Entropy - it doesn't just happen

originally uploaded by theimpulsivebuy.

What fools we were in the 1970s when we did not know that we needed a product like this to ensure that our hair looked messy, trusting instead to literal winds of chance, inadvertent bed-head (before that was a scientific term), and desperate self-barbering upon occasion. For if science has taught us anything, it's that one cannot trust nature to revert to disorder when one's (fashion) life might depend on it. I imagine that the Axe people have incorporated nanomachinery into their product to make sure that no two strands parallel one another over a significant distance, and perhaps a dab of adaptive optics to befuddle the hapless viewer's eye to see more of a fractal Medusa's nest than is practically possible to engineer in reality. Back in those days the mathematics of strange attractors was regrettably unavailable to describe the chaotic hair dynamics that is now understood to be essential to sustain modern standards of presentability.

Robot barber

I picture something that fits over a person's head and uses some means (static electricity?) to separate the 100000 or so strands of hair on a person's head and catalog each of them in a custom database for that individual. The hairs would also be analyzed for color, split ends, oiliness or dryness, and type of curl, so that all of this information could be combined to present the user with a palette of possible choices for their hairstyle

When the selection is made, a vast number of nanobots would go to work on the person's hair, clipping, coloring (or bleaching), crimping (or straightening), and application of product, while a gentle airflow carries away the clipped ends and the spent chemicals. If you had a number of bots comparable to the number of hairs, it should only take a couple of minutes before the final result might be ready for styling into a unified hairdo. All the bots would be suctioned away, or maybe a few thousand maintenance units might be left in to keep things in order after the visit.

Or it could be the kind with the silver arms and a straight razor like this one, I don't know. It all depends on what one would willing to pay for the tech. Given the right programming, I think one could achieve results that would make today's < a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20061103102948/http://www.mariska.xdh.nl/index-eng.html">extreme hairstyles look tame.

Update: It seems to have been devised independently (broken link), static included, sadly sans nanobots.

Shaving without commitment

I like my own hair just fine, but I don't have a problem with the idea of parting with it should the occasion arise. But what would be the most prudent way to proceed?
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I saw a HeadBlade in the store the other day and thought to myself, "I might try that if I knew that I could change back if I didn't like the way my head looked." That's when I came up with the idea of a razor with undo.

The way it would work would be to mate an electric or non-electric razor with a can of spray-on hair in the color of your existing hair. If you make a mistake and take off more than you actually want, you would flip a switch on the thing so that you could reforest the bad spot with a bit of spray-on. To go even higher-tech, one could imagine a gadget that collects and cleans the little hairs being shaved off, so that when you hit the undo button they could be stuck back on, assuring an absolutely perfect color match to what you had before. Assuming that that was what you wanted (think bad dye jobs). It would be like having CTRL-Z for your head! (Geeks know what I mean by that.)

It would also be great for persons undergoing sudden hair loss (such as during chemotherapy), to get rid of the weak hair and replace it with something more durable.

I think it might also work in the case of shaving one's face, though am somewhat dubious about how convincing the spray-on stuff would be in emulating a beard, let alone a mustache. It might be good in combating the problem of uneven sideburns, perhaps.

I know that there are women who shave their heads also, but I think it might be a savvier marketing idea to go after the much larger segment which shave their legs. I find it unlikely that they would have much reason to restore the hair, but I understand that some people have problems with cuts during this procedure, so I think the obvious choice would be to mate a razor with antiseptic and spray-on skin. As soon as one felt or saw a little nick, a spritz of this and a spritz of that should set you right.

Also would be nice to have: software to let you know what your bald head would look like beforehand. But that would be the subject of a different post altogether.