Radioscope: Hairy Story, BBC Radio 4 It's dead but it's very responsive, said the scientist in Procter & Gamble's hair labs to programme presenter Quentin Cooper in Hairy Story on BBC Radio 4 on Tuesday.
Cooper, a man who describes his hair status as somewhere between "billiard ball and coot" was on the quest to discover if "there was a toupe of hope to put on the bald facts".
Hair might be dead but, according to the scientist, it still manages to respond to a variety of natural phenomena such as humidity and one strand can reveal all sorts of information about its owner from what he ate to what drugs he'd taken. The labs in P&G are devoted to creating products that buy into our obsession with our hair - from the constant battle to remove it where we don't want it, to taming and teasing the rest of it.
Hair doesn't just attract the opposite sex, it can also influence other aspects of our lives. In 1996 a US survey found that all other things being equal, brunette graduates earned on average 12 per cent more than their blonde sisters - roll on the dumb blonde jokes.
Another survey of US chief executives revealed an overwhelming predominance of full grey manes at the top of the boardroom table. By way of explanation, evolutionary biologists point to the ultimate Alpha Male, the silver back gorilla whose dominant feature is a broad stripe of grey down his back.
All this talk of how powerful a good head of hair can be isn't the most hopeful news to give a bald man. By the time he was 21 Cooper didn't need a doctor to tell him that he had male pattern baldness - bald crown with hair on the back and side - and he did what most sensible young men do when that happens, he shaved it all off. Dr John Grey, a trichologist, gave him the news that really, bar a transplant or a wig, his baldness was so advanced that nothing could be done. He explained that it's not simply a question of hair falling out that makes people go bald, it's a cycle that starts whereby the hair that grows becomes finer and finer and loses its pigments so that it no longer has the strength to break through the skin. It's genetic too, as is when and how fast we go grey,
By comparison to the mammals we are closely related to, even the hairiest human is fairly bald. It's thought that as we were evolving we lost our hair when we acquired the skills to heat ourselves through fire and clothing. Humans, however, still do get those ecto parasites - ask any lice-fighting parent in term time.
While evolving we kept hair on our heads (and for males on shoulders) as protection against the sun and excessive heat gain.
The only positive note in the programme for slap head Cooper was when Nicky Clarke, hairdresser to the stars, advised him to look on the bright side because "you have a great shaped head".
