centres). Nevermind the cost though – hey, might as well be £50,000 in debt as £40,000 right? – why is going to the gym the first thing that any self-respecting student chooses to do when they return to University at the start of term?

What’s wrong with getting absolutely blasted and/or sitting alone in your room listening to The Smiths and wondering why no one loves or understands you but Morrissey? What’s this unhealthy obsession with fitness all about? No good can come from it.

As I was on my way out of the gym after a swim last night, I saw one of these students preening himself in front of the full-length mirrors in the changing rooms. Sadly, this in itself is not an unusual sight. In “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”, Robert Pirsig talks about a monkey trap that involves nothing more complex than a hollowed out coconut filled with rice: an unsuspecting monkey smells the treat inside the coconut and reaches in to collect it. However, the opening, which was just large enough for its open paw to go in, is too small to allow its clenched paw to pass back through. No matter how much the monkey yanks, he cannot escape as long as he tries to hang on to the rice, but is so focused on his prize that he will not release even though his survival depends upon it. It seems that the modern metrosexual male has the same problem with full-length mirrors…. worth knowing, I'm sure you'll agree, should you ever want to trap one.

What caught my eye particularly about this particular student was not that he was carefully teasing his hair into position with loving care, infinite patience and the careful application of hair gel – that’s common enough. This guy finished with the gel, and then reached into his bag for a can of hair spray, which he then meticulously applied on top. Astonishing. Take two hair scuplting products to the gym? When he’d finished, his hair didn’t look all that to my eyes, but in his mind, you probably can’t be too careful, right? I imagine he sleeps in a hair net too. Or perhaps standing up.

I had my remaining hair shaved back to a grade zero on Saturday morning, so clearly I’m not in much of a position to understand this kind of behaviour…. But it did strike me that I must be saving literally HOURS every week by not having hair. Hours that can clearly be put to much better and more productive use.

Um…. On twitter and blogging and shit like that.

(or it could save my life...).

At some point around 1996 or 1997, I went to a barber and asked for a number 4 all over. It seemed like a big decision at the time, but you have to understand that in those days I still had a full head of hair. In my mind, going for an all-over clipper job was a renunciation of the tyranny of hair; a decision made voluntarily at a time when I still had little idea what my hairline had in store for me. It was a kind of emancipation. Take two bottles into the shower? No, I renounce hair and choose to take none.

As the years have slipped away, so too has my hairline, and my decisions at the barber have become simpler as much out of necessity as choice. Grade 4 quickly became grade 4 on the top with grade 3 around the sides and back. Before long that moved on to a grade 3 with grade 2. Then it was a grade 2 and grade 1. Then grade 1 all over. Then grade 0.5... Each progression accompanied by a certain amount of anxiety about the next step. I was worried about having my hair cut too short.... but at the same time, clearly, I was running out of styling options.

Finally, on Saturday, I went to the barber and got a grade zero all over. My hair was cut so short by the time they'd finished that it was probably about the same length as the couple of days of stubble growth on my chin and probably doubled in length before I came into the office this morning. My head was now (partially-)covered in velcro, not hair.  It felt like the end of the line: short of using a razor and shaving my head completely, this is about as far as my tonsorial journey can take me. I haven't owned (or needed) a hairbrush in fifteen years.  Hair, for me, is officially over.

Or so I thought.  That may be the end of the line for the hair on my head, but it appears, however, that this is not the end of all my hair-related indignities. My future path was revealed with a simple question, asked by my barber as she put the finishing touches to my buzz cut.

"Would you like your eyebrows trimmed?"

Gah.  And, sadly, yes please.

you can leave your hat on....

It's been an extremely dull day at work - the worst by far since my return a couple of weeks ago - but it was all made a little more tolerable after I received word this morning that the hat I ordered on 7th July 2008 was next in line to be made by the hatmaker. 

This is, of course, excellent news.  I like hats.

I'm never usually one for delayed gratification, but the hat is, you see, a 100% handmade, 100% beaver felt fedora made to the most exacting standards (just how exacting you can read here), and I knew when I ordered it that the wait would be at least 18 months....but as it was being custom-made by a master craftsman in Germany, this seemed like a relatively small price to pay.  As did the actual price itself, which was a bit more than double what I paid for my existing - machine made, rabbit felt - hat.  Considering the amount of additional effort and the superior quality of the materials being used, it wasn't cheap, but on the whole I didn't feel that the price was unreasonable for what I was getting. 

