Gone Today, Hair Tomorrow?

By Rick Horowitz

Here's how I found out: hugging the highly tall wife of my highly hairless high-school pal. I hadn't seen them in years, my pal and his wife, and these were her very first words to me as we clinched and unclinched in the hotel lobby: "So Henry's not the only one!"

Going bald, she meant. Her Henry wasn't the only one with a patch of empty on the roof.

This was news to me. I didn't have an overhead mirror. All my other friends were either too short to notice my condition, or too discreet to mention it. Phyllis wasn't too short. She wasn't too discreet. Let the worrying begin.

And now? Maybe the worrying can end. Say hello to Propecia, the name on every guy's lips this morning. Propecia is the new baldness drug that's just received "two follicles up" from the Food and Drug Administration. Propecia puts hair back on guy's heads. Not tons of hair, and not every guy. But enough hair, on enough guys, for the FDA to say, "Sell it." Fifty bucks a month, more or less, and those tiny tan pills can be yours.

That sound you're hearing is cheering -- deep, rich, manly cheering. Our long cranial nightmare may be over.

Call it the Samson Syndrome: Guys like their hair. Guys want to hang on to their hair for as long as possible, preferably forever. A Michael Jordan can get away with shaving his head as smooth as a baby's butt; then again, lots of the normal rules don't apply to Michael Jordan. (Gravity, for instance.) For most guys, though, hair equals youth, strength, virility. When a guy's hairline starts receding, so does his self-esteem. He starts to fret.

Propecia might change all that. If it works, guys could stay hairy deep into their golden years. They'll be putting their teeth in a glass, but at least they'll be hairy. They'll consider this an improvement.

Are there side effects? A few. In a small percentage of cases, the researchers say, Propecia lowers a man's sex drive. Big deal -- if your head is shedding hair the way it's been shedding hair, and your scalp looks like a half-plucked chicken, your libido level is pretty much irrelevant. Your sex drive, not to put too fine a point on it, is rolling down a one-way street. You're all sexed up with nowhere to go. You're --

And there's one other thing. Once you start taking Propecia, you have to keep taking Propecia -- one pill per day, every day, for the rest of your life -- or all the new hair falls out. But what if you run out of pills? What if you forget to renew your prescription some weekend, and the drugstore is closed and your supply is gone? Will there be emergency outlets, little roadside dispensers like those newspaper boxes outside the Burger King?

There had better be. Of course, there's every chance that every other guy on the planet will be packing Propecia, too; somebody'll have an extra pill, don't you think?

Or -- and we also have to consider this possibility -- what if you're not one of those guys whose sex drive has been impaired? In fact, what if you're having such a nonstop hoot under your newly restored Propecia mop that you simply lose track of the time one evening and forget to take your pill? When the clock strikes midnight, does your head do a Cinderella? Does your shaggy top turn pumpkin shiny?

Worth it, guys are thinking. Definitely worth it.

12/28/97