Joan could no longer hide the fact that she had thinning hair. Her scalp now had more bald spots on it than the tires of a ten-year-old Mercedes. This problem could have been easily solved with a hair transplant, but Joan stubbornly bypassed a trip to the doctor to find a solution—which came (surprise, surprise) in the form of a cheapo wig from Chinatown made out of raccoon hair.
Nobody was the wiser, but every time Joan put it on, she got the sudden urge to tip over a garbage can and wash her hands in a stream.
She quickly discovered why. The wig, teased in an Amy Winehouse-style beehive, actually was a live raccoon that had stowed away on a Chinese cargo ship. (The creature had raided the captain’s liquor cabinet and passed out drunk on top of a Styrofoam headform where it slept it off for the duration of the journey to America.)
When Joan put the wig on, it not only looked terrible, but, at one point, the little creature woke up and bit her on the scalp. Joan immediately called a doctor who, as luck would have it, specialized in hair transplantation. He assured her that any pain she might experience would be nowhere near what she would have felt getting the rabies shots.
I’m talking about hair, people.
Men long to run their fingers through your hair …just not the hair on your arms.
They love to bury their nose in your hair …but not on your chin.
If men wanted to see hair on a nipple, they’d go to the beach with their brother.
Men love big boobs (as if we needed the reminder) for the same reason they like a hairless woman: they’re attracted to any characteristics that are different than theirs. Men don’t have boobs, so men are fascinated by them. Men lack curves, so they crave women with small waists and big butts.
Men have excessive body hair, which they associate with masculinity, virility, and an outward sign of the sexual beast within. In contrast, men are turned on by women without body hair. He won’t care if you were born to a pack of wolves in Romania as long as you are shaved, plucked, or waxed as smooth as a cue ball before he sees you naked.
I hate to encourage male demands on women, but the guys are right about a few things: lots of body hair on a man is physical proof that he’s overflowing with androgens, or male hormones, mainly testosterone.
Loads of testosterone = thick pelts of body hair and (in an ironic twist) a bald head.
If you see a man on the beach who is bald as the Super Dome with the hirsute back of a gorilla, you can assume the following:
1. He will never say, “I had a hard day. Just back off and let me go to sleep.”
2. He’ll be aggressive and ambitious in and out of bed.
3. He’ll cheat on you with a $4,000-an-hour hooker from New Jersey.
4. He is Eliot Spitzer.
Incidentally, women with lots of body hair have more testosterone in their bodies than their peach-fuzzed sisters, and all women have some testosterone. The quantity determines how hairy a woman gets. It also determines her sex drive. Men are attracted to hairless women, but fuzzier ladies have a higher sex drive.
To confuse matters further, the higher the sex drive, the more likely a woman is to tweeze and pluck and shave herself nearly to death to make sure she’s smooth enough to get a guy’s attention.
Excessive hair on a woman’s body—as seen by men, other women, and the woman herself—is unsightly, unattractive, embarrassing, and just plain rude.
Unless, of course, you’re a member of Dykes on Bikes.
In America, the aesthetic ideal is for women to be stubble-free. A mustache on a woman is off-putting. Even worse, a butt-stache.
The last thing you want is for your husband or boyfriend to put his hand on your leg and be reminded that the lawn needs mowing or the hedge could use a trim. Or for him to touch you in his sleep and wake up in a sweaty jolt, dreaming he’s in bed with Sasquatch.
You’ll never guess when and where women began the practice of shaving to be sexy. I’ll make it easy for you: where all beauty obsessions originated. Ancient Egypt. (Are you getting tired of my shout-outs to Cleopatra?) Egyptians were the B.c. equivalent of current-day Brazilians. The Alexandrians—women and men—were devoted to full-body depilation. Why? Well, hairlessness was next to godliness, especially when all of your gods were statues made of gold, ebony, and bronze. The Greeks and Romans also prized smooth. A clean shave (chin to testicle to toe) was a status symbol for men. For women, a hairless body was a beauty requirement. The hairier you were, the lower down the social ladder.