As things have turned out, I'm going to have waited well over two years before I finally get my hands on this hat.  In the meantime, the pound has collapsed against the Euro and the hatmaker has increased his prices significantly (he has more demand than he knows what to do with, so almost doubling the price was the only way he could think of to keep the waiting list at a manageable level).  In real terms, the hat I'm getting (and paid for in advance) is now probably worth nearly 3 times what I paid for it back in 2008.  Not that it matters much, as I'm more interested in wearing it than I am in its theoretical value as an investment.  Besides, I've been collecting £1 and £2 coins in a terramundi pot since I first placed the order, and there's a good chance that there's already enough in there to cover the cost.

Yay!

After more than two years wait, to be honest I'm mainly just looking forward to the day when this almost mythical hat actually turns up.  I've loved wearing my existing fedora around the world, and I can only hope that the new one accumulates anywhere near as many miles on my head. 

What does it look like?  Um, same same, but you can never have too much of a good thing, right?  Or, indeed, too many hats generally.

Not with my hairline, anyway.....

where did your long hair go?

You might not believe it, given the state of my hairline, but I sometimes need a haircut. In fact, my hair - the bits that aren't falling out, anyway - is incredibly thick and wiry. I don't have anything fancy done, like, but I do need to have my hair cut every four weeks or so. If I don't, then it all goes a bit unfathomably frizzy and out of control.

Even though I only ever have the clippers applied all over, and given that I have two pairs of my own hairdresser's clippers kicking about the house, I still usually go to a local barber and fork out £4 for a 2 minute buzz. It's not that I don't trust C. with the job and she's done it many times in the past, it's just that I find the whole process a lot less stressful when done by a professional who doesn't carry about them an air of barely concealed impatience and who doesn't bang on about how my spiky hair cuttings keep getting into their bra. Sometimes I'll even pop into the posh(-er) hairdresser in town and spend £12 on a 10 minute buzz. The haircut that I get there isn't noticeably three times better, but once in a while it's nice to feel a touch pampered by the person wielding the clippers and really taking their time over the job.

I had my haircut this weekend. I wasn't planning to, but I had it cut nonetheless. I came back from my normal Saturday morning run and was aiming for nothing more than a quick trim of the bits around my ears; the first bits that start to look fluffy and out-of-control. A quick trim now, I thought, would save me a trip to the barber for another week or so. I'd charged the lighter pair of clippers up especially. I unplugged them, took them into the bathroom, adjusted the blade so that it was as short as possible against the plastic clip and then started to trim. One quick slash up from my sideburns and across the hair next to my ear. Three seconds. That's all it took. As I pulled the clippers away, I could see that something was horribly wrong. My hair hadn't been long by anybody's standards: I'd had a grade one cut done not three weeks before. Even so, my reflection in the mirror in front of me showed an expanse of skin where the clippers had run. How could this have happened? I stared dumbly at the clipper in my hand. I frowned. I stared a bit closer.

Shit. That little plastic slide that was supposed to cut my hair to a grade one? It wasn't there. It was not on the clippers. I'd just given myself a grade zero on a not insubstantial slice of my hairline. I stared at the damage wrought on the right-hand side of my head, then tilted my head and looked at the other, the untouched side. There was only one thing for it: I turned the clippers back on and tried to recreate my handiwork in the untouched pastures of the hair on the left-hand-side of my head.

Three seconds later, I turned the clippers back off and stared at my refection. The best thing that could be said about the face that stared back at me was that at least it was even - evenly stupid, anyway. I'd made myself look distinctly gonzo.

Shit. Shit. Shit.

I picked the clippers back up, cast around desperately for the number one slide, and then set about the remains of my hair in an urgent attempt to undo the damage. Thirty seconds later, the sink was full of clumps of my hair and the front of my head was unevenly clippered. The back, however, was still untouched.

Shit.

I then sat, clippers in hand, at the bottom of the steps for the next thirty minutes - long, long minutes - as I waited for C. to return from her run. She barely had time to draw breath and to wipe her brow as she stepped through the front door before I pounced on her and begged her to rescue me from my misery and my ruination. I threw myself on her mercy, and in my hour of need, she rescued me. She was both exasperated and entertained by my predicament, but over the course of the next five minutes, she salvaged my ego and what was left of my dignity with those wretched clippers.

I love that woman.

the falling sands of time....

When I was at work yesterday afternoon, I popped upstairs to see an old colleague of mine who had heard that I might be able to help him out with a problem he was struggling with. I first met this guy about ten years ago and worked very closely with him for three or four years before I moved on into my current job. He's a nice chap, so I was more than happy to do him a favour.

