Wild hair may signal reverse aging

You know how in the ?Beverly Hillbillies? theme song ol? Jed is out shooting for some food, but he shoots the ground instead and accidentally discovers oil?

Well, I know how he must of felt. Sort of. Instead of discovering black gold, I discovered a black hair on my head.

If this doesn?t sound like a miraculous discovery, stop reading this column for just a moment and look at my mug shot. That is a guy whose darkest physical features is his pupils.

I?ve always been a blonde. I?ve weathered the jokes and severe sunburns. Suffering because of my hair color is something I?ve become accustomed to.

And yet, as I was fixing my hair this morning?a process that can take up to 10 seconds?front and center was this jet black strand of hair.

At first I thought it was a rogue piece of fiber from the Elvis wig I wore for an embarrassing gig I had this last Valentine?s Day. (That, however, is a topic for another column many years down the road when all the witnesses are no longer with us.)

I tried to whisk out the hair, only to discover that it was actually attached to my scalp. I yanked it out and saved it in a folded piece of bathroom tissue?root and all?for proof.

New black hairs, however, are better than new silver hairs.

Several months ago wife Hanna noticed that my roots seemed to be turning gray. This was a step I was not prepared to begin in my early 20s, and I spent several weeks fretting about that until I forgot about it.

This black hair can logically mean only one thing: If lightening hair says a person is aging, then darkening hair must cause a person is becoming younger.

Explorers have spent centuries searching for the Fountain of Youth, but apparently the shower stall in our apartment has a direct link to it.

There are some possibilities that must be considered, given this revelation: Will I shrink as I grow younger? Will I have to go through school again backward? What about birthdays? Should I change my last name to Button?

These are just a few of the questions that must be addressed if, in fact, I have begun a regression in my maturity.

Incidentally, I know of a handful of people who would use several of my past column topics to argue for this as well.

I spent a few minutes considering these possibilities before deciding they were unlikely. Formal research needed to be done, so I called my hair and scalp specialist.

Just kidding.

What I really did was go to Internet, which is a wonderful tool for locating random information. A hair and scalp specialist, for example, is called a trichologist.

I went to Google.com and searched ?blonde hair with back strand.? This pulled up 1,990,000 results, almost all of them having to do with hair dye. But there was one web page in which a person wrote asking about the exact problem I am dealing with.

A responder claiming to be a nutritionist answered that this is a condition called amorphopilotosis, and that ?it?s more common than you think, and there?s not really a cure.?

So I Googled ?amorphopilotosis,? which resulted in a total of two results with almost the exact same text.

Needless to say, I?m skeptical that amorphopilotosis is a real condition, and I?m even more so that the answer was written by a nutritionist.

I suppose there aren?t any real answers, so I?ll wait to see if I get more black hairs before I become concerned. Maybe then I?ll really call a trichologist.

But in the meantime, I?ve really been craving grape juice out of a sippy cup.

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