This seems to be a trope that continues to come up in conversation, or in fictional descriptions of low life or phony characters.
Thing is, I don’t know the last time I’ve seen a guy who seemed to be wearing a rug.
This could be because:
(1) toupees are out there but are getting more realistic;
(2) toupees are less in use because rogaine/Propecia/hair transplants have gotten more effective;
(3) toupees are less in use because it seems like it’s more okay for even youngish guys to go with the full head-shave;
(4) toupees were a fashion fad for a brief period in the '60s/'70s;
(5) toupees were never that widely used and it’s just a stock shorthand reference to a cheesoid persona.
The actor who was happy to use them as a prop was Carl Reiner. He was perfectly happy to put his toupee on or off for comic effect, and it was used to great effect in an old Dick Van Dyck show.
But if you noticed in that episode, the toupee looked like real hair even back then (admittedly, it was black and white).
Hollywood stars of the 30s and 40s often wore toupees. Fred Astaire was bald very early and wore them in most of his films (there a photo of him without one in the book Flesh and Fantasy).
So there were realistic versions for decades. The two main reasons for fewer toupees are 2 and 3 on your list.
The other issues have been spoken for but I don’t think this was true. I remember the Monty Python sketch from the late '60’s that ridiculed toupee-wearers.
Turn on any Sunday morning talk show with gibbering politicians. Then do as I used to do (when I watched) and think …“rug…rug…hairpiece…rug…rug…dear God, that HAS to be a wig!..rug…hair plugs…combover…rug…”
My dad wore a toupee all his working life (he retired in 1998.) When he had his second heart attack a guy from the church who had known my dad for twenty years came to see him, and of course my dad while recovering from quadruple bypass was not wearing his toupee, and the guy exclaimed, “Roy, what the hell did they do to your hair?!”
He was very sensitive about it - lost most of his hair before he was 20. It was evidently very uncomfortable and he hated wearing it, but he never appeared in public without it until quite a bit after his retirement, when my mom and I convinced him through much positive reinforcement that he looked way, way better without it.
That’s my answer. Toupees, in my mind, seem to be associated with tacky suits and other elements of 1970s culture. Herb Tarlek-types were really not that uncommon in the 1970s and early 1980s, from what I remember as a kid.
My high school band/choir director wore a toupee.Everyone knew…it was not much of a secret when his photo appeared on that year’s Band Calendar with him bald, and he had a full head of hair when school started in the fall. He supposedly had two, and some of the kids would watch for the subtle differences between them. They really didn’t look that bad…but the last time I saw him, now that he’s well into his eighties and frail, and his remaining hair (that shows) is white and wispy…the red toupee doesn’t quite cut it!
There is a very well-to-do man at my church who wears one, and he really should pay more and get a good one. A man my age that I saw for a while runs a toupee company, and his toups are really very good…I had no idea he was wearing one when we met until he showed me a picture of himself from a few years back. He has also invented an adhesive that makes wearing one more comfortable, I understand.
I think a lot more men wear them than you would think…they just wear good ones.
Bing Crosby did not wear his toupee when he went out shopping.
If you are put on a boring business presentation, I like to zone out and guess whether you are wearing a rug or wig, and I have the time to look really closely. I’m pretty sure that Jon Stewart of Daily Show fame has a toupee, but I don’t have him in Hi Def.
I remember watching a recent performance by the artist formerly known as The Artist Formerly Known As Prince. That is to say, Prince. When he finished he jumped down from the short stage, perhaps 12 inches, and he reflexively reached for the top of his head as if to catch his hat. But he wasn’t wearing one. I said “Hey! He’s wearing a rug!”.
The first 3 reasons in the OP are pretty good. But there is another reason. A man getting a rug is like a woman getting a new chest. People are going to notice that you’ve suddenly got more than you used to. And for a lot of guys being insecure because you’re bald is not as bad as people knowing that you’re insecure about it. I’m as bald as Wallace Shawn. I can’t just walk in on Monday with a Jack Lord toupe and think that no one will know it’s fake.
My father, like his father before him, blah blah blah, went bald at a young age. He got hair transplants that took, but in kind of a weird configuration. He wears a toupee, and has since before I was born.
Anyway, a few years ago, we were visiting the 'rents. My dad’s toupee came off in his hat, so when the hat popped off, it took the rug with it. The sprog took one look at him, got wide-eyed in shock and said, “Your hair broke, Grandpa!”
Well, I did a Google search to see how many people get transplants each year, but it got swamped in the noise of ads for, well, hair transplant clinics. Which does suggest that some non-trivial number of people are doing it. How much of a diminution percentage-wise in the number of older balding guys you would need before you thought it was visibly down in the population as a whole, I don’t know. But I’d imagine at least several million guys have had transplants, and I would think the ones who care enough to go through the pain/trouble/expense of surgery would overlap to a goodly extent with the set of guys who previously cared enough to hide their baldness with a rug.
I agree that Propecia and Rogaine are unlikely to have a huge effect, since neither of them seem that effective and neither really claims that they can regrow a full head of har from a cueball or monk’s fringe, as opposed to slowing down thinning/receding and/or growing some wispy little tufts.
I used to get a laugh everytime the felon ex-mayor of Providence, RI (Buddy Cianci) wore his at a press conference. He favored the cheapo ones (made with synthetic hair)-it would glow green under fluorescent lights! It looked like somebody glued a piece of astroturf to his head!
My ex-boss wore a toupee. He just retired at the end of last year. Actually, I counted at least three of them, all a slightly different shade of brown. Only one actually came close to matching his natural hair color, so he’d have a ring of different colored hair around the edges when he wore the other two. Worse yet, he wore his hair in a deep part down the middle that exposed the weave. My coworkers and I had a hard time keeping a straight face at times having to look at that train wreck.