I sat down at his desk and we spent five minutes or so working through the matter in hand before he suddenly looked at me, frowned and blurted out:

"Bloody hell. You're going grey!"

Now, whilst this is undeniably true, of all of the things that might be noteworthy about my hair, I've always felt this one isn't the obvious one. With this in mind, I pointed out that my hair was probably falling out at a faster rate than it was turning grey.

"Oh yeah, but I wasn't going to mention that."

Right. So it's alright to point out that I'm getting old, but not that I'm going bald? Eh?

....And then it dawned on me that he wasn't really making a comment about me at all, but was really making a general observation about the passing of time. Kev is about ten or so years older than me, and when he first met me I was about 23 years old, more or less straight out of University and very green about the gills. I wouldn't be surprised if a part of him probably still sees me as that kid, and seeing that I am now going grey was a sharp reminder that we're both ten years older and that the sand of our lives is slipping down through the hourglass even as we both remain in the more or less the same place and doing more or less the same things.

I experience something similar every time I bump into another old colleague of mine in the corridor.

"Hello Steve. How are you? How's the nipper?"
"I'm good thanks mate. She's not so much of a nipper now though - she's 9!"

It seems as though, every time I ask him, this poor girl has aged in an increment of years, when in my head she's still about 6 months old. Next time I ask, I imagine she'll probably be 23 and a surgeon or something. Perhaps she exists in some kind of a parallel universe where time runs more quickly?

No. That's not it.

I think it's far more likely that I am stuck in a universe where time runs very, very slowly and where things remain immune to change as the world outside moves on relentlessly without me

.... although judging by my hair, it's sadly not a universe where I'm immune from the ageing process.

Bobbins.

man you've been a naughty boy, you let your face grow long...

I don't tend to shave over the weekend. As far as I'm concerned, shaving is a chore that is done under some duress ever weekday morning in the shower. It certainly isn't something that I derive any great pleasure from, although as I have very little desire to grow a beard, I ultimately don't have much choice. Given the choice, I would always opt to have a couple of day's worth of stubble. I think it looks better, and it also means I do a whole lot less shaving. I choose to shave every day of the working week, but I'm blowed if I'm going to shave in my leisure time. As a result, by Sunday evening, I tend to look somewhat hairier than usual.

I was putting a contact lens in on Sunday morning, and thus rather closer to the bathroom mirror than usual, when I noticed something on my chin. At first I thought it was a bit of fluff or a feather from my pillow. Closer inspection, however, revealed that I was looking at a little crop of grey stubble.

Once I was sure what it was, I was a touch surprised to find out that I was thrilled. I had grey hair in my stubble! If I was to grow a beard, it would have a grey flash and everything! I've no idea why, but that thought sounded kind of cool.

Mind you, in the interests of full disclosure, I feel it's only appropriate to confess at this time that if I was to grow a beard, then it would not be an entirely salt-and-pepper style affair, a Sean Connery or a George Clooney. No. Rather, the grey flashes on my chin would be competing for attention with the rather more prominent and eye-catching ginger flashes in my beard. Frankly that's not a look that I aspire to.



So I won't be growing a beard any time soon.

No sir. No beard today.

you can leave your hat on.....

I've always liked hats. Even back in the days when I had some hair, I used to like the idea of wearing a hat. In those days, baseball caps were where it was at. As soon as you were a teenager and you decided that bobble hats, deer stalkers and cloth caps were off the agenda, if you were going to wear a hat, then you were probably going to be wearing a baseball cap. Sadly, I look a complete noggin in a baseball cap, but I always used to feel that my options were somewhat constricted, and so for a while I persisted.

I used to have a Wayne's World cap that I absolutely adored, but even though I wore it until it fell apart, I never really felt that I could carry it off. I still have a number of baseball caps: one from the Ryder Cup in Dublin, an England cricket cap, a battered old Adidas thing that I always wear when it's raining at Glastonbury.... I quite like them, but I never really wear them as I still think I look pretty stupid in them.

I've got other hats too. Over the years, the need for them has grown greater, either to protect my poor bald head from the sun or from the cold. I have beanies; I have a wide-brimmed leather hat that I bought in Australia; I even have a couple of funny flowerpot type affairs. These days I'm rarely anywhere without a hat of some sort, but I'm still not really feeling it. Somehow all those hats just aren't really me.

In some ways I hanker after a really classic hat. Not one of these tasteless modern affairs, but a something altogether classier. The thing is though, although everyone might have been wearing those sorts of hats right up to the 1960s, nowadays they're only really worn by old people, aren't they?

