Lori Anderson: Hair today, gone tomorrow - just live with it IT IS a lesser-known fact that whilst three bears constitute an allegorical fairy tale, two bears make a scene of bloody biblical carnage. Whilst Nietzsche may have postulated that God is dead, I now postulate that God is bald; as how else can we explain his sensitivity towards the follicly challenged? Those two bears? Well, before Goldilocks there came the prophet Elisha whose tale is documented in the Old Testament, 2 Kings 2: 23-24. Elisha was headed to Bethel when en route a group of neds started jeering at him: "Go on up you bald head! Go on up you bald head! He turned round, called down a curse on them in the name of the Lord when, lo and behold, two bears came out of the woods and mauled 42 of the youths to death. What are we to take from this obscure biblical text? Clearly God says: "Do not mess with cue balls." So if you are noticing the very first signs of male pattern baldness, do not despair, for God loves you. Yet whilst he can be relied upon to smite your critics, you may have to rely on a more earthly power if you choose to duel with mother nature and keep the quiff. By the age of 50, it is reported that 40 per cent of men experience some degree of baldness which is an inherited trait derived from either one's mother or father and of those who do begin to thin on top, 75 per cent admit that it sends their self esteem into a steep decline. A growing number of men, however, are now fighting to save their hair, with the market for hair loss products worth £100 million in Britain alone. The most radical option is a hair transplant and last month The Hospital Group, the providers of the majority of Britain's hair transplants, reported that the numbers of men having hair surgery had risen by 444 per cent between 2004 and 2009 whilst The International Society of Hair Restoration Surgery also recently reported that world wide demand for the procedure had grown by 47.9 per cent and that the market is now worth £1.2 billion. The age range at which men usually turn to surgery is between 30 and 49. In recent years, Elton John, James Nesbit and the footballer Wayne Rooney are a just a few of the celebrities who have spoken out publicly about the success of the operation which costs between £4,000 and £7,000 and can take up to nine hours. Each year over 3,000 men in Britain follow their example. The procedure can be performed with different techniques. The first is "strip harvesting" where a long strip of skin complete with hair follicles is removed from the back of the head and then cut into thousands of minute sections of two to three individual hairs each which are then grafted into the sparse areas at a concentration of 100 hairs per square centimetre. The other type is known by the acronym FUE which stands for Follicular Unit Extraction in which two or three healthy follicles at a time are plucked and then replanted. It is extremely time consuming and labour intensive and usually used for smaller areas and when used over a larger expanse of scalp the cost is far greater than "strip harvesting." The operation is performed under a local anaesthetic and over the next few weeks the scab clumped hair will fall out and then, hopefully, regrow over the ensuing months. Yet hair transplants do not come without their caveats. Many surgeons advise that the drug finasteride should be taken for life post hair transplant to stop the progression of hair loss in other areas. However adverse side effects can include impotence, testicular pain and gynaecomastia, as well as anxiety and depression. Since the earliest time man has struggled against baldness. Ancient Egyptians would incant a spell to Ra whilst imbibing a potion of onion, lead, alabaster, iron and honey. Neither Reginald Perrin nor Donald Trump invented the comb over, Julius Caesar was one of the early adopters and in the 17th century the British male was advised by the period equivalent of GQ to rub chicken dung into his scalp. The advent of the hair transplant is merely the latest and most successful attempt to keep a man's locks as lush as when he was a youth, but in the long term what will this intervention mean for men? In 20 years time, when the price drops and the procedure becomes more evolved and commonplace, will baldness become a poor man's "disease," a visible symbol of one's inability to pay for the upkeep of a full head of hair? Or, alternatively, will it be the mark of a man who has stared into the looking glass, seen it crack and gracefully accepted what he now sees? Will it be a mark of self acceptance in a man? More macho than a sleeve of tattoos? Had it been available in Ancient Greece with its cult of the Kouros, the beautiful boy, would the Stoics have refused and the Hedonists embraced it? The irony is that today baldness or the shaven head has become a symbol of male aggression. Bulging muscles and a shaved head has developed into a standard look for some "hard men" whose baldness is worn as a badge of machismo. On one level this is the case as baldness is caused by high levels of DHT dihydrotestosterone within the hair follicles but not as previously believed high levels of testosterone in the overall body. Hippocrates noted that boys who were castrated before puberty retained their leonine manes while in 1995 a report by Duke University stated that "whilst castration may be a cure it is not commercially acceptable." The modern balding man has options for the first time: to go gracefully into that good and shiny pate or rage against the dying of his follicles. Whether you be a Telly Savalas or a Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen, hold your head high and for those who dare mock the chrome domes, I have three words for you: "Beware the bears."