Baldness: Taking It in Stride

By the time Bruce Willis and David Beckham started to crop their hair, shaven-headedness had gone Mainstream Hetero. The white-van man and metrosexual alike, the baldness sufferer and the style surfer, were all flocking to have their hair clipped to the minimum length. “Celebrities shaving their heads brought a different interpretation to baldness entirely,” says Healy. “From when Trevor Sorbie started to makeover men with cropped hair on daytime TV in the early 90s, the meaning changed.”

But what about those who are not convinced by Trevor Sorbie or Bruce Willis? Is there really hope for them, with the new research discoveries and fresh techniques for hair transplantation? Probably not, according to GP and medical journalist Dr James Le Fanu, author of The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine.

“You have to be incredibly skeptical about stem cells and anything where people say in five years’ time we’ll do such and such,” says Le Fanu. “Stem-cell technology appears to offer the moon. Regeneration and regenerative medicine is often presented as the answer to everything in the universe. But actually there’s nothing in the bank.”

Balding, Le Fanu points out, is deeply mysterious, even counter-intuitive. “Nobody knows why you get balder as you get older. It’s an anomaly. It doesn’t fit.” Because, Le Fanu explains, people with lower levels of testosterone (which usually comes with aging) should theoretically enjoy better hair growth. After all, castrati never lose their hair, because they don’t produce testosterone. “There is some link between hair loss and testosterone, but no one knows what it is.”

Le Fanu isn’t all negative. He claims that hair transplants are pretty good nowadays and recommends drugs such as minoxidil, which induces hair growth in 30–40 percent of people. He notes that “increasing circulation to the scalp also appears to promote hair growth. The Japanese have a special hairbrush which they use to massage the scalp 200 times a day to increase blood flow. This is said to improve hair growth.”