Favor the Bald - How shampoos are only fancy soap.
Why would a person buy a shampoo that contains vegetal DNA? Do ads lie?
At a point, I started believing that cosmetic publicists think that one is a retard. Not fool, naive or even ignorant. A retard.
Overwhelmed at a moment by the anti-system anger, where "system" would be matching with 95 different classes of hair detergent "developed by experts" (they will never tell you in what area of expertise), I started thinking about two things: first, marketing of hair obsession; second, that it must be because of something. I mean, seriously. It is just hair.
"Make Your Hair Healthy Again". Really? First things first: hair is not alive, it never was, and never will; hair is basically knitted keratin and... Again: "that" is not alive. It cannot be healthy.
This picture has nothing to do with the article, yet he came up as part of a search result... and is too cute to be ignored.
Now, what happens to a dead knitting when we rub vegetable DNA to it?
Lets go into the experimenting stage: We take two equally dead grandmothers, preferably in the same year (it is very important to remember the notion of control groups, this is a test subject that is not undergoing any treatment; to compare results later), and we rub one of them with normal shampoo, while the other one is rubbed with vegetal DNA enriched shampoo. Since time is a luxury we do not have today... Please follow me to the other lab: I brought you another pair of dead grandmothers that were rubbed 3 months ago, so that you may observe the results.
Grandma, amazingly, is still dead. Not like the hair, that cannot die: BECAUSE IT WAS NEVER ALIVE (yet, both grandmas are pretty clean, that helps to make them look more "lively(?)").
What did we learn today? That nothing is solved by sprinkling DNA at people's hair.
Why this obsession with hair?
This hair obsession tells us a but of where we come from as hominids; because, if our hair made it all the way here with us during evolution, it must be for a reason. It turns out that having no body hair stated around 100000 years ago; when a gene that is related to keratin synthesis passed away as recessive. A perfect example in evolution, something that was useful sometime, lost its use, and was discarded.
It turns out that the loss of hair is a cold war against heating (no pun intended, seriously). Heating that goes even further than to have or to not have beard, or any joke that may escalate bout depilatory customs in females, it goes as far as our capacity to dissipate body heat. Any even creates a variability that will have to be handled to the point or a Darwinian challenge for survival where pros and cons face off... After all, the body hair was "body hair" for a reason. Yes, hair, besides looking pretty, protected us -among other things- from UV rays, this is a HUGE adaptive advantage since they can cause mutations; from mutations to pathologies: there's only a small step.
Evolution at its best.
For the lack of hair to be selected, there had to be more positive than negative effects in us thanks to is. Recalling the body heat topic, humans needed to dissipate even more heat, as a result of a very active metabolism and high calories diets (benefits of cooking!, a key factor in our evolution). Any man or woman that ever shaved his/her face during winter, to later ride a bike knows that hair is a great protection against cold; yet, the same beard is a torture during summer, so, to cool the things down a bit, leaving us with hair in only some key spots of our body.
After this natural selection, as always, there was a rampage of culture and sexual selection made that hair distribution among men and women to vary, to reach the situation we're at today. Arriving to the "alpha bald male paradigm" that has some science backing it up, since one of the reason they are bald is the dihydrotestosterone, on of who's close relatives? - (I've faith in you, I know you know it, or may guess).
"Fortune favors the bold", was always mispronounced: "Fortune favors the bald" is the real thing. Favored by evolution. Human heat dissipators. Bald Luthor, bald Statham, bald Xavier... Bald.
Upcoming article: Skin colors' adaptive advantages.
If you liked this post and its informal way of talking about sciences, please, follow me for more!
Leave a comment either for good or for bad reviews. I take everything as constructive, and I really appreciate the feedback, even from trolls (at least a troll read it before being himself!).
Copyrights:
All the previously used images are of my authory or under a CC0 license (Source: pixabay), unless openly stated.
All the Images created by me possess a WTFPL licencing and they are free to redistribute, share, copy, paste, modify, sell, crop, paste, clone in whatever way you want.
I was sitting in a café the other day, and some ad for soap or shampoo or deodorant came on, with women jogging wearing nothing but towels. I basically never watch TV with ads, just shows that I download, so it appeared very surreal. I thought, the people who watch this stuff every day must have a skewed view of reality. So I guess that's why they rub vegetable DNA in their hair.
I don't know why anyone would think putting DNA on their hair would do anything. That doesn't even make any sense as a concept. Shrugs people get suckered into buying some silly stuff.
Women :D
Men use shampoo, to wash every possible body part. (cmon, soap is superfluous anyways! It's FOAM!)
I haven't used hair shampoo for years now, only water, and I couldn't be happier ;)
Try, from time to time, change the water
@justtryme90: couldn't agree more - this is kind of a modern phenomenon to attribute evil things to almost anything ;)
Evil things?
yeah, like... rabid puppies (?)
They aren't evil, just diseased?
It seems that big words = money is valid... I didn't even know about the existence of these 'DNA-improved shampoos'.
I btw liked how you introduced the main meat of the post ;)
We, Latinamericans have a special skill to introduce the main meat where it corresponds.
I didn't know you were Latin-American! Better late than never ^^