I’ve been noticing for the past decade or more, that human males seem to be evolving towards less hair on their heads. Baldness has always been around, but it was generally associated with middle to old age; but now I find, more and more, that young men, even in their mid-twenties, are either thinning or balding altogether. Could this be due to stressful lifestyles, detergent-based shampoos, or evolution?

Given the increasing trend, though, it is a pity that hair is still such a “feature” of beauty, as much as in the male as in the female. In earlier times, hair was considered an aspect of beauty, so much so that widows in South India were shorn, and women in Islamic countries had to hide their hair even if their faces could be visible. But this aesthetic sense has not changed in the past few centuries…but hair patterns seem to have done so!

Women with sparse hair do have a tough time competing with their fuller-head-of-hair sisters….but I notice the same sense of competition amongst males, with the more-locks men being insufferably smug sometimes.

And men seem to also always keep experimenting with facial hair….every young man I know has, at some point or the other, tried out a beard, but not the traditional full one, or even the Islamic no-mustache one…they usually try out goatees, or that little triangle of hair under the lower lip that looks as if they forgot to shave it…and then, of course, the beard disappears, because, I suppose, of the discovery that maintaining a beard is not a simple matter of no shaving.

I don’t however, see much differences in mustaches …no soup-strainer, Rajasthani lip-to-ear, no “hanging” ones….just regular mustaches are all that I, at least, see around me. Er…should I say “mustache” like the Americans or “moustache” like the English?