Toupee Dismay

The other day I saw a guy wearing an obvious, and therefore pretty bad, toupee. It was one of those hairpieces where the hair looked like it was pasted down and hard as a rock, and the color and texture really didn’t match the horseshoe of surrounding natural hair. And then I realized, with a bit of a start, that it was my first bad toupee sighting in a really long while. What used to be a relatively frequent occurrence has now become a rarity.

There are two potential explanations for this: either the craftsmanship and realism of toupees has increased so substantially that they aren’t as noticeable, or men are just not wearing them as much as they used to. I think it’s probably a combination of the two factors. I tried to find information on whether male toupee sales are declining, but it doesn’t seem to be a frequently reported topic. Any Google search for toupees mostly turns up speculation about whether this or that famous person is wearing one. And if the speculation is right, hairpiece creation has improved, because the claimed toupees looked pretty natural.

It’s also clear that the bald look–including ultra-short hair and shaved heads–has become a lot more prevalent since the days when only Mr. Clean adopted it. As is often the case with fashion trends, it started with athletes and celebrities, and now it has worked its way down to the common man. And while not everyone has a skull shape that necessarily should be exposed to the world, a well-tended scalp always looks better than a bad toupee in my book. The fact that baldness has become accepted is a good thing, too.

If toupees are, in fact, going the way of the dodo, can Grecian Formula 16 be far behind?

Bald-Faced Waste

Imagine, for a moment, that you are a bureaucrat at the National Institutes of Health charged with making decisions about spending the NIH budget.

One of your subordinates comes to you with a proposal for the NIH to spend $22,500, over two fiscal years, to fund the 9th World Congress for Hair Research.  The subordinate notes that the theme of this year’s World Congress, sponsored by the North American Hair Research Society — which will be held at the “luxurious InterContinental Miami” hotel in Miami, Florida — is Reflect, Rejuvenate, and Regenerate.  He says the Congress will bring together “hair biologists, dermatologists, cosmetic scientists and hair transplantation surgeons” to “present new research, share experiences, and discuss new directions for the advancement of knowledge in hair growth, hair and scalp disease, and clinical care” and is sponsored by the likes of Women’s Rogaine, Procter & Gamble, HairMax, Theradome, L’Oreal, Aveda, and the International Society of Hair Restoration Surgery.

Do you: (a) tell the subordinate that his proposal is a very funny joke, and share a good laugh at the outlandish idea of federal tax dollars being used to help put on a “luxurious” conference about baldness and hair restoration surgery, (b) gently but firmly tell the subordinate that baldness and hair implant surgery aren’t the kind of serious health concerns that require the attention or support of the National Institutes of Health, or (c) rubber-stamp the proposal because it’s only for $22,500 out of the multi-million dollar NIH budget and note that the session about “Robotic Hair Transplants” looks like it should be interesting.

If you picked (c), you have a future as a federal bureaucrat.

In the grand scheme of trillion-dollar federal budget and trillion-dollar deficits, a $22,500 payment toward the 9th World Congress for Hair Research — which is going on now, thanks in part to your tax dollars — is just a drop of Rogaine in the bucket.  This is about principle, however.  Either the people who make decisions about how federal tax dollars are spent are zealous guardians of the public fisc, or they aren’t.  And while some men and women may fret about losing their hair, there simply is no justification for federal support for a hair-care conference that already is amply supported by large corporate sponsors peddling hair-care products and hair restoration and regeneration treatments and techniques.

Kudos to Senator Rand Paul — whose tousled coiffure is at the other end of the hair spectrum — for calling attention to this little example of spending silliness.  You can see the NIH information about the funding for the 9th World Congress here and here, and the Congress website is here.

Our reckless federal spending has fallen off the political radar screen, both because we’ve become hardened to enormous federal budget deficits and because other issues have come to the forefront.  At some point, though, our federal government’s inability to control its budget and to resist obviously unnecessary spending will have terrible consequences.  And that’s the bald-faced truth.

Heroic Hairlessness

If you’re a guy and you’re losing your hair, you’ve got a choice:  you can accept it and live with it, or you can take extreme measures, like expensive toupees, hair implants, or Rogaine or other hair growth treatments, to try to deal with the issue.  What to do?

For generations, men have bemoaned baldness.  They think women find bald men unattractive, and third parties think chrome domers are pathetic.  Now experiments conducted by a University of Pennsylvania researcher suggest these concerns are unfounded.  In fact, his experiments indicated that guys with shaved scalps are viewed as more manly, more dominant, and taller, stronger, and having more leadership potential.  According to the experiments, baldies still aren’t considered as physically attractive as men with full heads of hair, but a shaved head still beats the thinning hair and comb-over looks every time.  (Although the linked story doesn’t say so, incidentally, I’m assuming the depilated dudes didn’t have unsightly ridges, bumps, or scars on their heads.)

Why is this so?  I think it’s because people who accept their condition and deal with it are always going to be viewed as stronger and more decisive than people who try to mask the condition or reverse it.  Trying to hide something always seems weak — and trying to hide something as obvious as thinning hair, or wearing a bad toupee, just makes the individual seem ridiculous, too.