Friday, February 6, 2009

Missing hair and vanishing baldness

Recently, I've been seeing this advert for a certain hair loss clinic continuously:



Although I should point out I'm kind of paranoid about my (no)hair so maybe I just imagine it's on every time I see an advert break - it does seem to have been on a lot though. Anyway. The entire advert is composed of men with hair. In most cases a hell of a lot of hair, hairlines I can only dream about - and often do. A baldness clinic advertising itself without bald men? My first thought was obviously a hair loss clinic wouldn't want to be associated with bald men in their adverts, as that might imply failure on their part. But the advert clearly shows them walking into the place - one assumes pre- or during treatment, so at least some of them should be balding right? So I had another idea, that the lack of bald men in the advert is meant to signal to me that being bald is a failure on my part, and that there is no way they would employ such a failure in one of their adverts. So their message is, you must get hair or you will continue to be worthless.
It's a sign of my own issues with hair loss that even after settling on this interpretation of the advert I'm still giving semi-serious thought to the idea of looking into it. The power of advertising...

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