Hair Planter

A red-headed Manhattan dancing girl let an oldish man examine a bald spot on her scalp last week. The man, Christian Askhaven of Oslo, Norway, washed the spot, sterilized it, anesthetized it. At his hand was a tray containing 200 pairs of red hairs. Each pair he had painstakingly fastened at the butt ends with a pure gold clip so tiny that it could scarcely be seen by the naked eye. Mr. Askhaven (he is a onetime Norwegian farmer recently gone to Manhattan to demonstrate his hair-renovating system) speared a pair of false hairs on a stout hypodermic needle and drove the clipped butts into an empty hair canal on the young woman's head. He withdrew the needle; the springiness of the gold clip held the new hair in place. Two hundred times he did that and completely filled the baldness. There was no difference in looks or feel between the new and the old. Mr. Askhaven assured the dancing girl that Norwegian patients on whom he had done the same operations nine years ago still had their natural "toupees" in excellent condition.