And it was good hygiene, too. Kept away lice, fleas …and plebeians.
In classic art from those eras, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a strand of errant hair on any of the subjects, even in the crotch.
Except for a brief fling in the all-natural 1970s, hairlessness has been the modern American standard of beauty. Nowadays, hair removal is the preoccupation of women everywhere. The only place you definitely want hair is on top of your head. And there, the more the merrier. Big hair comes in and out of fashion, but men have always loved it. A shiny, lustrous mane is your crowning glory. It’s also money in the bank, the key to success, fame, and fortune.
Just ask Jennifer Aniston.
Beautiful hair is also a sign of good health. A woman with bouncing, soft, shiny hair eats right, bathes regularly, and has good genes. Gorgeous hair can make or break a woman’s looks. She could have the face of a dog, but put thick, shimmering blond hair on her head, men will pant.
Put a blond wig on a parking meter, and some man will offer to buy it a drink.
A woman could have a pretty face, but if she’s got scary hair, men turn to stone in her presence.
Just ask Medusa.
In fact, Medusa might’ve been the only woman in history, or mythology, who wouldn’t have minded losing her hair. As you get older, due mainly to hormonal changes, your head hair will get sparser. That’s right, another fun symptom of menopause. Every woman will experience some degree of deforestation. One in five lose enough to get depressed about it. Unlike male pattern baldness, female hair loss is diffuse, a little bit all over. You won’t get a receding hairline. But you might see more and more scalp when you look in the mirror. Unless you’re trying to seduce Uncle Fester, thinning hair is not a turn-on. A three-inch part isn’t fooling anyone.
The challenge for women vis-à-vis hair is less below the forehead, more above.
Why do we even have body hair? Humans have been out of the jungle for thousands of years. It’s been a few million years since we were chimps and grew our own fur coats. Why not evolve away the vestigial covering?
Would you believe body hair’s lingering purpose is to make us more attractive to the opposite sex? (The ironies never stop.) When I say “lingering,” I mean smell. Human sweat contains pheromones, subconsciously detectable smells that waft off of our bodies and into the twitching nostrils of men. They get a whiff. If our chemicals are a match for his receptors, he’ll come hither.
If not, don’t blame yourself. He could be gay.
Hair retains pheromone smell better than bald skin. This is why we grow excessive hair where we tend to sweat—the armpits and the crotch.
Ever heard of a “whore bath”? It’s when you use a washcloth and scrub those two areas.
By depilating to be more attractive, we’re actually cutting off (as it were) one way to send hotness signals to men. Lavender deodorant smells very nice, but it won’t draw in men like the chemical kick of pheromones.
Ah, well. We lose one weapon, and gain another. Beauty is about pleasing the eye, not the nose.
Which brings me to the greatest beauty procedure ever invented: laser hair removal. These days, laser hair removal is the number-one beauty procedure among women under thirty-five. More than 906,000 people got their follicles zapped in 2007. Hair transfers are not just for men. Although only 20,000 women tried it in 2007, the procedure is growing (even if your hair isn’t) in popularity. Reasons it’s the best:
1. It WORKS.
2. It’s permanent.
3. It’s not too, too expensive.
4. It doesn’t hurt too, too much.
5. No downtime.
6. It’s an excellent party conversation subject.
7. People you barely know will want to stroke your bikini line.
8. You never have to see that crazy waxing woman who yells at you in Russian again.
First, a quickie on hair growth:
The life-cycle of a single body hair (on your arm, chin, leg, pubic area, ass, anywhere but the top of your head) is only three or four months. Each hair begins as a glimmer in the eye of a follicle in the dermis layer of skin. Follicles are little sacs whose sole purpose is to grow hair, and drive you crazy with their fortitude. You can pluck hair out of the follicle, but it’ll immediately start making a replacement. You can send an electric shock into the follicle (otherwise known as the old-fashioned technique called electrolysis), which slows down hair production, but it won’t kill the enemy follicle. (Not one shock, anyway. Electrolysis will eventually stop hair growth, but it can take dozens of painful treatments over many years. Compared to the laser, electrolysis is horse-and-buggy hair removal.)
