22 September 2016
The Vikings used a lotion of goose poo.
The ancient Greek medic Hippocrates believed the best cure for baldness
was really pigeon droppings, which he mixed with horseradish, cumin and
nettles. One 5,000 year-old
Egyptian recipe
suggested blending the burned prickles of a hedgehog immersed in oil
with honey, alabaster, red ochre – oh, and fingernail scrapings – and
slathering the concoction liberally over the affected area.
For as
long as men have had access to mirrors, they’ve been fretting about
their scalps getting lonely. It was a particular obsession of Julius
Caesar, who tried everything to get his hair back; the wreath of laurels
he wore was less a nod to Roman tradition than an attempt at covering
up his shiny pate.
By the time he met Cleopatra, he was almost
completely bald. In a last ditch attempt to save his mop, she lovingly
recommended a home remedy of ground-up mice, horse teeth and bear
grease.
Alas, it didn’t work. He lost his hair like many great men
before and since, including Socrates, Napoleon, Aristotle, Gandhi,
Darwin, Churchill, Shakespeare and Hippocrates – who, despite the pigeon
droppings, was so bald he even has a type of
baldness named after him.
Eventually Caesar began growing his hair longer at the back and combing
these strands forwards across his head, a technique which was
optimistically described as “illusion styling”. Now it’s known as the
comb-over.
Thousands of years later, we’ve moved on from
garlands and revolting concoctions to expensive creams, tonics and
shampoos, and last resorts of toupes, pills and surgery. Today you can
attend a hair loss clinic, sign up for hair-loss counselling and it’s
not unusual to see adverts telling balding men to “see their doctor”.
Papers discuss balding in epidemic terms, meanwhile the phenomenon even
has a new scientific-sounding name, “androgenic alopecia”. If you didn’t
know otherwise, you might think it was a
medical condition.
Accordingly, across the globe, we spend $3.5bn (£2.7bn) on baldness cures every year. That’s more than the entire
national budget of Macedonia
or, as Bill Gates pointed out last year, significantly more than we
spend on the control of malaria (just $200m (£154m) per year).
And
what today’s treatments lose out on in ingredients they make up for in
unpleasant side-effects. Sales of the anti-hair-loss drug
Propecia, which has been linked to impotence, hit a record high of $264m (£204m) in 2014. Hair transplants, meanwhile, are notoriously bloody and have been known to make
grown men cry.
According to a 2009 survey by the International Society of Hair
Restoration Surgery, almost 60% of men would rather have a full head of
hair than money or friends.
Have we got it all wrong?
There’s
mounting evidence that bare heads aren’t a spectacular evolutionary
accident after all. Bald men are seen as more intelligent, dominant and
high status; their shiny scalps may help them to seduce women or even
save lives.
Before we can get to grips with what makes balding so great, first we need to set the record straight.
Contrary
to popular wisdom – and the existence of super-macho baldies such as
Bruce Willis – the propensity to lose your hair doesn’t make you any
more of a man.
Bald men are no more virile and they don’t have higher testosterone levels, though they do tend to have
hairier arms, legs and chests. Perhaps most surprisingly, bald men don’t actually have any fewer hairs on their heads.
So how does it happen?
In
1897, a wave of panic rippled across the globe after a French
dermatologist announced he had discovered the true culprit: a microbe
For
all the hysteria surrounding baldness, we have a long history of
getting it wrong. Aristotle thought it was caused by sex. In ancient
Roman times, an epidemic of smooth scalps in the military was blamed on
the heavy metal helmets worn by soldiers. Later theories included “
dryness of the brain”
– which was thought to pull the head away from the hair by making the
brain shrink – air pollution or, ironically, the wrong haircut.
Back in 1897, a wave of panic rippled across the globe after a
French dermatologist announced
he had discovered the true culprit: a microbe. Barbers and medical
journals leapt to action, announcing that combs should be boiled
regularly and under no circumstances should members of bald families use
any combs or brushes other than their own.
We now know that
baldness is caused by a potent break-down product of testosterone,
dihydrotestosterone (DHT). In the womb, the hormone plays an important
role in the development of male genitalia. In susceptible adults, it
makes hair follicles shrink. As DHT works its magic the long, so-called
“terminal” hairs on a man’s head are transformed into short, soft
“vellus” hairs like those on the heads of babies.
What sets those with bare heads apart is the sensitivity of their hair follicles, which is inherited from their mothers
And
since it’s a product of testosterone, you might think more testosterone
would equal more DHT and more withered hairs. In fact you only need a
tiny amount for balding to begin. What sets those with bare heads apart
is the sensitivity of their hair follicles, which is inherited from
their mothers.
The fact that it’s inherited is crucial. By the
time they reach their 30th birthday – long before the end of their
reproductive lifespan – 25-30% of men have some degree of hair loss. Not
only that, but it happens all over the world, in every single
ethnic group.
If being bald was so bad, it would have died out. The fact it is so
common might suggest it is useful, but how? And if so, why does it only
happen to men?
“In general in nature when males have something
that the females don’t it means that characteristic is acting as a
signal,” says Frank Muscarella, a psychologist at Barry University. Back
in the 1990s, this got him thinking.
Most of these “sexually
dimorphic” features also have something else in common. “They are
usually associated with dominance and more reproductive opportunities,”
says Muscarella. In other words, baldness might be the human equivalent
of a male peacock’s ornate, brightly coloured tail. It might have
evolved because it is attractive to women.
Previous studies had shown that women do not
find bald men sexy, but this is likely to be because bald men tend to be
old, and – not surprisingly – women don’t find old age appealing. “We
know that women are attracted to men with high social status, so even if
it’s not physically attractive it may embed a kind of non-physical
attractiveness,” says Muscarella.
