Phototropism. Reacting to light. It makes trees grow to the sky. It makes animals come out at night.
Yes, light causes trees to reach for the sky, and vines to climb high. Plants in the dark of the forest don’t get enough, and sadly, they die.
Others hide from the bright and stay out of sight. Raccoons and possums roam the streets at night. In the dark is when bats take flight. So many animals avoid the light. And men’s hair.
Men’s hair? Absolutely. Studies at the Scientific Consortium and Investigational Forensics Institute (SCIFI) have determined that hair loss in men is actually a gene-based phototropic effect. Certain men have hair that does everything it can to avoid bright overhead light. Who goes bald on the side of their head first?
Hats have been one traditional strategy to slow growth reversal that characterizes now-known-as-phototropic men’s pattern baldness. The long held belief that hat wearing was done to cover the absence of missing hair was just an ancillary benefit. The primary desire at a subconscious level was due to hair follicles’ communicating their refusal to reverse their growth direction.
Reverse growth direction? Yes. Just as there are laws of conservation of matter and energy, there is the law of conservation of hair. One is born with a fixed hair producing capability, generally measured in follicular cells. They will produce hair throughout your life. Those with the photophobic DNA sequence on gene 19 are disposed to reverse, or inward hair growth. These are known as r-hairs.
The follicles with the highest gene expression will also produce the fastest inward-growing r-hair. These can quickly, within a matter of months, reach the shoulders and back. A similar hairy-backed phenomenon is seen in full-head-of-hair men, but is never as pronounced. These mock r-hairs can also be clearly identified under electron microscopy as having a non-cranial origin. In any case, hairy-back syndrome seems to always demonstrate itself AFTER the normal age of marriage. This accounts for the continued presence of hairy backs in the gene pool.
For many, the growth is not very far, but under the scalp, through the skull, and into the brain. Some have speculated that the mammalian hard skull is an evolutionary adaptation to slow the debilitating attack on the brain by r-hairs. Hence, one can become hair-brained. Our more common use of the term “hare-brained” is actually a bad rendering of the Scottish word
haer, which refers to the rich hairs of a pelt, like a rabbit’s, but not the rabbit itself. The demented criminality of Lex Luthor may be attributable to hair-brained syndrome.
Men can wear hats. Men can wear shirts. But unless they join a terrorist organization, they do not cover their faces. This is where some of the most alarming, annoying, and amusing r-hair expressions take place. We’re talking about ears, noses, and eyebrows.*
Barbers do what they can. Sharper Image’s perennial best seller is the nasal hair trimmer. We see men on television whose eyebrows could be English sheepdogs.
Men, while you can’t prevent the r-hair migration to the rest of your body, you can look in the mirror. Then apply steel cutting instruments to make the world a better-looking place. Enough said.
* subject of a future Conspiracy Theories investigation
