Hairy Business
When I finished college, my age caught up with me. As if my body could know its greatest years were behind it - and had no further interest in esthetic preservation - it began to discard hair as though it were ballast from a sinking balloon.
I was in Europe, visiting my sister in Paris not a week after graduation when I began spotting strands on my pillow each morning and on my towels after showers. In a matter of days the hair on my head thinned to the point I could no longer shape it with but a few, hapless passes of my fingers. Instead, I'd meticulously push hair this way and that until it rested in that Euclidean perfection required to hide fleshy veins of scalp left wantonly exposed by this effluvium of hair.
I supposed many superstitious explanations for my misfortune. Among the causes I scapegoated were: the alkalinity of parisian water, high pressure exerted by the showerhead, stress from an oversees plane ride, and my travel-sized bottle of Pert Plus™.
I had never before used a combined shampoo and conditioner.
It's unintuitive, I know, but the most outlandish explanations become the most credible at the height of panic. When one goes completely blotto with worry, the fantastic becomes so ponderously imponderable that its weightiness proves as inescapable as the gravitation of a black hole. And so, one comes to rely, resignedly, on the most unreasonable explanation at hand with the crooked inevitability of weighted dice.
I believed Pert Plus was making me lose my hair.
To this day I cannot be certain that I was guessed wrong. I bought a bottle of another shampoo at a chemist at the first chance I found. Within days there was no further loss of hair to speak of.
Do I really think a shampoo and conditioner tandem caused my hair loss?
No. It seems equally likely that an allergic reaction to turtles, a momentary alignment of the planets, or a series of malicious visits from a Burmese Nat caused hair to precipitate from my head.
Could the hair loss have come from the stress? Since I stopped losing the hair and seem to have regained some of it, I think it more likely.
Eighty-five percent of hair on a healthy human scalp is growing at any given time.* The other fifteen percent is dormant, or in the 'rest' phase.* Dormant hair is poised to fall out within three months, and knew hair will typically take its place.* When one is under stress, much more of his/her hair (up to 70%!) will enter the dormant phase.* Inevitably, all this hair gets the boot within three months. Provided all stressors are removed (and how likely is that by the way?), the hair will reappear within a year's time.*
I can't recall what incubus, if any, would have prompted such unusually high levels of stress some months before graduation. Perhaps it was the job-search or a series of mid-term exams. It's probably best for my present health that those stressors remain forgotten.
I likely won't know what made so much of my hair abandon me that summer, I'm thankful some of it stayed the course. I don't think Pert Plus had anything to do with the problem - but I'll tell you this - you won't get me to use it again!
