Elisha is walking the road up from Jericho to Bethel when a crowd of local boys starts in on him. The taunt has been echoing for roughly twenty-eight centuries: aleh qere'ach. Go up, bald head. The prophet turns, curses them in the name of the Lord, and two she-bears come out of the forest and maul forty-two of them.
Generations of commentators have tried to make this proportionate. The most persuasive attempt argues the insult was theological rather than cosmetic. His teacher Elijah had just gone up, in a whirlwind, in front of witnesses. "Go up" may have meant something closer to follow him, then, if you're so holy. It is also worth noticing that Elijah is introduced in the previous chapter as ba'al se'ar, a hairy man in a leather belt. The successor was the bald one. The boys of Bethel were not commenting on hairstyle so much as on succession.
Which is, more or less, what people have been doing with baldness ever since.
The Torah itself is remarkably relaxed about it. Leviticus 13 is a long, careful chapter about skin afflictions and the priest's job of examining them. It distinguishes qere'ach, thinning at the crown, from gibbe'ach, receding at the front. Then it delivers the verdict: tahor hu. He is clean. Nothing wrong with him.
Not everyone in Tanakh got the memo. Samson's hair is the whole plot, seven locks under a Nazirite vow, and the moment Delilah calls for the barber the story ends. Absalom's hair is the opposite lesson. Second Samuel bothers to tell us that he cut it once a year, and that the annual clippings weighed NIS 200. He then dies suspended from a terebinth by his own head while his mule keeps walking.
Rome is where vanity gets properly documented, because Rome had Suetonius. Julius Caesar, he tells us, minded his baldness a great deal, combed what remained forward over the crown, and enjoyed to wear a laurel wreath at all times. Otho went into battle in a wig so well made that people only knew because someone wrote it down. Domitian minded so much that he wrote an entire book about hair care, dedicated to a friend, while going bald himself.
The wig then does about fifteen hundred years of heavy lifting. The Mishnah, in a discussion of what a woman may wear into the public domain on Shabbat, mentions the peah nokhrit, the false hairpiece, in passing, as an ordinary object requiring no explanation. Louis XIV, thinning early and unwilling to be seen that way, put France into wigs. By 1665 the Paris wigmakers had their own guild. An entire luxury industry.
Then came the age of the honest lie. The Seven Sutherland Sisters toured America in the 1880s with a combined thirty-seven feet of hair and a bottled tonic that sold in the millions and consisted, on later inspection, largely of water, witch hazel and vegetable oil.
The actual answer to baldness arrived in the 1950s. Norman Orentreich, a dermatologist in New York, established something he called donor dominance: Hair taken from the back and sides of the head keeps its own genetic instructions when it is moved somewhere else.
Early execution was rough. Orentreich's technique used four millimetre punches, and the results, unkindly but accurately, were called doll's hair.
It took until the 1990s for surgeons to work in follicular units of one to four hairs as they naturally grow, and until the early 2000s for extraction one unit at a time to become practical.
Turkey now performs a very large share of the world's hair restoration surgery, where established practices such as the Dr. Serkan Aygin Clinic operate at a scale that has made the city the default destination worldwide. A hair transplant in Turkey is now an ordinary line in the travel plans of men from Riyadh to Manchester, and anyone who has passed through Istanbul's airports has seen the gauze headbands.
Elisha, it seems, never cared, which was always the cheaper option and remains, for most people, the correct one.
This article was written in cooperation with Tom White