Hair to the Throne: A Hairy Situation
I hate those ads for all sorts of stuff that interrupt videos on YouTube or articles on websites. For whatever reason, these days, in my experience, it’s mostly advertising for fungal infection balms and hair transplantation for men. Just like with cigarettes, there’s very graphic imagery of swollen toes, scalps with patches of hair and young men complaining how they suffered mockery. This miraculous preparation fixed the problem and now they can brag with a full beard, making them look like an extra from Game of Thrones. A gym rat I frequently run into during my workouts took the bait and tried it too. Instead of a small samurai-like tail now there’s a crown of hair that still shows the receding hairline underneath. It’s a mystery to me.
Being fortunate not to have to worry about hair loss, I’m nevertheless intrigued by the vulnerability of men when it comes to facial hair. My own beard can be quite a nuisance if not properly maintained since it’s rather on the sharp side. If the border police decided to use it instead of barbed wire, it might repel illegal intruders just as good as the real thing. Fortunately, my pubic hair is much more hospitable and you won’t get your lips shredded if you decided to give me one of those jobs that don’t require an internship. Judging by how long it’s been that no one showed up at my employment office, it seems easier to grow a bib-sized bush on my face.
Hair plays an important role in our culture as a mark of prestige, strength and maturity. It’s a symbol of manhood in its rawest form. In Islam, women traditionally hide their hair under the hijab. In the Bible, Samson’s strength was embodied in his hair. The Scriptures really get hairy from time to time. And then there’s the most distinctive of all, the heavily texturized, sculptural dreadlocks. They make black people’s heads look like a bronze bust with a crown. They’re simultaneously audacious and demanding attention due to their equisite aesthetics. On the other hand, it’s so popular that it easily turns into the opposite. There are people that make it look like a messy pile of rainbow-colored pasta sitting on their head. I’ve seen a few.
Allegedly, all roads to solving the problem of male hair loss lead to Turkey. A friend told me about his own plans but gave up on it in the end. It was too much hassle for a problem that was likely psychological. We like to blame patriarchy for everything that’s wrong around us.But things aren’t that easy even for men who don’t fit into a very specific image or mould. Whatever the collateral consequence for women might be, dudes who aren’t sufficiently dudes turn into a patriarchally inadequate second best. The world is full of bubbles, and emotionally homeless men is the worst. Make no mistake though, it’s packed full of lost causes hidden in plain sight.
Just because you don’t see us, it doesn’t mean we’re not there. Many men wear their beard as a shield against prying eyes trying to expose the pain lying beneath. Maybe they’ve had a bad day. Maybe the marriage isn’t working out. Maybe they’re really the second best but no one cared enough to say it in their face. If you lose it, nobody will be able to do it anyway. I know quite a few elderly men with that notorious, thin combover. And there’s Prince William as well. Unlike his, my house doesn’t have a name. But neither does my hairdo: the closest word to it would be fabulous. From what I’ve been told many times already, it perfectly applies too.
Just like myself, my hair used to be straight. Not anymore. For whatever reason, it spontaneously curled up over the years and when freshly washed, you could mistake it for a wig. Having an oddly shaped head helps with how your haircut works. There was a time when I rocked the full Statham, before the muffin top waist I’m rocking right now. While trying to rock it off at the gym, your mind descends into your feet touching the threadmill. Others are trying to do the same, chisel away the ugly bits until they emerge from that marble block of shame into a delicate shining piece matching the Greek Discobolus. The ultimate image of pride and vanity.
In the past, everything related to grooming for men occupied a more or discrete niche in the beauty industry: shaving kits, colognes, soap and pomades which work both on your hair and your shoes if there’s no polish. With the ascent of the modern metrosexual, things changed. Suddenly, the beauty isle in your supermarket started expending. Where there used to be one after shave balm, now there were five. The same happened with skincare, which is anything but non-binary. Beauty industry may be inclusive, but not if it affects their margin. Almost everything that’s sold on the shelf for dudes is equally if more expensive than its female counterpart. It makes you want to stick to a can of old-fashioned Nivea.
When it comes to multipurpose products, you can’t beat all those 6-in-1 lotions, potions and shower gels meant for dudes. Most have a refreshing scent and the bottle is much bigger than the small-sized portions meant for women. It reminds me of Kramer, whose shower did double duty as a human-sized kitchen sink and a personal hygiene tool. There must be a reason why the idea didn’t turn into a trend like Rachel’s hair from the TV show Friends. If we learned anything from Seinfeld, it’s that shower stalls can never be too big, which doesn’t apply to the water pressure though. The only thing worse than a light trickle is the equivalent of a full-blown hot tsunami in a space hardly bigger than a traditional English phone booth.
My dad shaves every day and it used to be a major rite of passage for young men. Now it lost a bit of the milestone veneer. When I look at old high school photos, I can’t handle the barely-there beard or the moustache that was rather a suggestion than a presence. There’s no solution for this kind of an issue in Turkey, I’m afraid. Save the money for a therapist to talk you through that unneccesary anxiety and force you to focus on priorities. One of them would be creating a habit of using a perfume, also a rite of passage. For a short time people like Freddie Mercury, Salvador Dali and Hercule Poirot were my inspiration when it comes to facial landscaping.
However, I’m not going to share it with you because I prefer to keep my embarassments in the most secure place of all: my social media, available to everyone on my friend list. The upside nowadays is this lasagna on your timeline is mostly under the radar. Should you find yourself in a situation when nothing worth sharing is happening in your life, consider it a relief. There’s no urge to boast or impress. Nothing left to say. You don’t live, you exist. The only ones who can truly lay claim to this without looking pathetic are people in a coma on life support, tubes sticking out of their mouth or arms. But there are all kinds of supports: a perfectly groomed beard is a good beginning. Take it from there and who knows how far you’ll go.
George Michael sings sometimes the clothes don’t make the man. That’s a damn lie and any man who knows how to properly wear a tie will agree. Or a bow tie, if you want to take it one step further. That one makes me look like a waiter, so I skip it. Ladies tend to have an extremely well developed sense of smell. Sometimes they’ll sit next to you if they smell a perfume they like. It used to happen and made me feel like a truffle. She’s a Venus fly trap and I’m stuck in her scented ointment. Like subliminal messaging, smells convey images that are a figment of fiction. When you take the elevator in my building on Saturday night, it smells as if you were stuck in a giant peach or vanilla air diffuser. Nauseating is an understatement here.
The changing room in my gym smells like a giant bottle of Old Spice. You run into people that seem to spend more time in tanning beds than their own beds. They leave the place wrapped in a dense fog of testosterone and Chanel. It’s a level of narcissism which combines Dorian Gray and Patrick Bateman. Simultaneously entertaining and silly, it paints the image of the modern man as a creature of habits intended to turn George Constanza into Apollo Belvedere. If you’re turned on by it, all those sad, flaccid dicks swinging around the room will soon kill the buzz. Whatever you do, there’s one thing you should always remember in the changing room and outside. Just like whiskey and sleeping pills, Chanel and flannel shouldn’t ever mix.