In spite of this, when we went to Ecuador last year, I was still determined to bring back a proper, authentic Panama hat. So when we were in Otavalo, I went out to the famous market and I bought myself a genuine, original Panama hat. I didn't wear it there and then, but I rolled it up, put it into its box, brought it home and planned to wear it at some unspecified point in the future. One day, I want to be the kind of person who wears a Panama hat.

I mention this because, several months later when I finally came to take my Panama hat out to have a look at it, I discovered that it had almost completely lost its shape. I put it away again, and it wasn't until last weekend that C. decided to dig it out and see if she could give it some shape. A bit of research revealed that this was fairly easily achieved with a steaming kettle and a lot of patience, both of which C. possesses. A short while later, and my Panama hat was back on the table as a serious option for the summer. I had a moment of clarity: I was looking at myself in the mirror wearing the newly reshaped hat, when I suddenly realised that even if it was true that you have to be a certain age before you can carry off one of these hats, I was almost certainly that old already.

I'm going to wear it out.

I haven't worn it out just yet, and I'm still a bit self-conscious about it, but I will. Who cares what people think anyway?

This new determination has stoked me up with new enthusiasm for hats. Proper hats. Although the Panama hat is probably the most famous hat to have come out of Ecuador, a far greater number of people actually wear the traditional felt hat. Panamas are all very well, but it's quite a fine hat, not an everyday kind of a hat. Felt hats are much more durable and all-purpose; much better suited to all year round wear. I took a shine to them when we were over there, and if I didn't have such a big head and they didn't have such a narrow brim, then I might have bought one there and then.

Perhaps not entirely unrelated to a forthcoming cinema release, I've decided that he only sensible choice for a man in the market for a proper hat has got to be something like this, hasn't it?



I'm going to get me a fedora. I may still very well look like a nugget, but I just don't think I care anymore. It's got to better than a Wayne's World baseball cap, right?

Or perhaps this kind of a midlife crisis is even worse?

like a coin that won't get tossed....

Although I'm only thirty-four years old, some days I feel as old as the hills. I went for a run during my lunchbreak yesterday, and it was fantastic. I was feeling a little bit tired from a game of football the night before and from my mandatory 3 times a week anti-WT upper body strengthening exercises, but within minutes of getting out of the door, it was obvious that this was going to be one of those rare occasions where a run feels great. Usually they just feel like a bit of a slog, a means to an end, but yesterday was great. It was a beautiful day, not too hot and not too cold, with just enough sun and barely a breath of wind. It felt as though spring was really just around the corner, and I found an unexpected bounce creep into my stride as I ran down by the river. It was great.

This morning though, I felt sore. The still-damaged ligaments in my ankle were stiff, my knees were a bit sore and my legs appeared to have seized up. I used to embrace a bit of after-exercise muscle pain as a welcome sign that I must have been working hard enough. Now though, it just feels like a window into my old age. Not that it's enough to stop me exercising so obsessively, mind you, and I played 90 minutes of football this evening. I feel worse doing nothing at all than I do flogging myself into the ground, I know that much. The physical discomfort is a whole lot easier to deal with than the psychological discomfort I inflict upon myself when I don't exercise. Ask me again when I'm a bit older though, eh?

I've been getting used to what cosmetics companies call "the visible signs of ageing" for some time now. I first noticed that I was losing my hair when I was in my middle-twenties, and I've been going grey since not very long after that. I imagine that the wrinkles around my eyes are coming along nicely too, although I've never really studied them with any great interest.... besides, what exactly am I going to do about it? I'm not bothered by wrinkles, so I'm not about to start using Protect & Perfect, nor am I likely to start having hair replacement therapy or get a weave done any time soon. I don't think I'm vain enough. It's not that I'm claiming I have no vanity, because I do, it's just that I'm not vain enough about my appearance to be interested in doing anything much about it. Grey hair simply doesn't bother me.

Well, I say that..... but in the last couple of years I have started to notice the odd grey hair appearing in locations. You know....other than on my head. On the whole, I can ignore them. For starters, I'm not an especially hairy man, and they're still pretty isolated, in the main, and clearly nothing very much to worry about. Yes, even down there. For some reason though, I seem utterly unable to tolerate grey hairs appearing on my chest. I simply can't stand the sight of them. No matter how much I try to leave them be, once I have spotted one of these interlopers, I have to pull the little bastard out. I'm aware that this is neither rational nor sustainable in the long run. As time goes on, there are only going to be more greys appearing, and before long I know that they will have a clear numerical superiority. Am I going to persist with my zero tolerance policy to its logical conclusion, or am I just going to get over it and learn to live and let live?