The first of three hair growth stages is called the anagen stage. This is when the follicle gives birth to a bouncing baby hair that quickly grows and sprouts upward, through the dermis, to poke out of the epidermis as irritating stubble. The next stage is the catagen stage, when the hair reaches maturity, and the follicle cuts it off—like a parent kicking a post-collegiate kid out of the house. The hair says, “I don’t need you anyway!” and leaves the follicle, swearing never to return. And it won’t. It makes a clean break from the follicle and its supply of blood, then moves upward.
This is when the hair sticks out farther and appears longer (it’s the same length it’s always been, but now you see more of it). Which brings on the last stage, called the telogen stage, when the follicle regroups after that ugly separation scene above, decides to try again, gives birth to a new hair, and starts the cycle all over again. As the new hair starts to grow, the old hair is pushed out of the body and then gets stuck in the weave of your sweater.
Since you grow a new hair every three or four months, a single follicle on your body can produce two hundred and fifty hairs before you die. Multiply that by the number of follicles on your entire body—five million of them—and you’re looking at 1,250,000,000 hairs to contend with in a lifetime.
Incidentally, the 100,000 hairs on your head have a much longer growth period, up to two years. They also grow at a different rate than body hair, which is why they can get so long.
Okay, on to the miracle laser hair removal procedure. No pre-treatments are needed. You’ll go to your appointment. Take off the appropriate clothing. Lie down on the table. The dermatologist will shave the area to concentrate the laser light on the follicles underneath the surface of your skin. He’ll smear a translucent jelly like K-Y on the treatment area to cool and protect your skin. You’ll put on a pair of goggles (the little ones you used to use when self-tanning, before you stopped that unhealthy habit) to protect your eyes from the intense laser light.
The dermatologist or plastic surgeon will fire up the laser and then start zapping you along the treatment area with the hand-held wand device. The burst of laser light penetrates the skin layers and is absorbed by the pigment of your hair. The darker the pigment, the more laser light absorbed. Since the laser will be absorbed by hair or skin pigment, contrast works best. For this reason, laser hair removal works best on brunettes (dark hair pigment) with fair complexions (light skin pigment). Snow White would be the ideal candidate. Her sister Rose Red? Not so much. Laser hair removal is useless on blondes (that is to say real blondes). What matters is the color of hair under the skin. If your roots are brown or black, you can laser.
As the hair pigment absorbs the laser light, it heats up the follicle and damages it. Enough heat, and the follicle will be destroyed and never grow another hair. This is good. This is what we want. The catch is that only hair in the anagen stage, the active growth stage, has enough pigment to absorb the laser’s light and heat. Since, at any one moment, a third of your hairs are in the anagen stage, at each treatment, you’ll damage only one-third of your follicles. Damage, but not completely destroy. Hair growth will be slowed, but it won’t stop after just one treatment. This is why you need to schedule six to eight treatments, six weeks apart. That way, you’ll hit each follicle three times during its anagen stage. By the end of your eight sessions, you’ll never grow hair again on up to 80 percent of the treatment area. And the 20 percent of hair you have left? It’s thin and straggly. Doctors recommend you go back once or twice a year for a maintenance zap.
Some of you might think of all those sessions as a major commitment. An hour every six weeks for nine months? That’s nothing! A commitment is once a week for fifteen years. In other words, marriage.
Immediately after you’ve been zapped, you might be a little red for a day. Use sunscreen. After about ten days, your hair will start to loosen. If you tug a single hair, it’ll slide out—proof that the follicle has been damaged. Between sessions, if you have regrowth, don’t pluck or wax. That interferes with the growth stage of the follicle. If you must, shave offending hairs.
