Hair

Subterms

    Latest story

    88 Shares119 Views

    Hair Transplants and the New Male Vanity

    by

    Last year, I noticed that two comedians I like talked about getting hair transplants. One of them, Matteo Lane, named his special “Hair Plugs & Heartache,” which opens with an extended bit about the transplant experience. I appreciated Lane’s radical (and very funny) transparency regarding the cosmetic enhancement. He talked about the expense, described the 10-hour surgery and the long recovery, and joked about his hair growing in gradually “like a Chia pet.” He’s very happy with the outcome.Lane also talks about why he got his surgery in the United States instead of in Turkey. He said he didn’t want to go through customs with his head swollen like the alien from the movie “Mars Attacks”: “I want to be ugly at home.” Going to Turkey to get a cheaper hair transplant is such a cliché that there’s an entire genre of social media video dedicated to depicting men’s beef carpaccio heads on “Turkish hairlines” flying back to their homes from Istanbul.The British tabloid The Mirror just ran a story about one regular bloke who traveled to Turkey for hair transplant surgery and is quoted as saying that he feels he has “a new lease of life.”This is a marked change from just a few years ago, when men were less forthcoming about getting surgery on their domes. In 2021, my newsroom colleague Alex Williams wrote about the men who got hair transplants during the locked-down days of the pandemic. “There’s still that old stigma, where guys aren’t supposed to worry about how they look and spend a lot of money on their appearance,” one hair transplant recipient said at the time.That stigma is very old, indeed. There’s long been anxiety over hair loss among men, according to Martin Johnes, a professor of modern history at Swansea University in Wales who has researched masculinity, modernity and male baldness. But the stress really started ramping up in the 1930s, when men stopped wearing hats regularly and popular media started valorizing youthfulness more aggressively.In the 1930s, it was considered effeminate to pay too much attention to your appearance yet many of these men still wanted to take action if they were unlucky enough to go bald. They called baldness obscene, a major disaster and, poetically, a favored nightmare. One 30-year-old upholsterer said:I do not care to see bald heads. I can only tolerate them if the owner has a large head, or if his personality will not allow himself to look pitiable.While the bad feelings around baldness clearly aren’t new, talking about those feelings in public is. And hair replacement technology has improved so much in the last couple of decades that transplants look real now — it’s not just snake oil or cheesy infomercials for hair in a can anymore.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    More stories

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      Male Pattern Baldness: How to Treat and Prevent Hair Loss

      by

      Male-pattern baldness hits half of men by age 50. Here’s what to know about treatment and prevention.`It’s a day no man looks forward to: looking in the mirror and admitting that his widow’s peak is real. Or feeling the breeze on the crown of his head.Up to half of men will experience some form of male-pattern baldness by 50, and still more after that. Though our genetics and hormones play major roles in hair loss, the exact mechanisms aren’t fully understood, which is why treatments to stem and reverse it remain imperfect, said Dr. Arash Mostaghimi, vice chair of clinical trials and innovation in the dermatology department at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.However, there are a few things you can do both before and after that fateful day comes. Here is what you need to know about what works, what’s new and what to avoid.What Causes Male Pattern BaldnessThe average human head contains around 100,000 hairs. Each is connected to a follicle, which can hold one to five hairs.“It’s basically its own organ,” Dr. Mostaghimi said of a scalp follicle. “It has its own stem cells. It regenerates.”Typically, men’s hair loss occurs because of an increase in an enzyme in the scalp that converts testosterone to a more potent form, called dihydrotestosterone (or DHT), Dr. Mostaghimi said. The reasons that one man might have more DMT than another are not well understood, but it has a genetic component.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 100 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      The Best Hair at Minnesota’s State Hockey Tournament

      by

      At Minnesota’s state hockey tournament, outrageously coifed high school stars competed for the best “salad” and “flow.” And then the games began.Making the state tournament is a big deal for boys who play high school hockey in Minnesota, where the best of the best face off — with championships on the line — at the Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul.And while the tournament is a four-day smorgasbord of slap shots, glove saves and power plays, it has evolved into a full-blown spectacle — as the global hub for “hockey hair.”“As soon as our players make the state tournament, it’s like, ‘Guys, come on, we’ve got to play hockey now,’” Ryan Neuman, the coach at New Ulm High School, said in an interview. “And they’re busy making hair appointments to get perms.”Hockey hair has ranked among the sport’s more curious traditions for decades, stretching back to the days when N.H.L. greats like Guy Lafleur, Marty McSorley and Al Iafrate (for whom being bald up top was no great deterrent) took the ice with epic mullets.With its tight sides and elongated caboose, the mullet is conducive to the hockey-specific concept of “flow,” a heightened state of being that is achieved whenever a player’s long hair pours out from under his helmet and billows behind him as he zips up and down the ice.Steeped in the tradition of hockey hair, players in the state tournament often book salon appointments to make sure they look their best.Luke Schmidt, Bauer Hockey and MSHSLWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More