Dyeing For It

What is going on with men’s hair?

Musician Jack White and actor Bill Murray were at the baseball together in Japan this week. I know this not because I follow either of them particularly closely, but rather because it’s the sort of oddity that the internet does follow closely. Then randomly serves me an image of.

There they were, the two celebrity men – from opposite ends of the entertainment spectrum and perhaps more jarringly, from different generations, Murray being 25 years White’s senior – shoulder-to-shoulder in the stands at a Chicago Cubs exhibition game.

What struck me about the image wasn’t its Odd Couple nature, or the age gap per se, but rather, how Jack could look so much less dignified than a man old enough to be his father. It didn’t take long to figure out – it never takes me long to figure it out these days – it wasn’t just the shirt/sweater combo versus a too-tight retro jersey, it was the hair dye. It’s always the hair dye.

Jack and I are the same age and both have fairly thick heads of hair. But I know what he’s going through. We’re knocking on the door of 50, physical things change and it’s almost always in unflattering ways. Even thick hair one day becomes thinner than you’re used to, more brittle, and of course, gray in places. It’s confronting.

Yet I stand by something I said to some mature male friends not so long ago; if you’re a middle-aged man, lucky enough to still have most of your hair, dyeing it is just an insult to all the balding men who aren’t so lucky. You won the gene lottery, what more do you want?

Furthermore, I’m sorry, it looks ridiculous. Just look at the picture of Jack and Bill as an example, and tell me who you’d rather sidle up to at the bar of a four-star Tokyo hotel. The quirky old guy with the electro-static white strands, or the slightly-less-old guy who looks like a black cat fell on his head and he brushed its legs apart for the photograph?

I don’t want to be unfair, Jack is hardly alone. In recent years, maybe as my generation lurches deeper into the gray, I’ve noticed more and more men rushing for the bottle. Further online searching will show you that Jack tried an electric blue ‘do a few years ago, and I applaud him for his creativity. Mostly though, it’s the panicked, way-too-dark look giving the game away for men of a certain vintage.

Nick Cave’s only eight years younger than Bill Murray, but he’ll never let his hair tell you that. Half the men I’m supposed to admire from my generation now look like recently divorced cab drivers who refuse to listen to their daughter’s best advice. What’s happened?

Women have been dyeing for generations, I know, and I don’t feel qualified or entitled to get into that. But many are forgoing the bottle these days, and at least most women who dye their hair do it seriously. With grace and thought and nuance to the color. Most dyed men look like someone hurriedly Sharpied a picture of them in a dentist’s waiting room magazine.

I took the kids to see Paddington In Peru recently, and the least realistic thing about the whole movie wasn’t that a permanently-infantile animal, with no pants, could get a British passport in order to visit his aunt in a jungle nursing home for retired bears; it was expecting us all to believe that Antonio Banderas still has a full head of black hair. I’ve forgotten the movie’s plot. It was very distracting.

Have you seen Bradley Cooper lately? What more could that man want? Why then does he insist on making himself look like the wolf from Red Riding Hood, dressed up as the grandma from Red Riding Hood, dressed up as Bradley Cooper?

The more celebrities do things, the more we see it creep into the general population, too. I’m all for freedom of personal preference, but this hair dye trend feels a lot sadder than that to me. It’s not bravely being who you truly are, it’s vainly clinging onto who you once were.

Men, in general, are not well. Reviving a lot of old, bad ideas. I think our politics has well and truly illustrated that in recent years. Captained by the great Hair Forger In Chief himself. But for god’s sake, let’s restore some dignity while we still have time, and hair! Guys, put down the bottle.