Indignities of Aging: From Hair to Infirmity

There are cultures that adore flowing locks on a man; others that click heels and salute the buzz cut. Some favor the mustache and/or the beard; others prefer a man clean shaven. Some see the hairy chest as manly; others shave the chest bare. But amidst this variance in attitudes toward male hair, one universal seems to stand out, one attitude of revulsion akin to that toward incest or the smell of dog feces. I am referring to hair protruding from a man’s nose.

The most vivid memory that I have of my late Uncle Joe is not connected to anything that he said or did. It is the image of his large schnoz – the Colossus of Nose -- hovering over me with a crop of wiry, pitch-black nasal hairs sprouting from the cavernous region of his nostrils. As a child, I oscillated between fighting the urge to stare and only wanting to look away.

Fast forward to the years when you find yourself losing hair where you want it to remain and gaining it where you don’t. And there they are suddenly: the unruly visible nose hairs.

At first, if you have a mustache like I once did, they don’t seem to be much of a public nuisance. Like a fat man trying to hide his girth by standing in the back of a family photo grouping, they are not immediately apparent for what they are as they are behind the greater hirsute display, seeming to say, “I’m just one of the boys!”

Then I decided the less gray hair the better. Off with the mustache and beard! Like the sagging chin that hid beneath my beard, there they were demanding notice. The small scissors that once trimmed my mustache was now put into play cutting back this unwelcomed nasal nosegay. As anyone who has attempted this can attest, the task is not easy since one wants to remove the hairs but not one’s nose. And these hairs are good at hiding from the shears and springing forth uninvited at awkward times.

One such occasion comes to mind, when I was taking children to the zoo. We were resting on a bench in the bright summer sun. Lillie, who must have four or five, was sitting on my lap when she looked up and said, “What’s that sticking from your nose?”

“Nothing,” I replied, affecting nonchalance.

“It’s a hair,” she persisted, exhibiting the candor for which children are often praised and sometimes beaten.

“Be quiet Lillie. Everyone has hairs in their nose,” said Hanna, Lillie’s mother, trying kindly to extricate me from my embarrassing situation, but her daughter continued to stare until I deposited her on the ground, reached for a tissue, and pushed the escapee back into its place.

Of course, Hanna was right. Everyone does have nose hair. For more on the subject, I turn to an infographic from the famed Cleveland Clinic, an infographic entitled “Nose Hair Safari” which offers to lead us through “the nose hair jungle.” It begins by telling us that “the inner surface of your nose has as many hairs follicles as your head.” I don’t know how this fact was discovered, but I’m going to take their word for it. Coated with a thin mucus layer, the hair serves the useful function of filtering out dust, pollen, and other foreign particles and protecting our lungs. Here’s a bit of trivia: according to Cleveland Clinic, the average person’s nose hairs each grow six and half feet over the life span. Again, I take their word for it since no documentation is provided crediting who made this amazing discovery. Finally, more immediately relevant to my topic, “Older people don’t have any more nose hair… than younger people. But as we age, the hairs get longer and courser.” Thus, they are more prone to spring out and, being visible, to resemble something that might be found on the back of a wild boar.

The time had arrived, I finally decided, to cut through the nose hair jungle with something other than a scissors. This decision led me to an online search for a nose hair trimmer. One thing that will strike you if you go looking like I did is that products bear bland company names, with one exception. The company Manscape calls their ear and nose hair trimmer the Weed Whacker. It’s an amusing name for a grooming product, a name clearly targeted at men and their stereotypical love of lawn care products. Can you imagine a woman saying, “I’m going to take the Weed Whacker to the old unibrow”? After an undiligent, haphazard search through reviews and ratings, I impulsively bought a Philips Norelco at Target because it was cheaper than all the other products I had browsed through at other stores. It does the job efficiently and painlessly.

Lillie has grown too big to sit on my lap, but her younger sister Sophie has taken her place. Now I can rest assured that as she gazes up adoringly at her beloved Papa’s face, she will not be distracted from his rugged good looks by any unsightly outcropping, although when she sits on my lap, she likes to squeeze my arm and say, “Why are you so squishy?”

The End