It’s one of those questions you get when you’re a man and men around you are going bald: Would you ever do a combover? The question is usually phrased with a sarcastic tone, as in, “You’re not so pathetic and insecure that you’d do something so fucking dumb if you started to go bald, would you?” And, of course, my answer is that should the day come when these lustrous locks finally thin to the point of scalp exposure, there’s no way I’d do a combover. It looks awful and it’s a lie.
See, the combover is the hairstyle where you let the hair on one side of your head grow long enough to be combed over the baldness like hay on a barn floor. While most men who do it leave the hair flat and dead and plastered over the skin, occasionally you have someone like Donald Trump, who does some elaborate bouffant like a pampered, preening prince at Versailles or something. But most don’t have time or stylists to create that kind of luxuriant obscenity. For most, it’s just a combover. It’s supposed to make it look like you have a full head of hair, but you just look like a jackass because everyone knows you’re lying. You’re trying to pretend that time isn’t having its way with you like it inevitably does with everyone, so you fake it.