Who knows? For now I think I'll take it one day - and one hair - at a time.

It's just not logical. Why just the chest? Why care here but nowhere else? Call yourself clever do you brain? Well where's the consistency? Tell me that.

So yeah. I'm maybe a bit vain. Just in a slightly offbeat way. I may be ageing, but boy, do I take pride in the consistent colour of my chest hair.

Come to think of it, I'm not overfond of stray, Denis Healey-like eyebrow hairs either.

Especially not the ginger ones.

you can brush my hair, undress me anywhere...

As I was showering at the gym this evening, I noticed that someone had left some shampoo behind. Shampoo and conditioner are provided by the gym, so I've never felt the need to take any additional bottles into the shower with me. Still, each to their own, I suppose. As I was otherwise lacking in visual stimuli, and because it was an interesting looking bottle, I picked it up to have a closer look.

It was this stuff:



I read the blurb with some interest:

"Stop excessive hair loss.
Reduce access to Dihydrotestosterone (DHT)
Reduce conversion of Testosterone to DHT
Promote healthy hair growth
Contains Zinc and Vitamin B6 (P5P form)"

Wow. That's amazing, I hear you cry, but how does it work?

Well, here comes the science bit:

Dihydrotestosterone (DHT) and Hairloss

It is universally (universally!) agreed that men and women with male/female pattern baldness have increased levels of Dihydrotestosterone (DHT) in the scalp, which contributes to a shortening of the growth phase and a thinning of the hair. Testosterone is converted to DHT when in the presence of the enzyme, 5 alpha-reductase

In the presence of Nanoguard, the conversion of Testosterone to Dihydrotestosterone is effectively blocked, meaning the cause of hairloss is partially eliminated and conditions for follicle growth are optimal.

How does Nanoguard A work?

Nanoguard blocks the activity of 5 a-reductase, the enzyme responsible for converting Testosterone to Dihydrotestosterone. This enzyme is present in the scalp and hair follicles at high levels. By blocking this conversion, the levels of the androgen DHT are reduced, which stops the shedding & miniaturisation. This also revitalizes & protects the hair follicle and creates an environment conducive to healthy hair growth.

Hmm. That's interesting. So a shampoo can help to arrest hairloss in both men and women? And only £15 a bottle? Where can I get me some of this miracle product?

Oh hang on..... it's all bollocks, isn't it? Aren't male and female pattern baldness caused by totally different things? Is a shampoo really likely to affect that process?

As you may know, I'm a bit of a slaphead myself:



Speaking as a man with hairloss, I really don't see what the big deal is. Sure, I'm fascinated by the way my hairline is retreating on several fronts all at once. I'm also mildly curious why all of the other men in my immediate family still full heads of hair... but have I ever wished that I could make it stop? Have I ever stared enviously at another man's luxuriant mane? Nope. Not really. What would be the point? I've got the hairline that I've got, and that's the end of it.

With this in mind, I've always been amused by the lengths that some people will go to try to either cover up or even to reverse their baldness. Have brush-overs ever fooled anyone? Do they start when a young man first notices a little tiny bald spot and innocently parts his hair over the spot? Does this simple act commit you to a brush-over for life? As your bald spot gets bigger and bigger, do you find yourself sweeping that single lock of long hair further and further over your pate? What about drugs? I watched someone on telly once, a young man, responding to the news that one of the side-effects of taking Rogaine was that it could rob you of your libido. He thought that this was a trade worth making: hair in exchange for your hard-on.

No. Just no.

No.

So I looked at this shampoo bottle, shook my head sadly and put it back where I found it.

Was I remotely tempted to use it? No.

Did I hurry away from the shower cubicle after my shower just in case the person who went in after me chased me up the changing rooms after me trying to hand "my" shampoo back? Yes, I did.

Bald and proud, me.

Well, certainly bald anyway.

---

As a footnote to all that Morrissey stuff last week, do go and read this in the Guardian - it's the author of that piece, Tim Jonze, in the NME telling his side of the story. The article is interesting, I suppose, but the whole thing is worth reading just for the comments, which quickly degenerate into the predictable slanging match, but are notable for the contributions of Andrew Collins, Jon Wilde, the author and others. Does it add anything to the debate? Nah, but it's funny watching people trying to have a reasoned debate on an open internet forum. Surely everyone knows that's an impossible dream.....?