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It's the male curse that our hair disappears from our heads in middle age and starts sprouting instead from the nose and ears. A gadget for
every problem you
didn’t know you hadIn simpler times, wars were probably settled by whose king had the richest thatch blooming out of his schnoz. Today we win wars with smart bombs and don't speak of migrating hairs in polite company. Thankfully, modern technology has made it a cinch to conceal our fluffy little secret.
I know this because I was just cruising through the new Sharper Image catalog and learned of the Turbo-Groomer 2.0, a power user's tool to remove "unsightly" nose and ear hair.
It comes with two interchangeable cutting heads. The first is a 6,000-rpm rotary blade that hacks out the hair from your nostrils and ear holes. The other is a mini-trimmer with side-to-side action for buzzing off the hair on the outer edges of the ears.
You get it all, including a space-saving stand, for just $59.95. You can get the Turbo-Groomer in businesslike black, white or platinum. No fruity colors here.
I worried how such a powerful cutter could distinguish between unsightly and sightly nose and ear hairs. No problem. This baby has dual LED "headlamps" that let you really get in there and see what you're doing.
This is why I'm so addicted to the Sharper Image catalog. It's full of high-priced gadgets that pay attention to every little detail in solving problems I didn't know I had. It's the perfect source every year when it gets close to my birthday and people start bugging me about what I want.
I wish they'd just use their imaginations, but they never do. Thanks to Sharper Image, I'm able to give an intelligent answer when they ask what I want: "I would like an electric nose-hair trimmer, please."
While I've known for some time that unwelcome hair was taking root in odd places on my head, to be honest I never saw it as a problem that required a $60 appliance.
I root out the ear hairs with the same clipper I use to trim my balding scalp. It gets the job done without too many bloody nicks.
I've always let the nose hairs just kind of blend into my moustache. But now that the moustache is graying and the nose hairs remain dark, I suppose I won't be able to hide the problem that way for much longer.
I used to wonder why these hairs don't appear until we get along in years, but I'm starting to see the logic in not giving us nose and ear hair until we're mature enough to responsibly trim it.
Can you imagine if teen-agers had nose and ear hair? They'd incorporate it into their fashion statements and we'd see kids walking around with nose-hair dreadlocks and ear-hair pigtails.
Women are more aggressive than men in attacking unwanted hair. Not content to just cut it and live with the stubble, they dissolve it with depilatories, burn it off with hot wax and, most painfully, rip it out with tweezers.
Sharper Image has something electric for them, too. The Gently Gold Caress Hair Remover has 36 pairs of gold-plated tweezing discs that tear out hairs on the legs, underarms, bikini line and face at the rate of 600 per second.
Ouch. If I put that thing near my nose, it would probably yank out my brains along with the hairs right through the nostrils.
David Shapiro is managing editor of the Star-Bulletin.
He can be reached by e-mail at dshapiro@starbulletin.com.
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