Men's hair

At about thirty years of age, everything changes for the male part of the population. Your hair is no longer significant. Before, you could signal to fellow human beings your inclusion in a specific subculture by styling your hair in a certain way. It mattered. It could very well be the factor that enabled you to get that tiny chance, in a crowded nightclub, full of young people, all loaded up with hormones, to get to the situation that really mattered; the particular intercommunication between opposite sexes in which it is possible to engage in the activity that may result in the biological act that contributes to the continuation of the human race. Conversation, that is. Conversation with a chick. And that may lead to sex.

But afterwards, when you're a father, with a mortgage, busy climbing the ladder at work, what with all the political problems both home and abroad, you don't have time to stand in front of the mirror and do your hair no more. You don't go to the nightclubs. Most likely, you're stuck happily off in a relationship with the chick that spotted the awesome, multi-coloured construct on top of your head years ago. You can't be bothered to use hair styling products anymore. You forget about dyeing. You begin to find it a nuisance to go to the barbershop every N weeks. Anyway, you only go out to push the perambulator around the neighbourhood, and to get groceries from the store nearby. And when you do, you wear a woolly hat anyway, because it always seems to be winter. There's hardly any point in constructing a gravity-defying post-modern sculpture out of your hair, or washing it and then spending hours to make it look like you just woke up in a frozen pool of barf, like you used to.


If you're lucky, like I was, you begin to get bald at that point. Then it's relatively easy to make the decision to cut the most of it away. You could cut all of it, but IMHO it's better to leave a couple of millimeters. That way you don't have to shave it too often. And you don't look too shiny either. I, myself, prefer to have a stubble on the chin too, at all times. I'm hoping to look like a friendly kiwi fruit.

Then there's the long hair. In a way, having a long hair is a no-hair. You've accustomed to it, you don't have to maintain it, you mostly have it ponytailed up. Therefore, you might as well shave it off, it's just dead weight.

In my experience, there's a limited number of groups of men over 30 that really need a hairstyle:

• Heavy metal musicians: it does look cool when a group windmills their hairs in unison.
• CEOs: everybody knows that you need a thick, silver hair to become a CEO. It's exactly the same with gorillas; the silverback is the leader of the troop.
• Clowns: the clown hair signals the audience that you're supposed to laugh at everything the guy does and says. Take this clown for example:

• Fabio: the hair is where his power resides in.