In defence of the pink rinse
Paul Nuki speaks out in celebratory support of a smooth head
I can’t remember a time when I was not either going bald or had become what my daughter calls a “fully-fledged slaphead”. But I do know that hardly a year has passed without someone offering me a “cure”.
There was the unspecified “treatment in Vienna” I dimly recall my grandmother suggesting to my parents when I was about five. Alleged friends have periodically suggested transplants, toupées and even weaves, and of course, adverts for countless miracle pills, oils and rubs have assailed me from nearly every men’s magazine or website I’ve ever looked at.
Yet I’ve never been tempted by any of it. Since abandoning an expensive brand of hair-thickening shampoo in my mid-20s and fully embracing the pink rinse with a buzz cut, I’ve not only welcomed the wind on my scalp but followed a philosophy of radical bald-ism. It’s a worldview that is deaf to the term “follicly challenged” and firmly asserts not just that bald is good, but that bald is best.
Well, that is what all the scientific evidence points to. In my opinion, a naked noggin rightly signals to all who bask in its reflected splendour not only vast intelligence but huge virility. Is it, for example, just coincidence that Churchill, Gandhi and Gorbachev were bald while Hitler, Stalin and Saddam Hussein were not? And can it really just be chance that I have four children while Guy Kelly, the bouffanthaired author of the hairist propaganda on this page, has no known offspring?
But we radical baldists do not define ourselves in relation to the hirsute. Far from it. We can, it is true, feel a little smug about how much we save not having to buy shampoos, conditioners, sprays, gels and testosterone supplements. But our bile – our righteous anger! – is reserved entirely for the traitors among us and their scalp-desecrating enablers.
This group does not, I want to stress, include the many young men going through the often difficult transition to domedom. They need our help and support, not least in the selection of
Is it coincidence that Churchill and Ghandi were bald while Hitler and Stalin were not?
the best hair clippers.
No, the real enemy are the combovers, pill-poppers, weavers and assorted tuftheads who have betrayed their bald creed and are old enough to know better. Elton John, Elon Musk, Emmanuel Macron, Donald Trump and (increasingly) Boris Johnson. These are the vainglorious traitors to the baldist cause. We spit on their combs.
And yet we slapheads must retain a sense of humour to survive. Before I invested in my own clippers, I went regularly to a local Turkish barber for a buzz cut. Every time I walked through the door, he would look me in the eye and in front of all the other customers exclaim: “Whaddaya want me to do – grow you some f---ing hair?!”
These are the sort of tribulations every slaphead must live with. And yet – as I would explain in riposte to Mehmet the barber and his customers – we humans are still evolving and the most evolved are we chrome domes. We left the hair behind shortly after climbing down from the trees.