MADRID (dpa) – Very few men talk about it openly, but hair loss and baldness continue to present a big problem for countless men.
In Spain, where many men feel compelled to live up to the image of a hairy and macho “Latin lover”, around half of males are going bald by age 50, the daily El Mundo says.Though hardly anyone admits to worrying about it, many men begin to gaze into the mirror as early as in their 20s, scrutinizing their hairlines for signs of the first strands falling out, according to experts quoted by the daily.In a 1999 poll which interviewed 403 men who were going bald, 63 per cent said that loss of hair made them feel less attractive and 43 per cent said they feared it could harm them in some way.Baldness can even lead to depression, anxiety and compulsive obsessions, El Mundo said.Far from being just vanity, fears linked to baldness have a basis in reality. A study made last year among 30 personnel managers of large Spanish companies showed that they gave applicants with thick hair a preference over thin-haired ones when choosing people for job interviews.The candidates with a lot of hair had a 25-per-cent advantage over those whose photographs revealed that they were going bald. The applicants with hair looked younger and more dynamic, the managers said.Politicians with abundant hair are likely to get 30 per cent more votes than ones with thinning hair, another poll indicated.While pollsters have found women prefer men not to have a lot of hair on the chest and back, there is no doubt that females prefer hairy heads to hairless ones.The keys to male attractiveness include “nice hair, an agreeable smell, good teeth and sensual eyes”, according to a recent poll which interviewed 503 Spanish women.The problem is not new, of course. Julius Caesar is supposed to have started wearing his emblematic wreath of laurels to cover up creeping baldness, while Napoleon reportedly wasted a political meeting with Russian Czar Alexander on discussing the pros and cons of anti-baldness creams.More than a millennium before the birth of Christ, Egyptian doctors prepared an ointment against loss of hair which contained grease from lions, hippopotamuses, crocodiles, ducks and snakes.There have been different theories about the causes of baldness, with one claiming that the active minds of intellectuals make them go bald sooner, while one expert in Victorian England postulated that playing the piano makes men bald.Even today, however, scientists do not understand why some men begin to lose hair in their 30s while others still have bushy hair at age 70.Baldness has mainly to do with hormones and ageing. Female hormones protect women from it, but even women begin to lose hair after menopause, though their hair thins more evenly all over the skull and the change is not as visible as in men.In Spain, men spend millions of dollars annually on anti-baldness products, but the vast majority of them are of no use whatsoever.Only a few products have been known to help, including one originally developed against high blood pressure and another one intended for hypertrophy of the prostate gland.But hair begins falling out again as soon as the man stops taking the medication or applying the ointment, according to experts quoted by El Mundo.Expensive and time-consuming hair transplants only have an effect on the spot on which the transplant is made, while genetic remedies are still far away.Anxiety about baldness is likely to keep spreading in western societies where a youthful appearance is a key to social and professional success, dermatologist Ramon Grimalt predicts.Nevertheless, the best that bald men can do for themselves might be to question such values.“Countless men submit to cosmetic operations to try to appear to be what they are not,” author Carmen Rico Godoy pondered. “I dislike my wrinkles, but I accept them as a price for other things, such as more freedom and a certain distance from society.”For those unable to muster such wisdom, hairdressers suggest one more solution: follow the fashion of shaving the entire head, launched by Brazilian football stars such as Ronaldo and Roberto Carlos.Shaving the head is no longer associated with being a skinhead, and “it is a great escape”, fashion expert Angela Navarro said. “It allows men to forget their daily battle against going bald.”
