The Bald Truth
Americans turn to weaves, rugs, plugs, and drugs to alleviate hair loss, creating a $1.5 billion industry
Mark S. was 17 when he began to notice large clumps of hair collecting in his shower drain. The follicles just above his brow were sprouting mere wisps to replace the lost hairs, and pretty soon Mark's friends at his Milwaukee high school had nicknamed him "Captain Forehead." Anxious to stem his premature hair loss, Mark tried remedies like vitamin supplements, topical solutions, and specially formulated shampoos. None worked. After graduating from high school, he moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career as a musician. To pay the bills while he tried to win a record contract, Mark took blue-collar jobs, avoiding indoor office work that would make it seem odd for him to wear a hat.
By the time Mark bought a hairpiece in 1994, seven years after his first signs of hair loss, he had invested more than $6,000 in baldness remedies. But his self-confidence was still shaky. Finally, he decided to spend an additional $6,200, which he didn't have, on a hair transplant. To come up with the money, Mark moved out of his apartment and into his car for three summer months. Two surgeries and 2,365 hair grafts later, Mark, now 27, sports a full head of shoulder-length hair. But Mark's troubles are probably not over.
Amazingly, at this late hour of human civilization, no one knows for sure how to prevent a hairline from receding. In spite of this collective ignorance, a growing number of the nation's 40 million balding men and 20 million balding women are turning to drugs, hairpieces, and surgical procedures to alleviate their hair loss, in the process creating a $1.5 billion-a-year industry. Americans now spend 1 times as much money on products intended to help them keep or replenish their hair as they do on razors that remove it.
Repeat customers. Light-bulb makers benefit from the fact that bulbs eventually burn out and need to be replaced. Similarly, the hair-replacement business profits, in part, because its solutions to baldness are at best imperfect and almost always impermanent--repeat customers, in other words, are a given. Once a consumer commits to treatment, it becomes difficult, and in some cases impossible, to stop spending money and return to the old, reliable comb-over. Hairpieces, for example, require frequent servicing and must be replaced every few years; any hair growth induced by the drug Rogaine disappears once a customer stops using the product; and hair-transplant patients often must undergo multiple operations.
Scientists still have a limited understanding of why androgenetic alopecia--commonly known as male-pattern baldness--occurs in the first place. It seems to result from three interdependent factors. The first was uncovered more than two millenniums ago when the ancient Greeks noted that eunuchs did not go bald. They surmised correctly that among the things lost in castration was the mechanism that leads to baldness. The missing variable, it turns out, is male hormones. Scientists have learned since then that testosterone is only an accomplice, not an originating agent, in the balding process. The second, and most important, variable is a genetic predisposition for hair loss. Researchers are convinced that baldness is hereditary, but they have yet to identify the genetic coding that makes the scalp go bare. Even with the right genes, hair loss only occurs with a third factor: aging. All men and women lose some hair as they get older, but those with pattern baldness lose more hair at a younger age than do their counterparts (pattern baldness affects nearly 40 percent of males in their 30s and well over half of all men over 50).
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