You had to know the trivialization of everything would find its way into business at some point. You had to anticipate superficiality, like water, would eventually seep into every nook, cranny, and formerly purposeful aspect of our lives. And so it has. In fact, vanity is now making the editorial calendar in at least one business publication.
Exhibit A: Business Insider, an erstwhile professional publication (I’m giving it the benefit of the doubt), has seen fit to publish pointers on tonsorial alternatives: “How to get the best haircut for your face shape“. And since sensationalism (like trivialization) is a hot commodity in an increasingly frivolous world, the missive starts with a dramatically dire disclaimer:
Forget everything you think you know about face shapes and haircuts — it’s probably all wrong.
Egad! Do I now have to flush decades worth of preconceptions about visage visualizations and their corresponding hairstyles? What about my own? Do I have the right cut, or will I appear as an antiquated rube in the eyes of my chic superiors at Business Insider?
And for the follicly challenged members of the working world, Business Insider generously (albeit erroneously) offers Exhibit B: “This is the one thing you should never do if you’re losing your hair“.
The way a comb-over works is that you try and “teach” your hair, which naturally wants to grown down, to grow across your head instead.
I’m not entirely sure what kind of hair-training classes the article’s author, Dennis Green, has attended. Nor do I know what kind of bait, nutrients, or other enticements he imagines one might use to coax one’s hair to grow across a barren expanse of scalp.
Since he appears to have a full head of hair in his photo, we have to assume it’s his own. So, maybe he should be forgiven for not knowing a comb-over is a flap of hair, stretched over the top of the wearer’s naked dome, and rendered solid with copious amounts of hair spray. But should someone like that really have his own column? Maybe Business Insider gave it to him to feed his vanity.
We’ve come a long way, kids. But it seems to have been backwards.
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Allegory of Vanity by Antonio de Pereda [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.