Question Celebrity

If you are an average, well-nourished human, and you are patient, and you steer clear of harsh flattening irons, relaxers, bleaches and other follicular abuses, your hair could grow about six inches in one year. In other words, growing hair past the shoulders is slow work. As with so many tedious tasks of life, our celebrities seem to get a free pass: They let someone else's hair do the work for them.

Suppose you walked into your office or school tomorrow with two feet of new, thick, straight blond hair cascading past your shoulders. Would people admire it? Not mention it at all? Gossip about it? Cluck their disapproval? Wish they had some fake, thousand-dollar hair, too? More to the point, would anyone admire you for who you are? In this, the celebrity age, they might. False blond and brunette extension tresses have come to occupy a psychic space apart from toupees, wigs or intricate multi-culti weaves. For celebrity blondes, extensions are essential to the overall presentation: The ease with which Paris, Nicole, Jessica, et al. (and ad nauseam) go from short to long, bob to Lady Godiva, demonstrates that the did-she-or-didn't-she stigma of fake hair is long gone. So long gone that now the big-name hair god who did the extensions, and the exorbitant cost, have become new status markers. (The gaudy falls and beehives of Elizabeth Taylor's era were some other sort of magic act, about which no one ever spoke.)

Still, having one's own long hair, grown the old-fashioned way, is often what separates the A-list (A is for Aniston) from the B-list (B is for Britney). When trying to think of the worst things she could tell Howard Stern about Paris Hilton recently, "Saturday Night Live" alumna Tina Fey (herself a softly tressed brunette) mentioned how disgusting it was to keep finding clumps of "gross Barbie hair" everywhere Paris went during her "SNL" host stint. (Translation: Paris is a walking lie.) A widely disseminated photograph from a recent Beyonce appearance seems to show the skin near her temple grotesquely crinkled, like that of some kind of humanoid freak in "Star Trek" -- a malfunction, apparently, of the special glue that keeps her hair on. Gossips everywhere took a moment to ponder the stunning truth of it: You mean Beyonce's hair does not grow out of her head in a straight, honey-hued line? The shock of all this lasted, oh, five minutes. Of the many distortions celebrities traffic in every day, their long, luxurious hair is the least of it.

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