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Men's Hair Style Articles

Well, I’ve been beating around the bush but I’ve been meaning to write about male pattern baldness because of the massive effects it has on men's hair style. It’s no secret that baldness in males is a common occurrence. Many men deal with their baldness by shaving their heads, covering up their heads, or seeking treatment. Male pattern baldness is caused by a number of different things including: hormones, stress, and aging, so there is no surefire way to knock it out.

A dilemma that these men face is in that they don’t know how to style their hair with what little they have. Another problem is that even though a certain style may have worked for them at one time, it may have been superseded by the continual loss of hair that they are experiencing. So what’s the best option? There is no easy way to get around the privation of baldness but the best way is to accept it.

Men have trouble accepting their hair loss because it is a vital part of ‘who they are’ and can often attribute a loss of self esteem to their loss of hair. Common options for treatment include the use of topical and natural products.

Topical treatments are applied to the scalp usually a few times daily and can cause skin irritation and or sensitive skin. Topical solutions can also be found in special shampoos that will benefit hair re-growth.

Natural hair loss products usually come in the form of a tablet or capsule. These capsules contain a variety of vitamins, minerals, herbal extracts, and other substances that a found to be nutritive to hair follicles. The most common ingredients are B vitamins, zinc, nettle root, and pumpkin. Natural treatment of hair loss is viewed as the safest way to combat hair loss because there are far fewer negative side effects and they often benefit your overall health.

Before you do anything with your hair, meet up with a barber or other men's hair style expert and have them give you a spruce looking cut. You’ll be starting off with a blank slate and will have much room to improve. Ask your barber what style is best for you and see if you can’t get some good ideas rolling around. Once you decided and all trimmed up, you are then free to start playing around with style.

An important question that you must ask yourself is “How much time would I reasonably spend maintaining my hair.” If you spend more than 15 seconds in the mirror before going out, you might be a good candidate for some hair products. When it comes to hair styling, men only have a few basic product choices: hair gel, pomade, or hair glue. Each has a distinct purpose. Hair gel is used for varying degrees of hold and comes in a variety of different scents that can have surprisingly positives affects on your overall body odor. Pomade, though commonly mistaken as gel, is used to add shine and a slight texture to the hair. Hair glue is used for only one thing: making your hair rock solid.

Whether you use styling products or not, it is still very important to take care of your scalp and hair to ensure they are always healthy and looking their best. Cleaning your hair with good quality shampoo and conditioner will keep your hair from drying out and will remove the residue that styling products leave behind. When washing your hair try to minimize the use of shampoo and always mix it with water before applying it. If your hair is exposed to too much soap it will become damaged and once dried, will look frizzy. It’s considered a best practice to shampoo your hair every other or every third time you shower.

Lastly, don’t be afraid to try specialty products. Everyone’s hair is different and will react to products in different ways. From time to time, branch out and try a few new things and figure out what works best for your hair.

So I’ve been thinking about how men's hair style relates back to our younger years and the iterative development process that hair goes through as we grow up. I have recalled the numerous different hair styles that I’ve had throughout my life and needless to say, most of them were indeed failures. I learned from my fashion blunders and slowly figured out what worked best for me and my hair type. I’ve come to the conclusion that even though each of our hair types has countless stylistic possibilities, there is without a doubt a ‘best’ way to style our hair type. It's up to us to find out what the 'best' is and how to avoid those which are detrimental to our social success.

Luckily for each of us, we probably had at least one person in our life that was bold enough to inform us when our hair was not appropriate for our social surroundings. I’ll never forget my outlandish friend Evan in elementary school who never ceased to remind me that my hair looked like a rat’s nest and that I should get it cut. My mother suggested that it looked handsome on me so I decided I liked. Well, thanks to Evan, I eventually rid myself of the rat’s nest.

Our hair styles like many other traits are often products of our experiences and surroundings. We will each have spent hundreds of hours of our lives trying to figure out what works best for our hair, so we might as well get it right. There are many ways to figure what the ideal style is for your hair type, but this is my favorite: Take a look at some actors or other famous people with your same hair type and see what they are dong to make their hair work for them. After all, they pay stylists to make their hair look great. It’s a free resource and it’s also fun see what kind of stuff is out there!

Historically, men's fashion has focused more on clothes and accessories rather than men's hair style. As a result, we seem to perceive hair style as being secondary to the image which we wish to convey. With the hair that we were each blessed with, we have the capability to take that hair and fashion it into something that will integrate well with our wardrobe and more importantly, our complete our image.

Though we all have unique hair styles that we call our own, our hair styles are often products of our notion of ‘who we are’ or ‘who we’d like to be’. In creating our outward image, we have several tools at our disposal: clothing, accessories, and of course our hair. Because our image is often clothing centric, the importance of our hair style falls secondary to our clothes and is often dependent on the style or type of clothes that we like to wear. In a very traditional sense, the business man likes a clean-cut hair style with his suit and tie, the hippie wears dreadlocks with his tie-die, and the nerd slicks his hair with hiked suspenders (but he doesn't know any better), etc., etc.

Our hair style is being perceived more as being an accessory, or something that we can manipulate to exemplify our desired image. Just as we throw an ascot or tie around neck to compliment dapper attire, men's hair style should be a compliment to both clothing and accessories.

In a search to find trends in men's hair style, I have landed upon a goldmine: Hollywood. No surprise there! I've been checking out the dos of many past and present Hollywood actors and have taken great notice of the cyclic nature of hair styles. As most of us might have a long-haired buddy, we have seen that this trend from the seventies came screeching back into style and is now disappearing just as quickly. It should be no stretch to say that this rings true for all hairstyles...well, almost all (sorry Alfalfa)!

Hollywood hair is a true testament to the role that our hair style plays in allowing us to achieve a desired look. If we examine the hair styles Tom Cruise over a time-line of a few years, we’ll see that for almost every movie he has acted in, he has sported a unique and different look. The varying nature of Tom Cruise’s hair style and that of all actors demonstrates to us that our hair lets us achieve amazing flexibility in the way that we look.

If you get a chance, research your favorite male actor and the many different looks that he achieves with his hair type and color, and know that, with your hair type, you have the same number of possibilities for different looks! None of us are stuck with any particular image as we might think, and sometimes we just need a little reminder :)