Bad hair

Toques are lovely devices for keeping one’s head warm, but they have a very unfortunate effect on hair. Those who complain of “bad hair days” in warmer climes will never truly understand bad hair until they’ve worn a tuque all day and pulled it off just before going in for a job interview.

There’s more at stake in those circumstances than just looking funny. A recent study indicates you’ll probably actually do much more poorly on that job interview, because bad hair–or at least the thought of bad hair–actually lowers people’s self-esteem, so that they feel less smart, less capable, more embarrassed and more self-conscious.

Marianne LaFrance, a professor of psychology at Yale, recruited 120 people, half men, half women, to take part in her study of the psychological effect of various experiences. The subjects were divided into four groups. One group was asked to recall times when they had had hair problems, and then were asked to rate their top ten bad-hair problems. A second group, the control group, wasn’t asked to recall anything. (The other two groups were asked to recall times when they were in good physical condition and times when they’d had trouble with product packaging, the latter making more sense when you realize the study was funded by Procter and Gamble.) Then everyone in all the groups was asked to fill out a variety of standard psychological tests.

The bad-hair people had significantly lower self-esteem than the ones in the control group, and tended to feel more insecure in social situations. Women in the bad-hair group were more likely to describe themselves as embarrassed, self-conscious and bothered, while men in the bad-hair group were more likely to describe themselves as less confident, less sociable and more nervous.

LaFrance hastened to point out that, in her study, people didn’t actually have bad hair, they just imagined having bad hair–which means bad hair isn’t just on your head, it’s also in your head.

Given the fact hair can cause such embarrassment, why do we have it?

In other animals, hair performs many functions. Insulation is the obvious one. In some animals, special facial hairs called vibrissae–the whiskers of a cat, for instance–serve as touch organs. Hair can camouflage: the spots of a leopard make it hard to see among the shifting shadows of leaves. Hair can even help an animal defend itself: porcupine quills are hairs.

None of these apply much to humans. About the only function hair serves with us is to help identify the sexes (and it’s not a sure guide even there). Oh, and touching the eyelashes trigger nerve circuits that close the eyelid.

Hair grows out of “follicles” located in the epidermis, the top skin layer. Sweat glands lubricate the hair, and “sebaceous” glands give it a waxy coating that keeps it from drying out (and makes unwashed hair oily.) Every follicle also has a tiny muscle which raises the hair in response to fear or cold. If we had enough fur, this would make us fluff up to look bigger and feel warmer. Instead, it just makes us look like plucked waterfowl.

Hairs are living parts of the body, made up of three layers of cells, some alive, some dead. The middle layer gives hair its shape and hardness, accumulating keratin, the same protein scales, feathers, nails, hooves, claws, horns and skin are made of. Hair colour, which ranges from yellow to black, comes from melanin, the same pigment that colours our skin. When the melanin-making cells die, hair emerges without pigment: gray. The shape of the hair determines how it grows: the flatter the hair in cross section, the curlier it is.

Hair follicles alternate growth phases with rest phases with shedding phases. A human scalp hair usually lasts about four years before being shed. Although some animals shed most of their hair at once, usually on a seasonal basis, humans, like cats, shed all year long.

Some people shed hair that never comes back: they go bald. On the other end of the scale is hirsutism, an excessive growth of hair. Unwanted hair may be bleached or temporarily removed through shaving, waxing, plucking or chemical warfare, but the only permanent solution is electrolysis, in which the hair root is destroyed by an electrical current.

Usually we don’t want our hair removed, just groomed, for which we turn to a barber.

Considering the dire consequences of bad hair science has now revealed, I think it’s high time I went to one.

Permanent link to this article: https://edwardwillett.com/2000/02/bad-hair/

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