Is baldness a thing of the past? Or will it grow on us again? | Eva Wiseman
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As hair-loss treatments improve, one wonders if we’ll start to get nostalgic for a good combover. It is with mixed emotions that I announce the end of baldness. Rest in pates, old friend. This year will see the very last generation of men who, having arrived at the threshold of their 30s, are forced to accept the loss of their hair, with all their future sons and grandsons nipping instead to Turkey for a little implant and some kofta. Gone today, hair tomorrow.
![[Eva Wiseman]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/uploads/2017/10/06/Eva-Wiseman,-L.png?width=180&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
It’s true, look around. Compared with the Sean Connerys and Bruce Willises of yore, the number of bald celebrities on screen today can be counted on a single fist. The surgical technology has evolved, the transplants have become more accessible, the preventative drugs have improved, the death of bald is nigh. Like combovers, the hair plugs bring their own acts of faith of course, with hairlines so straight and thick it appears sometimes as if they are creeping down the face at night like a mask – every time I see one on telly I’m reminded of the Simpsons episode where Homer gets an evil hair transplant that plants its roots in his brain, leading him to murder Apu and Moe.
But their proliferance means, God, this will be the last generation of combovers, truly a dying art. All these small monuments to youth sculpted in a bathroom mirror at 7am, designed with thickening powders and special brushes to look dense even under strip lighting. Each combover is a poem – and if not exactly a poem, then at least a limerick. Each one is an act of gorgeous magical thinking. And each one is destroyed daily, not just by rain and wind, but by other people’s limited empathy, and crucially, eyesight. I joke but I respect it, I do – these small acts of concealment are often oddly moving, and tell, not always the story their wearer intended, of youth and vitality, but one far more vulnerable and authentic: about loss and fear, and other things that have no words for them yet.
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