Before you ask, Muscarella
doesn’t have a vested interest in this theory. “No actually I’m not
bald, I have a very good head of hair,” he says.
In 2004,
he decided to investigate on behalf of those who are less fortunate. To
eliminate factors which might skew his results, Muscarella knew he’d
need to improvise some bald men himself. But he knew he couldn’t simply
photograph some men and edit their hair out.
Instead Muscarella
roped in a hairdresser friend – and they took a trip to the local wig
shop. “I asked him to cut the hair on the wigs so that one looked like a
full head of hair for a man, one looked like it was receding and one
looked like it was bald,” he says. Men who go bald naturally tend to
retain some hair over their ears and around the back of the head, so
they needed a wig even for the bald look.
After his friend had
finished hacking the wigs to shape, Muscarella bought three plastic
skullcaps and attached the hair with Velcro. Then they asked six
unfortunate students to try them on and took some photos. “Of course
they looked absolutely horrible,” he says.
Luckily his co-author
had just acquired some very, very primitive photo editing software and
so, pixel by pixel, they were able to erase the strong lines between the
skullcap and the forehead and make the pictures look relatively normal.
Then
they put their images to the test. He showed the images to 101 male and
101 female psychology students and asked them to rate the men’s
attractiveness and aspects of their personality.
The
bald men were consistently rated as more intelligent, influential,
knowledgeable, well educated, high social status, honest and helpful
While
the bald and balding men were not considered as physically attractive
as the other men, one category of scores was far higher. The men were
consistently rated as more intelligent, influential, knowledgeable,
well-educated, high social status, honest and helpful – traits
collectively known as social maturity.
He speculates that
baldness may have evolved as a signal of high social status – something
some women find irresistible. Intriguingly, bald men were also viewed as
significantly less aggressive. “If you think about it, early human
males would have been running around completely naked and completely
hairy, so you can imagine a big shaggy head of hair, a big bushy
moustache – all kinds of body hair – they would have been very kind of
threatening looking,” says Muscarella. Going bald may have been a way to
separate mature, high-status men from hostile adolescents.
If that’s the case, it’s possible we’ve been
hi-jacking this natural signal for years already. As Muscarella points
out, the shaven look has been a hit with philosophers, teachers and
priests for centuries. Christian monks have taken this one step further –
not only shaving their heads, but doing so in a way which
directly mimics the way men go bald.
The
finding is backed up by numerous other studies. Across the globe, from
workers on a remote sugar cane plantation in Brazil to Zambian high
school students, balding men are overwhelmingly
viewed as more dominant. It even works on men who have simply
shaved all their hair off.
There’s even some tantalising – albeit controversial – evidence that bald heads may be life-saving.
For
a long time, the opposite was true. It’s long been known that men who
can’t produce DHT, such as those who have been castrated, have healthy,
flowing locks for as long as they live. Intriguingly, there are also no
recorded cases of prostate cancer in this group.
DHT is
responsible for the growth of the prostate gland in babies, so it makes a
lot of sense that it would also contribute to the growth of tumours in
adulthood. Prostate cancer and baldness may be underpinned by a shared
hormonal sensitivity which runs in the family. This was confirmed
earlier this year with the discovery that balding men are more likely to
develop
aggressive prostate cancer, which is responsible for around 300,000 deaths every year.
It doesn’t sound like much of a silver lining – but there’s a twist.
Low levels of vitamin D
– which the body can only produce when it’s exposed to sunlight – is
another known risk factor for prostate cancer. And as any bald man will
tell you, they get a lot more sun exposure than the rest of us. Did
baldness evolve to mitigate some of the deadly effects of DHT?
“Tens of thousands of years ago in Europe it
might have helped those individuals to receive more UV radiation and
produce more vitamin D,” says Peter Kabai from István University in
Hungary, who struck upon the idea when he began
going bald. This would also explain why women don’t go bald, since they don’t have a prostate.
Men who develop a receding hairline and bald spots before the age of 30
are up to 45% less likely to develop prostate cancer later on
The evidence is racking up. Men who
work outdoors have better odds against those who spend more time inside. That’s also true of those who have a tan, who were
sunburnt as children, who live in
warmer climes
or who take more holidays abroad. The effect is so powerful, even the
season in which you’re diagnosed makes a difference: those
diagnosed in the summer are less likely to die of their cancer.
“This
all relates to vitamin D – in which most people are deficient,” says
Kabai. The final strand of proof comes from a clinical trial published
last year. Thirty seven men with prostate cancer were either given a
vitamin D supplement (nearly seven times the recommended daily allowance) or a placebo.
Sixty
days later, their prostates were removed. In the group which had been
taking vitamin D, their tumours had shrunk. In the group which hadn’t,
they had got worse. The supplement also changed how key genes were
expressed – turning off those involved in inflammation, which is known
to contribute to the development of cancer.
In other words, balding men may be more susceptible to prostate cancer
despite the fact that they are losing their hair, not because of it; the baldness itself may be helping mitigate some of the risk.
It
could also clear up why the evidence is so confusing: a previous study
found that men who developed a receding hairline and bald spots before
the age of 30 were up to 45% less likely to
develop prostate cancer
later on. “Some bald men might prefer to wear hat all the time, while
others might not. That difference could be one source of ambiguities in
such studies,” says Kabai.
So there you have it: going bald could
help men get ahead, get the girl or get better. Perhaps it’s time to put
the pigeon droppings away and give bare heads the respect they deserve.
