Let's talk about hair or as I like to call it, “keratin corpses we've built an entire civilization around” Think about it. Meeting your crush, heart racing, palms sweating, brain short-circuiting and what's the first emergency response your body deploys? Not "let me say something charming." Not "let me stand up straight." No. It's "MUST. FIX. HAIR."
You could be having an actual panic attack, and somewhere in the chaos, your hand still finds its way to your fringe like it's defusing a bomb. Meanwhile the hair has no idea any of this is happening. It's dead. It hasn't received a memo since it left your scalp. You're out here negotiating your entire self-worth with something that has less biological activity than your fingernail clippings and yet we've elected it Supreme ruler of first impressions. The follicle caste system, where it gets deliciously unhinged. Not all hair is created equal. Oh no! We've built an entire caste system for dead cells based purely on real estate.
Hair on your head? Heck yeah, a royalty, a crown jewels, worth a 45-minute morning ritual and a skincare-adjacent haircare aisle at the pharmacy. Hair on your arms? Instant social liability, nobody told these hairs they did nothing wrong, they just grew where they were told to grow, minding their own business, and now they're being shaved, or worse, waxed off like they committed a crime. Same manufacturer, same material, same person growing them. But one gets a silk pillowcase and the other gets threatened with a blade or hot wax on a Saturday evening. It’s not biology, that's real estate discrimination for keratin.
And then we added gender to the chaos, as if location-based hair discrimination wasn't extra enough, we said "let's also make it about gender", because humanity never met a random trait it couldn't turn into a whole belief system. A mustache on a man stereotyped him as rugged, distinguished, possibly making him a whole personality who is planning to wipe out a race out of the world . The exact same hair, same location, on a woman will be treated as a national emergency, tweezers deployed, group chats convened. Body hair on a man in some cultures are considered a badge of masculinity, practically a medal ceremony on chest, pun intended. Body hair on a woman, somehow scandalous, despite every woman on Earth being biologically engineered to also grow it. We're talking about the same follicles doing the same follicle things, and yet depending on which chromosomes ordered them, they're either a trophy or a transgression. The hair didn't sign up for this drama. The hair just wants to grow in peace. The real plot pwist or the kicker, if you may, this is a dead cell. It has no opinions, no ambitions, no idea it's dead. It is, biologically speaking, doing the exact same job as a callus, except instead of getting exfoliated off your heel without ceremony, the one on your head gets balayage, a skincare, sorry, haircare routine, and a whole industry built in its honor.
If humanity poured this much collective genius, tribunal-level nuance, and cultural mythology into something with zero nerve endings and zero say in the matter... I'm terrified to know what else we've quietly built entire belief systems around while it just sat there, being dead, having no clue. Oh wait it’s land…
Anyway. Excuse me while I go fix my hair before this blog post gets a profile picture.
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