Whatever your disappearing hair issues Ð say no to rugs

Date Published: 18-Jul-2012

A man who clearly had a substantial amount of time on his hands recently took a case to the Advertising Standards Authority because he claimed an ad for a hair transplant clinic implied that bald men suffered a lack of confidence.

Given our penchant as a nation for red tape, his complaint was duly investigated and upheld to the point that the ad – and the implication that a full thatch leaves you equally full of confidence – has been withdrawn.

But clearly a full head of hair is a lifeline for some people – or at least for Wayne Rooney and Terry Wogan – while others usher the tide out as quickly as possible by shaving their domes even before the last strands have given up the ghost.

It can be seen by some as the first sign of your own mortality and all of the quips about grass not growing on a busy street don’t really disguise the anguish it can cause.

Poor Jackie Healy Rae, for example, took to wearing a flat cap when his hair began departing his head, as did all of his sons as though this was part of their genealogy as opposed to the Kerry version of a fashion statement.

It’s ridiculous, of course, to imply that just because a full head of hair gives you confidence, therefore bald men are lacking in it; some of most famous men on the planet are bald and hardly qualify as shrinking violets.

Thierry Henry for example doesn’t seem to suffer from anxiety attacks; nor would you see the likes of Keith Wood, Bruce Willis, Michael Stipe, Sean Connery or Michael Jordan curl up into a corner because of a lack of self-belief.

And yet, on the other hand, there have been surprisingly few bald world leaders, which only suggest they’re not tearing their hair out as much as we thought.

Eisenhower was bald and there was a few of them in the Middle East – Moshe Dayan, Menachim Begin, David Ben Gurion – but most of them were fully covered on the follicle count.

Our own current leaders Enda Kenny and Eamon Gilmore have what our mothers could only describe as fine heads of hair – a trend that is equally prevalent around the Cabinet table.

True, Michael Noonan and Ruairi Quinn don’t have to waste their wages on buying a comb, but Alan Shatter has a head of hair that actually adds a couple of badly needed inches to his height, and his hirsute colleague James Reilly looks like he’s growing his hair for eventual harvesting on a commercial basis.

Across the water, David Cameron’s bonce is his pride and joy, kept in place with a force so powerful that a hurricane wouldn’t shift it. Same could be said of Angela Merkel, except she’s not a man.So perhaps our friend had some merit to his argument after all – if you want to get ahead, get a head of hair.

For more, read this week's Connacht Tribune.