Clippers save money

If you are a bloke with thinning hair, you can:

• plaster it down into a combover (undignified);
• take some dubious pharmaceuticals (expensive and uncertain);
• get implants (ditto, also they look obvious);
• cut it short and learn to love your scalp.

I have chosen the last option. I still have most of my hair, but the widow’s peak is evaporating and it’s clear that the “M” is going to be a “U” soon.

So anyway, I got clippers from the Warehouse for $12 a couple of years ago, and so I get a regular number 2 at home for free. You can’t get a number 2 from a barber for $12, so I’m well ahead. Some mugs may be spending hundreds on haircuts per year, but not me, mate.

(Life gives you lemons, you make lemonade, right?)

Apropos the number 2: when I was a teenager, and contemplating getting around punk/skinhead style, my mother disparaged such cuts as making one look “like a fur-bearing doorknob”. I grew a mullet instead, which I felt displayed my chestnut curls to advantage.

Apropos the combover: I was once privileged to be walking along Broadway in Newmarket behind a man whose scalp only grew hair in a small patch at the back. By means of some sort of super fixative and great deal of dedication, he had managed to tease those few strands into a kind of bouffant helmet which looked most convincing at a reasonable distance. Alas, it did not stand up to a strong head wind—or rather, in a manner of speaking, it did.

Apropos the hair implants: I once worked with someone who’d had them, but they didn’t take. So he had a neat pattern of dark scarred dots on his shiny forehead, which reminded me of the keys on a concertina.

Bonus baldness facts! It isn’t true that you get it from your mother’s side. At least, it’s more complicated than that. I love the breathless tone of the article: 1 in 3 men over 45 is at risk!

There’s a lot of money in dealing with baldness:

About a third of all men are affected by male pattern baldness by age 45. The condition’s social and economic impact is considerable: expenditures for hair transplantation in the United States alone exceeded $115 million (U.S.) in 2007, while global revenues for medical therapy for male-pattern baldness recently surpassed $405 million.

Don’t let anyone tell you men aren’t vain.