Valeva · Notes
Three states,
and only two
have names.
English gives a man two words for this. He has his hair, or he took it off. Between those two sits a stretch that runs a decade and often longer, that every person in the room can see, and that nobody at the table will name out loud. It also happens to be the only one of the three a man can do anything inside.
A man cannot book
what has no name
The first state fits in a sentence. He has his hair. The third fits in a sentence too. He took it off. Both go on a form, both close the subject, and both get said in public without anybody flinching.
The middle refuses to fit. A man inside it still has hair, so the first sentence half applies and then stops. He has not taken anything off, so the third does not apply at all. Ask a table of grown men what to call the part in between and watch every one of them reach for a joke, because no word is waiting there for them to pick up.
That missing word costs far more than a missing word looks like it should. A man puts in his calendar the things he can say. The dentist. The eye test. The car, in for its service every autumn. Each of those he can write down without explaining himself to anybody, and each of them accordingly gets done. The middle carries no name, so nothing about it gets scheduled, and nothing gets neglected either, since neglect needs a thing to neglect.
What passes for a man not bothering is usually a man without the word for it.
“I'm not losing hair. I wanted to keep what I have, and most of this category is selling me a problem I don't have. Two drops in the morning, that's the whole routine. My barber asked what I'd changed after about a month. I told him nothing, which is the point.”
Martin K., 58
That leaves the question of when it started.
No first day, and
it runs in decades
Everything else that ever happened to him arrived on a date he can still name. The knee went on a Tuesday in Vermont. The eyes went at forty-four, in a restaurant, over a menu he had to hold at arm's length. The back announced itself lifting something stupid out of a car. Each one arrived, got noticed within the hour, and got dealt with, because arriving is what puts a thing on a list.
This one never arrived. It never had a first day. It moves at a rate no mirror reports, in a bathroom he stands in every morning of his life, and by the time it clears the threshold where a man can see it on himself, it has been running for years. Nobody hands him a diagnosis, because nothing ever happened on a particular morning. What he entered instead had no door.
Ask him how long his hair has looked the way it looks today and he will not answer in weeks. He answers in decades. That is the unit the whole thing runs in, and it is already the unit he uses for everything he means to keep: the house, the marriage, the car he refuses to sell.
He has bought bottles before, and more than one of them is still in a cupboard with most of it left. He has learned to treat any new one as money already spent, which is a fair reading of this category. It is why this bottle gets sold with a term attached instead of an adjective.
90 days. If it didn't work, the money comes back. Nothing goes back to us.
He keeps the bottle and he keeps whatever is left inside it. What gets weighed at the end is shine, softness and body. Those three substitute for nothing: they are scalp condition arriving at the surface, and a man reads them off his own head, in his own bathroom, without taking anybody's word for anything.
Which puts the whole stretch in one place.
The middle is spent
on the scalp
Whatever runs through those years does not run through the hair. The hair on his head this morning counts as finished work: assembled a while ago, pushed out, and beyond the reach of anything poured over the top of it. Next year's hair has not been made yet.
It gets made in roughly a square foot of skin, and that square foot is where the stretch actually gets spent. Most of what decides how it goes is for sale to nobody. Age. Inheritance. What he takes for his blood pressure. Whether he spent a year ill. Only one item on that list is skin, and skin is the one thing there a man can reach himself.
Golden Oil goes onto the scalp rather than through the lengths, which is what makes it a scalp oil rather than a hair oil, whatever the two bottles look like standing next to each other.
What it is for is the condition of the hair he already has: its shine, its softness, its body. Those same three are what the 90 days get measured against, so the thing he is buying and the thing he can claim on are one thing, named the same way in both places.
Nine ingredients, and the order matters.
Golden Oil
30 ml · glass dropper · eight botanical oils and a Vitamin E
The label prints all nine in descending order of concentration, so the order can be checked against the bottle rather than taken on trust. Batana carries the most volume, which almost nothing else in this category does, and coconut comes second.
Jojoba is why the blend goes in rather than sitting on top. It is a wax ester rather than a triglyceride, which makes it the closest thing in the formula to what the skin already puts out by itself. Castor and batana carry the weight and stay up there for hours after a lighter oil has thinned out and gone. Olive and avocado do the softening, and they absorb into the fibre rather than resting on top of it. Coconut goes into the fibre too. Rosemary and peppermint go in sparingly at the root, and they carry the one property a man can check without a laboratory, because he can smell them. Vitamin E keeps the other eight from turning, and since no water goes into the formula, nothing else has to.
Coconut carries the published work. Rele and Mohile measured it cutting the protein a hair gives up in a wash (J Cosmet Sci 54, 2003). What they measured was the fibre, in a wash, with coconut on its own.
A couple of drops on the scalp, in damp hair after a shower, two or three minutes of massage, three to five times a week. About a minute and a half, start to finish. Four to six weeks before there is anything worth looking at, and then in this order: shine, then softness, then body.
“I started this about six weeks ago, mostly for the dryness. The change was gradual: more shine first, then a bit of strength when I comb it. Nothing dramatic. I don't want dramatic; I want to look like myself on the other side of a red-eye.”
Henry W., 70
Free shipping anywhere in the US.
Men who subscribe get a specialist of their own. You write to support, they know your account, and a person walks the first 90 days with you and says plainly what has moved and what has not. The sixth bottle comes free.
The price sits on the next page, whole, with nothing added at checkout.
Golden Oil is a cosmetic scalp and hair oil. It is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease, and it does not treat, slow or reverse any condition of the scalp or the hair. Individual results vary. Statements above describe the composition of the formula and published work on individual ingredients, not results for the finished product. Quotations are from customers who gave permission to be quoted.