When I was a teenager, my mum reassured me that I wouldn\u2019t go bald in my 20s like my father had. She seemed pretty sure of this. \u201cLook,\u201d she said, brightly, pushing back her hair from her forehead, \u201cyou\u2019ve got my hairline, not your dad\u2019s.\u201d At the time, I bought her argument, but within 10 years her reasoning had been revealed to be magnificently wrong. My hairline had begun its slow march north, a clear sign that I\u2019d inherited male pattern hair loss from one of my parents, if not both of them.<\/p>\n
I pretended not to be bothered at the time, and as the years went by I persuaded myself that my ever-shorter haircuts might make me look better than I used to. But deep down it felt unfair, a genetic quirk I didn\u2019t deserve. I\u2019d wince as the barber held up the mirror behind me, revealing an ever-widening bald patch. The advent of social media gave me an exciting new pastime: untagging myself from photos that gave an unflattering perspective on my gleaming forehead, which was pretty much all of them. I pretended not to be bothered, but it was a pretence, and that pretence continues today, in my 40s; while stoically accepting hair loss as my destiny, I know perfectly well how I feel about it. I don\u2019t like it. I\u2019ve found myself turning to classic coping mechanisms such as wearing hats and growing a beard, hilariously feeble attempts at misdirection that fool nobody, least of all me.<\/p>\n
\u201cHair are your aerials,\u201d says Danny, the hirsute drug dealer in the film\u00a0Withnail and I<\/em>. \u201cThey pick up signals from the cosmos and transmit them directly into the brain. This is the reason bald-headed men are uptight.\u201d Danny\u2019s conclusion \u2013 that all hairdressers are in the employment of the government \u2013 was stoner paranoia, but in one sense he was right: balding men are often uptight, about their baldness if nothing else. As coping mechanisms go, my hat and my beard are pretty benign examples. But while hats and beards tend not to provoke any additional anxiety, it would seem that transplants, drugs and wigs certainly do.<\/p>\n Androgenetic alopecia is the medical term for this inherited form of hair loss, and while it affects both men and women, it\u2019s men whose anxieties tend to be targeted by the hair loss industry. It\u2019s estimated to be worth at least $1.5 billion a year worldwide, servicing the needs of millions of men and becoming increasingly adept at persuading them to part with money. A casual internet search returns a disorientating array of options that promise to alleviate the misery of the balding man: from herbal remedies to surgical procedures, from magic foams to fancy hairpieces, from restorative shampoos to nanofibre sprays for \u201ccolouring in\u201d bald patches. Some of them work, in the sense that the hair loss might be made less apparent (no miracle cures exist), but what works for one person might pan out disastrously for another. The resulting arguments play out daily between thousands of voices across dozens of websites, helping to generate a smokescreen of confusion behind which snake-oil salesmen can operate freely.<\/p>\nReference:<\/h4>\n
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