Seeing this tweet, I think it was from the illustrious and often hilarious @tvjrennie (whose blog can be found here), I had to make a personal note.
So, we all know about men and receding hairlines. They fret about them, they comb over. They even get expensive hair implants in Miami. Sci personally thinks that, if the whole thing is going, and you’re going to have a topward landing strip and then a monk’s ring round the sides, go all the way. Just shave it and OWN IT, Patrick Stewart style.
(ROWR)
Anyway, apparently every time my Dad worries he’s losing his hair, my mother just smiles and tells him that it’s NOT baldness. It’s cranial expansion, and it just means that he’s getting smarter.
When Sci heard this as a child, she thought it was awesome, but was disappointed for girls in that we were apparently denied cranial expansion in adulthood. Luckily, I have found this is not true. But when I saw this tweet from John Rennie, I thought “I KNEW IT! At some point way back when, they DID think there was a connection between baldness and smarts!”
Well, apparently they saw a connection between HAIR and smarts, but not quite like I was hoping.
The link is to “Centuries of Advice and Advertisements“, and concerns a note in the The Phrenological Journal and Science of Health, December 1905. The link is here, but I want to reproduce it in full below:
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Upon reading this article, I had to go and look up what color EXACTLY people consider ‘auburn’.
Looks red to me. Not only does it look red, it looks red in that “yeah, only 1 out of every 1 MILLION people actually HAVE this hair color, so I am obviously a fake” way. So given that this was 1905, perhaps the person in question was referring to a more brownish hue (as I don’t think they made this color before 1950 at least).
So apparently the writer in question saw more auburn amongst the learned ladies, while among other sets she saw more variety. Taking out the obvious issue of confirmation bias, could there be a reason for this? Could women with darker hair have been seen while young as more likely to be “bookish” and thus those tendencies would have been more encouraged in those children? Perhaps peroxide had already come into use, and truly “‘bookish” ladies were more likely to scorn hair dye?
But the more important question is this: screw hair color. 3/4 of it these days isn’t real anyway. Sci wants to know about the BALD. Are bald men more likely or less likely to hold higher degrees? How much money do they make? How many women actually consider them sexy as long as they own it and scorn the combover? Inquiring minds want to know!