The length of each session depends on the treatment area. Armpits can be fully zapped in five minutes. The bikini area? Ten minutes. Full leg, toes to groin? An hour and change.
In terms of pain, it hurts less than a waxing. The sensation is like a tiny snap, and you can smell the hair follicles burning, although you won’t feel heat. Each time you go in, you’ll have less and less hair—ergo, less pigment and decreasing pain with treatment. By your eighth session, it’s practically painless.
Most dermatologists and doctors charge by the treatment area, not the individual sessions. So, the bigger the area, the higher the price. For full leg, in New York City, expect to pay a few thousand for a package of six to eight sessions. For the lip line, you could pay only $300.
An at-home laser hair removal product has won FDA-approval recently. It’s called Tria. As of this writing, you can only buy one through a doctor, and he’ll train you to use it. It’s not approved for use above the neck, but I’m sure women will just love to zap their mustaches and chin hairs with it. It’s a good idea for women who have some laser hair removal experience already and need the unit for at-home maintenance zappage. Cost: $1,000, plus tax.
The rewards:
No hair! You can ignore your crotch all winter long, but how great is it to put on a bikini in June without having to worry about hair sticking out the sides like a billy goat.
No hair! Throw out the weed whacker. The superstitious game of to-shave-or-not-to-shave before a hot date is irrelevant. Your legs are hairless as an Egyptian cat. Your ass is as bald as Charles Barkley. Instead of agonizing about what shaving will mean to the date’s outcome, you can spend that time styling the hair on your head, which could use the attention.
No stupid hair! A denuded bikini area is fantastic for your sex life. With no hair gumming up the area, he’ll be able to find your clitoris without a map.
All the time in the world. A friend of mine used to spend half an hour every day shaving her legs and forearms, and ten minutes every night inspecting her lip and chin for pluckable stubble. She decided to spend the money, and had her legs, bikini line, chin, mustache, and armpits lasered. It took a year and $5,000, but she added forty minutes to each day of the rest of her life. She calls it the best investment she ever made.
The risks:
A tiny bit of swelling and redness are typical, but they’ll be gone in a day.
Burning. This happens only if the laser wielder doesn’t know what he’s doing and zaps you too long or too often in the same spot. To avoid burns on the surface of your skin, go to a qualified dermatologist or a plastic surgeon. Don’t let some schmoe at the mall take a laser to your flesh.
Hyperpigmentation. Rarely, the laser stimulates the pigment in your skin, and causes skin to get darker, like a tan. If this happens, usually in darker-skinned people, don’t worry. It will fade.
Hypopigmentation. Another slight risk with darker complexions: The laser light might inhibit pigment in your skin, making it lighter in splotches. Unfortunately, lightened areas will stay that way.
Up to a few years ago, hair transplants were a men-only phenomenon. That was because no one wanted to acknowledge that thinning hair was not just what men had. They don’t call it female-pattern balding. These days, it’s different. The problem is out of the closet—or hat box—and is acknowledged as a problem, and science has come up with solutions. When the top of your head looks like a bowling ball, it’s time to think about hair transplants.
I have a friend—herself a dermatologist—who got a transplant. They took hair from the back of her head in patches and moved it to the top. It took a long time, lots of procedures, and months of waiting before she noticed any change. It’s been two years, and now she looks fantastic. She loves to shake her hair, which is now thick as mink. And you’d never know by looking at her that it’s been surgically enhanced.
Make no mistake, this is surgery. Whenever a scalpel is used, it’s time to call the plastic surgeon. I’m not going to split hairs, as it were, and dwell on the blood and gore, although there is some with this procedure. Here’s what will happen to you during a hair transplant procedure.
