Combover and Mathematics

The combover isn't just an occidental hair illness. They are very common in Japan, too. Check this out…



It's amazing to see which amount of time this guy would save by simply not combing his hair every morning. Just think about this:

– It must take him at least five minutes every morning to get a haircut like that. Each year, he wastes 365 x 5 minutes, that is to say 1.825 minutes per year. 1.825 minutes = 30,4166 hours = 1,27. This man spends more than one day of a year combing his hair. But wait.
– Given that:

• a man usually starts having a combover when he's 35 — an age at which significant loss of hair has already occurred, urging the need for covering bald flesh on the skull
• the male life expectancy is around 75 years old

we can assume that this man will be combing-over during 40 years, It means that this man will spend 73.000 minutes combing his hair. 73.000 minutes = 50,7 days!!! This is a complete loss of productivity to obtain a disgusting — but funny — haircut.

And that's a minimum. For instance, there are more complex combovers (and I'm not even talking about the Trump style) which take about 10 minutes to be "built".

I know it's a considerable loss of time for bald men (and not just foolish old men: I coud name several intellectuals wearing a combover), but "normal" men and women also waste time combing their hair in various ways every morning. And not to mention shaving, make-up, etc.

I guess you wonder why I'm always making so much fuss talking about hair and so on. Maybe because I don't let mine grow more than 1 centimeter high. I've never combed my hair. Never. And I probably won't. (I don't waste time on that! I just need my father to cut my hair once a month; it takes me only 5 minutes) I don't know why. I like it the way it is, and I don't want it to change. I can take a great advantage of this rather silly situation. I mean that later, I won't look like an idiot on birthday pictures: many hairstyles, highly popular not so much time ago, are now old-fashioned, such as the mullet.

My hair's never changed in 18 years (I'm 19, but till I was 1 year old, I was blond (!) and I had an "undercut" [if that is the appropriate translation of a "coupe au bol"]) and it won't. Except that I'll end up half-bald like my male relatives, but I don't fear it. Going bald is natural. I don't see why you'd need to hide it—by means of the combover or of the awful toupee.