The Birmingham age-herald., 1915-01-17
No Hope for Bald Pate,

From the Journal of American Medical Association.
 The reams of paper that are used up each month in articles in the daily pa pers-and weekly and monthly papers. on beauty culture are conclusive evidence
 that 1t Is natural for man to desire to peautify the person as 1t is ito indulge in the illusions of hope" A sound mind In sound body suffices the serious minded minority, but apparently the in- 1 numerable majority. if they had their way, would have comedy body and
 take their chances on any old kind of a mind, on the principle that it is bet ter to be good looking than wise, because more people have sight than understand ing To decorate and beautify the body IS an inborn passion; the savage does it differently from us, but when remedies that are recommended for avoiding wrin- kles, giving the eyebrows an aristocratic arch, coaxing the lashes to be long and languorous, making the ears pink and small or the nose straight and thin, re- moving double chin or taking the core out of the Adams apple, we have noth- ing on our uncivilized and supposedly more ignorant brothers. The hair in par ticuiar is the object of all mankind s cosmetic endeavors.
 When it comes to civilized man. he fs universally engaged in trying to save what he has left or regrow what he ha 8 lost. Women, with few executions. do not become bald, but all women. in their opinions, are threatened with that un- speakable calamity; men not only may get paid, but a large number of them are already so. And thus the popular reme- dies for the hair need almost a surgeon generals catalog. Vibratory and cleo trlcal treatments hair tonics that feed the hair roots. as though they grew out of the scalp like broom sedge out of an old field, heats foot oil and crude kero- sene, massage and mange cures. all have their futile trials.
 Among these our particular topic now Is singeing the hair. This is recom- mended to overcome splitting at the ends and to prevent falling of the hair the reason for the latter being that it "coses the pores and keeps the fluid in the hair" With the long hair of a woman which has tendency to split at the end, it is possible that singeing the tips may be Of some use; it substitutes a charred blunt end of fused horn for one taperinx to point or cut clean across. But even ir cases of this sort it is less useful than greasing lightly the hair and thus supplying the fat which is lacking in such hair.
 For the hair of men, which is kept short, singeing is not of any use in pre- venting splitting; hair which is not al- lowed to grow to its natural length does. not split, unless it has a deep seated dis, turbance for which there is no such sim pie remedy. Of course singeing the hair ends in order to prevent the fluid in the hair from escaping like sap from a tree Is based on an entire misconcep- ton of the hairs structure and nurri- ton. The hair does not contain any more sap than a buggy whip; 1t is not nour- ished by any fluid in it, but by the blood plasma that reaches only the hair root. The hair above the skin surface is spine of horn, which is even oiled from without and singeing it's tips has no erect whatever on either it's nourish- ment or it's growth. It is certain, says the Journal, that singeing the hair Is of no value in preventing it's fall; in fact, the only value the procedure has is to the zealous hair dresser who gets his little fee for doing it-unless it is worth quarter to the seeker after hair to think he is doing something even if he is not.