Roger Rabbits with Jim Bunny

It was one tiny innocuous hair. Just 2 or 3 millimetres long.

It wasn’t ‘WHAT’ that set her off, but ‘WHERE’.

“That’s annoying me,” she said. And with all the precision of an executioner at a Place de la Revolution beheading, the barber severed it at skin level with her clippers. “Gotcha!” she boasted.

One hair, just one minute hair that had sprouted from my nose. Not the nasal passage but the point of my nose. I am certain you will have a sense of my embarrassment and vulnerability. Life has come to this.

After decades of casual, intermittent maintenance - trims, tucks and tidying - the body now demands constant, close attention. Festoons of hair have started flourishing from clefts and crannies where I didn’t know hair even grew. Proliferous – like noxious weeds, privet, brambles and gorse. Why doesn’t hair grow in places it’s needed – like the crown of my head? And I’m growing paranoid – if people don’t eyeball me when talking I figure they’ve spotted another rogue hair. How can they take you seriously?

This isn’t just glib nonsense. Happiness can depend on it. Because the sight of bristles protruding from the nose or ears is a reliable deal breaker in more than 90% of all human interactions. I am told “that’s according to a study that hasn’t been done because there’s absolutely no need for one”. It all makes sense – imagine sitting down to a romantic dinner and staring lovingly at a clutch of nasal hair. Just wouldn’t work.

To add a scare factor, a single nose hair follicle will grow to about 6 ½ feet or two metres over a lifetime if not attended to.

Eyebrows a scrubland 

And no one would want that to be the last thing that happens to them – tripping over a nasal hair at 84, breaking a hip, getting pneumonia and dying in hospital. Imagine the epitaph, “A beautifully lived life undone by a nasal hair.”

And all these dark thoughts sewn by a barber who thought she was being the good shepherd, just doing her job. “Would you like your eyebrows trimmed? “WHAAAT???”

For decades these vital organs have been maintenance free. They just got on protecting my eyes and serving a pivotal role in my facial recognition, my expressions, my aesthetics. Now, with age, they’re just scrubland, wasteland. They grow wild, a mad medley of grey and black and shades in between. They’ve become more like shade sails than eyebrows. They need furling or reefing whenever the wind gets up or I’d just disappear over the horizon.

It’s not just about aesthetics. I know a bloke who consulted his doctor about bouts of violent sneezing. He’s a bit ‘hypo’ and was half expecting a dark diagnosis. “Mmm, nasal hair,” declared the doctor. And $70 for that wisdom thank you! So nasal hair is not only an eyesore and an irritation, but also expensive.

A dark hairy void 

Cilia, it’s called. Almost makes them sound cute. A highly effective first defender against dust and allergens – 120 on average in the left nostril and 112 in the right. No wonder they can look like a broom head if left unattended.

The final indignity at the barbers came when, with clippers poised, she pulled the neck of my T-shirt clear to trim the neck, gazed down into the dark hairy void and asked: “How far down would you like me to go?” How rude!

Like Grit McGillicudy – a neighbour with a pate like a ping pong ball, but a full body suit of hair from the ear lobes down. We know because he’d take off his shirt to mow the lawns and it looked like Sasquatch had been let loose on the berm. His wife said Grit was like cuddling a Yeti, albeit a nice Yeti.

I’m sorry to have to share this with you but it needs discussing. It needs dealing with because men’s problems just aren’t fashionable, they don’t get addressed. They just don’t have the same salability of women’s problems.

Hurts like hell (sidehead)

So the upshot of all this is a perhaps a men’s support group – for men suffering the indignity of wild, unwanted nasal, ear hair, body hair.

We could gather shirts-off, and share anecdotes about hair suits, and chant mantras wishing away all extraneous body hair. We could hold active meetings – full-body waxing demos and laser removal. Full-body waxing is hilarious entertainment when happening to someone else. What about tweezer workshops – safe, effective tweezer techniques? Fascinating stuff.

But ‘safe’ and ‘tweezers’ and ‘hair removal’ shouldn’t be used in the same sentence. Richard Leinhardt, an emeritus plastic surgeon at Manhattan Eye and Throat Hospital in New York, said plucking a hair follicle can cause swelling and infection, since germs, like staph, live at the base of the follicle – including some staph-like germs, that can be resistant to antibiotics. Much worse is the fact that plucking nasal hair also makes your eyes water. It hurts.