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CRUZ |
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is A BLESSING (...not a disease!) |
 don't despair, just think: Yul Brynner |
Yes, fellas, there are girls
who love the hairless look
By RAPHAELLA CRUZ
of TheColumnists.com
Not long before I met my husband, a girlfriend told me about a man she thought I should get to know, but she was reluctant to give me any details-- except that he had a good job and seemed pretty nice. Those are usually the first criteria a potential date has to meet these days, so I was interested. Then I brought up the inevitable next question.
"What does he look like?"
"Well, he's bald," my friend muttered, looking at her shoes, as if that was the end of the deal.
I have nothing against a high forehead, and was about ready to accept when she added, "and he has a big, round scar on the top of his head that you absolutely cannot ask him about."
Baldness I can stand, but big scars and big secrets put me off, so I declined this particular match. As it happens, I ended up marrying a baldie, and he looks great.
But this matchmaking episode set me wondering about the strange ambivalence of people toward baldness. In some quarters it has become stylish (some women even find it positively kinky) but in others it is treated as a social disease, like gonorrhea or something nasty like that. Worst of all, some people consider it a sign of getting old.
The negative press on baldness no doubt stems from the exaggerated portrayals of bald men as freaks or losers: Mr. T., Homer Simpson or the hapless George Costanza. Insecure men who want to distance themselves from these characters are easy prey for the hair replacement therapies, a big business today that takes advantage of balding men's vanity and nostalgia for follicular sprouts.
But, hey, how about the guys who have made it big without hair? Yul Brynner started it, Jesse Ventura picked it up, and celebrities from John Malkovich to Dick Cheney have turned it into an asset. Homosexual men also lean toward baldness, apparently because it's a good way to look neat and tidy. But that's another story.
I was just a little girl when my father started losing his hair. What began as a high forehead gradually turned into a smooth and shiny globe that felt warm to the touch, and to me it was beautiful because he was my father. I don't know whether he was ever self-conscious about it. If he was, he never let on--except possibly for a period of a few years when he was really into hats.
I am not sure this was due to self-consciousness, though. He was probably just trying to protect his exposed cranium from the elements, both cold and hot. Someone once told him an unprotected head is like a chimney, so in winter he put his Russian astrakhan cap on it. In summertime, on vacation in the South of France, we could always identify him in the hypermarche by his shiny crimson-purple sun-burned scalp peeking up above the aisle. Very few men in France are that tall, and you rarely see a bald person.
He always characterizes himself in cartoons with a giant bald head sprouting from a tiny neck and a long, thin body. There is some truth to this combo. His baldness is part of his character, his persona, and very much in his genes; neither of his brothers has had any need for hair products beyond the age of 25.
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on the fashion scene now like to keep their heads shaved clean |
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I feel sorry for the men in the world who are desperately self-conscious about their hair loss. I suppose some remember the days of their youth with pride and sadness, when girls could run her fingers through their hair. They remember loading it up with hair gel or flipping it into wings, combing it into a DA, or attaching feathery roach clips to the smooth long locks and feeling like real chick-magnets.
In efforts to reproduce the effects, they might now grow it long on one side and comb it over the top, hoping no one would notice the deception. Or grow a lot of facial hair to compensate for what the ravages of time and genetics have done to them.
A friend of mine who suffers from top-of-the-head hair loss (the soup bowl look) recently invested thousands of his social security dollars on a hair replacement that promoted temporary growth. For a few weeks or months he was in his glory, young again. He walked around with an ear-to-ear grin, his head held high, his new hair flapping in the breeze. The problem was that he had peaked in the 1970s, and so he styled it that way again--long and messy with gel and sideburns. He just looked pathetic, a father of three, nearly 40 years old, wearing new jeans and an outdated hairstyle, apparently feeling like the Lion King. To me, he had looked so nice and so real before.
I saw him recently and his temporary cure had worn off. All the new hair was gone. I imagined him in the bathroom each morning, combing out his thousand-dollar hair, one chunk after another, until he was back to his old bald self again.
My husband, who is barely over 30, was completely bald when I met him, although by choice, not by natural selection. Like Yul Brynner, he shaves his head regularly. When we met, he was thrilled to learn that I work at the Gillette Company ("World Shaving Headquarters"), where I can purchase blades at a discount that comes out to slightly more than the Wal-Mart price.
He does his head completely at least twice a week. Sometimes I help him, splashing warm water on his prickly three-day fuzz, squirting Foamy® into my fingers and massaging it into his scalp, and running the MACH3® Turbo triple blades into tracks from his forehead to his neck, dabbing it with a dry towel, and then applying the after-shave while he screams.
My two-year old niece is fascinated by his head and stares at it in awe and wonder. He picks her up and she runs her hands over his silky skull, looking in his eyes and smiling.
I hope the bald men who are reading this will hear my advice and realize that it really doesn't matter how much hair you have on top of your head, or even what you look like. What matters is who you are inside.
If you are concerned about your looks, do your best with what God gave you, and save your money for something other than hair restoration treatments. Remember, some woman might actually sidle up to you and whisper in your ear: "Kink--ky."
© 2002 by Raphaella
Cruz. The illustration is from IMSI's Master Clips Collection,
1895 Francisco Blvd. E., San Rafael, CA, 94901-5506, USA.
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