1. You go to the surgeon’s office, prepared to spend the better part of the afternoon there. In fact, be prepared to spend the better part of many afternoons there, as you’ll probably have several sessions to fill out your head.
2. You’ll get anesthesia. Probably local, but maybe general. For a procedure that takes hours, personally, I’d rather sleep through it. But the risk goes up whenever you go under. It’s a choice between you and your doctor.
3. Once you’re numb or asleep, your scalp will be cleaned. Then the doctor will decide which parts of your hair— usually in the thicker, back-of-the-head area—to use as donor grafts. Grafts can be round (ten to fifteen hairs), mini (two to four hairs), micro (one or two hairs), slits (four to ten hairs), or strips (thirty to forty hairs). He might do several slits and a strip. Or a round and a mini, depending on the area.
4. The doctor will trim the hairs on the donor patch, and then cut it out—skin, follicles, and all. He’ll fit that donor graft into a hole or slit he’s made in the bald part of the scalp. If he’s doing a bunch in the same area, they’ll be in rows an eighth of an inch apart. In your next session, he’ll fill out the area so it looks more natural and less like rows of planted corn.
5. The donor scalp area will be stitched up with one or a few sutures. They’ll be small and won’t show through your hair.
6. You’ll be squirted with saline, cleaned, and bandaged. Your doctor might have you wear a compression garment on your head for a couple days. If you’ve had general anesthesia, you’ll sit around for a while before your escort can take you home.
It totally depends on how much hair is moved, what kind of hair you have (curly, straight), and what anesthesia you choose. A good range is $3,000 to $5,000. Per procedure. And there will be several of those. It’s a lot, true. But hair doesn’t grow on trees, either. And it’s permanent.
The rewards:
No one ever again asks you to bend down so they can put on their lipstick in the reflection of your scalp.
Your hair might not be as lustrous as it once was, but you’ll have more confidence in a convertible.
Warmth. We do have hair for a reason.
You won’t lose hours moving your part from the left, to the right, or in the middle, searching for the style that hides the thinning hair. Now you can part your hair anywhere with confidence.
Relief from self-consciousness and anxiety. So much of plastic surgery is about not hating something. When the source of anxiety is gone, the daily joy and relief are tremendous. This is especially true about hair. Unless you really love hats, you can’t hide a balding head under clothes.
The risks:
Death. Remember, anytime you have general anesthesia, there’s a small risk that you won’t wake up. I have to put that out there, no matter how remote the possibility. As always, talk to your anesthesiologist to get his credentials and make sure he’s totally qualified.
Swelling and bruising. These are two constants when you have surgery of any kind. The swelling will go down in a week and be held at bay by a compression garment. Bruising? Well, you won’t see a lot of it under the hair in back. On top, the discoloration should fade in a week or two. Meanwhile, wear a hat or a scarf.
Pain. Your scalp will feel tight, throbby, achy. You’ve been cut with knives; this shouldn’t be too surprising.
Alternatively, numbing. Pain here, numb spot there. Sensation should return—in time for your next graft transfer.
Grime. No hair washing for at least a few days. Think of it as a scalp oil spa treatment.
Gray. No hair dying for a couple of months.
Butt softening. You can’t exercise for three weeks, as working out gets your blood flowing. Ordinarily, that’s good, but in this case, your transplants might spring leaks.
Celibacy. See above, re: blood flow. No getting it on for ten days. Not that you’ll be in the mood. See above, re: pain.
Mad impatience. Transplants require a level of commitment seen in few marriages. You will need multiple treatments over a couple of years, as you’re moving only a few hundred hairs per session, with a couple months of healing between each transfer procedure. What’s worse, the transplanted hair is going to fall out after six weeks. It’ll regrow in another six weeks. But be warned, there will be a period when you look worse before you look better.
Failure. Some follicles won’t take to their new location. Like moving a thriving plant from one location to another where it withers and dies, some of your transplanted hair will die, no matter how much you talk to it.