Newspapers are full of news about Wayne Rooney's baldness and his attempts to conceal it. Men usually discover they are bald four or five years after their hair has already gone, and discover next that their hair was not blown away by the wind or in the shower, but has moved from their heads to their ears or noses. Every man who claims that baldness does not concern him is a liar, for hair is synonymous with youth. However, a spiteful bald man may say that it is synonymous with stupidity, and the proof is that donkeys do not go bald, and there is even hair on their backsides. According to medical knowledge, men begin to lose hair in their twenties, while two-thirds of men become bald by the age of sixty, i.e. before the age of retirement. I also read that there usually are a thousand hairs in each square inch of the scalp before the onset of baldness, and the norm is for men to lose one hundred hairs each day, which are compensated in part through hair growth. The loss accumulates over the years, until no hair remains except in rare instances. I am not writing about baldness today to rub salt in the readers' wounds. The readers have enough bad Arab political news day after day. Rather, I want to convey to them the good news that baldness may soon be eradicated. In recent weeks, without any request on my part, I read report after report in Western newspapers and magazines about a near medical breakthrough that will finally triumph over hair loss. This will probably solve our neighbor's problem, who complained that the wind stroked his hair when he left the house. When I said that this imagery was nice, he replied angrily that he meant the wind pushed the ‘toupee' off his head and he started running between the cars to catch it. I will not burden the reader with medical mumbo jumbo, as some of the terms are as long as the patients' sorrow or as long as my hair when I copied the hippies in the sixties. I am just reproducing highlights from the reports I read, which include the fact that 90 percent of celebrities in the West have had hair implants or wear wigs. Near the end of last year, scientists at the Berlin Technical University declared that millions of hair-loss sufferers could grow new hair from their own stem cells and have it implanted in their heads from other parts of their bodies. At the beginning of this year, a study by the University of Pennsylvania suggested that baldness is not what people believe it is. Instead, it was simply that their stem cells were becoming weaker and produced what is more like 'downy hair' than actual hair, and that there are ways to strengthen these cells to produce hair again. Then, in February, the University of California, Los Angeles, announced that it reached “astounding” results by means of a chemical called Astressin B, which succeeded in re-growing hair after one jab per day (probably in the bald scalp) for just five days. I will believe it when I see it. Until then, I finish my shower every morning by scrutinizing the floor and looking for fallen hair. Usually, as soon as I see three or four hairs, I start mourning them, and go to the office with a sullen mood. Then I read Arab news and suffer another defeat, like the one in 1967. When I complained to my son about the fallen hairs every morning, he took a look at the bathroom floor and said: Father, there are more than three or four hairs, there are about ten, but you probably can't see the white hairs. I said to him [sarcastically]: “Thank you for this great news”; you're also telling me that I started to lose my eyesight along with my hair, but then, see no evil, hear no evil. After all, a thousand times white hair, better than once being bald. I am certain that the young people who belong to my son's generation will not suffer from baldness because medicine will have eradicated it by knockout before any of them reach the age of thirty, especially as hair transplantation has made so many strides and can now be done with individual hair follicles rather than big grafts. In the meantime, I do not know whether the many news stories about baldness and its treatments in recent weeks were related to the marriage of Prince William and Kate Middleton. I noticed, as the reader probably has, that the hairline of the Heir Apparent is receding, with many bald patches, even though he is below thirty. I wonder here, does a handsome prince on his way to the British throne need to have hair transplanted? He has many things to compensate him for his hair loss, things that journalists like us do not have, as we are on our way to an Arab press conference where the leader would claim that the revolution of rage is not taking place in his country, but in the neighboring country. Real baldness, that barren desert, is under the skull, not above it. [email protected] A technical error in Al-Hayat's edition yesterday caused an article by colleague Jihad el-Khazen from the day before to be republished. We apologize for this error.
