Wayne Rooney’s honesty about his hair transplant should be copied by female celebrities
Of course humans have been hurting themselves for a very long time in order to look more beautiful. And now that Wayne Rooney (25, and a soccer hero) has had a hair transplant we can expect a whole generation of worried young men, currently his devoted fans, to undergo the same procedure in about 15 years’ time.
At least Wayne Rooney’s honest about it. “Just to confirm to all my followers,” he tweeted. “I have had a hair transplant. I was going bald at 25, why not.” His wife, Coleen Rooney, tweeted a message clarifying that the hair transplant had been all Wayne’s idea, and had not been performed at any bossy instigation of hers.
Wayne Rooney’s Manchester United and England team mate, Rio Ferdinand, was most supportive, sending this nice post-operative message: “Just don’t go down the wearing a alice band route!! You’ll be doing headshoulders adverts soon! Hope its gone OK Good luck lad.”
I don’t know much about hair transplants, except that they’re blooming painful and that you’d have to be pretty highly motivated to endure one. And that bald men are pretty highly motivated, although I have never in my life heard a woman say that a man was unattractive on the grounds that he was bald. Presumably going bald is tough because it is ageing, and anyone would take Wayne Rooney’s point about going bald at 25. “How old are you in that photo?” Michael Owen tweeted Wayne Rooney on May 7th. “Your face looks like a 12 year olds but your hair looks like a 60 year old.”
Charming. No wonder poor Wayne ran all the way to Harley Street. Baldness itself hurts. Even if you’re a millionaire genius footballer who is also known as Shrek. And even if you’re a millionaire chef like Gordon Ramsay, who was photographed in Los Angeles with a horribly swollen face, allegedly after a bad reaction to chemicals used in a hair transplant. Interestingly, Ramsay was photographed walking in Los Angeles with another footballer, David Beckham – a man who knows all about the importance of male beauty and its impact on the power of marketing.
Wayne Rooney has handled having a hair transplant with great style. He has also declared himself “delighted” with the result. If only the outcome of every cosmetic procedure was as happy. If only everyone who has gone under the needle – if not the knife – was as frank. You can count the number of female celebrities who have owned up to plastic surgery on one un-laser-treated hand: Sharon Osborne, Anne Robinson, Debbie Harry and Joan Rivers. With the exception of Joan Rivers, who constitutes a special (mental) case, God be good to her, it seems that the facelifts of the other three have all been very successful.
As Debbie Harry said, she is in the entertainment industry, and she has to look good – which is pretty much what Anne Robinson and Sharon Osborne said as well.
The other female celebrities are frightful sneaks who will not even admit to dieting, let alone having cement injected into their faces. Most of them are still wittering on – and twittering on – about how their only beauty aids are eating healthily and going hiking in the woods. Even we, the lumpen proletariat, know somewhere in our lumpen souls that this is a lie. The female face is now routinely punctured and paralysed and inflated, and not just in celebrity-land, but at a shopping mall near you.
Let’s stay in celebrity-land for a moment. Last week the editor of Italian Vogue, Franca Sozzani – who looks suspiciously wonderful herself – said that plastic surgery has “become a mania. No one can bear to think about getting older. You see Ivana Trump in a very short skirt and that face and you think, what a pity, she doesn’t know when to stop.”
It is in this approach – that plastic surgery is like hacking at your fringe, as well as being an indication of the raw fear that adult women have of looking like anything but eager girls – that the truth about it probably lies. Italian Vogue ran one of its satirical issues on plastic surgery, which means that plastic surgery and cosmetic procedures are now so common that they have become unfashionable. This is what happened to the Burberry check.
Franca Sozzani objects to plastic surgery on aesthetic rather than on moral grounds, she says. In other words she doesn’t want to look at the mistakes – let’s hope she doesn’t come to Ireland any time soon.
Unfortunately, with the rise of filler, all Sozzani has to do is look at the once lovely face of Marie Helvin, the greatest model of her decade, and even, a few months ago, the beautiful face of Nigella Lawson, to see what can go wrong. Carla Bruni’s filler is discernible. If this is what is happening to the rich people, what are ordinary consumers of Restylane, the most popular filler in the world, looking like?
The answer is . . . not so great. Therefore we need female celebrities to be a bit more like Wayne Rooney, and let us know what they’ve had done, and whether it has been a success for them or not. It perhaps should be no surprise that cosmetic surgery is an area in which female solidarity is desperately needed, but it is nevertheless true. The women should be more like Wayne.