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But You Still Have Your Hair...

gattino

gattino

Justified & Ancient
Joined
Jul 30, 2003
Messages
2,523
A delightful Airbnb guest from Taiwan has been chatting away with me all evening.

When I went into the kitchen for a drink of water she was perplexed, asking me "you drink tap water?! But you still have your hair!"

Pardon? Tap water in Britain causes your hair to fall out, it said in the guide books apparently. "Was this a Chinese guide book?" I asked with a smirk...no she said. The East Europeans she met (she lives in London) all say the same thing too.

Either this was some misunderstanding of London's famous hard water or a rumour deliberately spread to foreigners by bottled water companies.

I googled it. To my surprise there were a couple or three tabloid health scare stories in recent years making the claim, but its the first I've ever heard of it. To Johnny Foreigner however its a well known fact. We tap guzzling Brits are all alopecia time bombs.

Say it isn't so.
 
How bizarre :)

I heard some American podcaster speculating (in a playful way) that UK tapwater probably isn't fluoridated, which would explain our wonky teeth.

(That and the fact we don't generally have braces put on them the second our adult set have fought their way out of our bleeding gums).
 
The water in the North East smells really strongly of chlorine. I didn't notice it when living there but since moving away, I can't drink the water when I visit back home. It stinks of chlorine and tastes really, really odd. It brings both me and my wife out in teenage-looking spots and gives the whole family the runs.

So now we only drink bottled water when we visit the UK (despite me being born and raised there for 19 years).
 
:yeahthat: here in Wigan, the tap water sometimes smells very strongly of Bleach. It does put me off drinking it straight from the tap (or glass obviously) in fact i rarely even use it for the cats water bowl - i usually use cooled water from the kettle for this. it seems much better and doesn't smell after its been boiled??
 
Same with my parents' house. I was born there, but every time I return I really don't like drinking the water.
 
How odd. Here in Liverpool the water is from the mountains of Wales I always believed anyway, and taste as delightfully tasteless as water oughta.

But maybe its just a kind of taste blindness from familiarity. The same Taiwanese girl couldn't stand any dairy products and in particular the smell of milk makes her ill... yet I never noticed milk had a smell (I seem to recall on QI once they claimed chinese people think westerners smell of milk). On the other hand how anyone can tolerate the taste of coffee is beyond me.
 
Mythopoeika said:
You find it infuriating?
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Yup, it is genuinely like those hair-swishing TV ads, all long and smooth and wavy. Drives me MAD. I had it cropped really short for years, my excuse being that I was doing a lot of swimming and running etc, but I really couldn't be arsed with controlling it.

These days it's long, 'cos Techy likes it, and I wear head-tubes and clips to stop it moving around.
 
plastic wiganer said:
:yeahthat: here in Wigan, the tap water sometimes smells very strongly of Bleach. It does put me off drinking it straight from the tap (or glass obviously) in fact i rarely even use it for the cats water bowl - i usually use cooled water from the kettle for this. it seems much better and doesn't smell after its been boiled??
Click to expand...

That's quite noticable with the tapwater round these parts (N.London / Herts) sometimes. Lord knows what it is, but I'm guessing it's not yer actual bleach. It can get quite cloudy at times though, which does makes me suspect the money-grabbing water company is tapping it off from nearby swimming pools.

I do know that the water where I live now is partly from the Thames and Lea and also from chalk aquifers, which might explain why it contains enough calcium carbonate to make cleaning sinks and kettles, etc. a constant, irritating struggle.

Mythopoeika said:
Same with my parents' house. I was born there, but every time I return I really don't like drinking the water.
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Being brought up with the hardest water in Britain (looking forward to the 'documentary' presented by Danny Dyer, if Ross Kemp's not available) I've always disliked the taste of the soft (and probably much better) water when visiting family Oop North. When I was little I'd refuse to drink it and still find it a bit odd. Conversely folks from soft water areas don't think it tastes of anything (it's just water!) whereas the London stuff, for example, is unpalatable. Yet I like every mineral water I've ever tasted. Are mineral waters technically 'hard' does anyone know? They're full of minerals, after all - which are supposed to provide health benefits. That would explain why to me they taste not that different to the local tapwater...maybe just a little bit softer.

The strangest tapwater I've ever experienced was in an area of peat bogs. It chugged out of the tap in various colours from yellow to brown. Which was quite off-putting until we got more or less used to it.
 
Andy X said:
The strangest tapwater I've ever experienced was in an area of peat bogs. It chugged out of the tap in various colours from yellow to brown. Which was quite off-putting until we got more or less used to it.
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I remember a holiday, years go, in a caravan in NW Scotland. The lady from the farm was showing us how everything worked, and she turned the tap on in the bath, which proceeded to let out a stream of light-brown water. Dad said "I suppose it'll clear in a bit?", to which she replied that no, it was always like that. It tasted fine, as far as I recall, though getting into an already "dirty" bath was a bit disconcerting.

Like most Brits, I don't think I'd ever heard the apparently common notion that our disgusting tap water makes your hair fall out. I'm almost tempted to start a thread to find out was other pre-conceptions and stereotypes foreigners have about the British, but I think I'd be afraid to find out!
 
If there was a problem, it could lie with the piping rather than the water. Metals leeching in.
 
Peripart said:
Like most Brits, I don't think I'd ever heard the apparently common notion that our disgusting tap water makes your hair fall out. I'm almost tempted to start a thread to find out was other pre-conceptions and stereotypes foreigners have about the British, but I think I'd be afraid to find out
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Back in the 80s..pre internet so perhaps it wouldn't be doable today....there was a very enjoyable show presented by slobber-mouthed former Mirror editor Derek Jameson, called "Do They Mean Us?" in which, for our amusement, they did a weekly round up of print and broadcast news and current affairs stories from foreign media about Britain. The question in the title was meant to imply bewilderment.

What I remember most about it is that Americans were obsessed with the loss of Empire "Having lost an Empire.." seemed to litter every explanatory report.

Punks were the other obsession at the time. Here's a clip from the show, of a japanese (it says..I think it was actually iranian, from memory) report explaining the phenomenon somewhat imaginatively to its home audience
 
I have been drinking fresh untreated water since 1993 and at 62 I still have my hair, albeit thinner and more brittle. And very very grey.

It wasn't deliberate, I've never heard of this, it just so happens that our house in the US had its own water supply from a 200ft deep well, and this house gets its water straight from a mountain stream.

My younger brother has been bald as a coot for 20 years. He drinks tap water. Case closed :)
 
gattino said:
Back in the 80s..pre internet so perhaps it wouldn't be doable today....there was a very enjoyable show presented by slobber-mouthed former Mirror editor Derek Jameson, called "Do They Mean Us?" in which, for our amusement, they did a weekly round up of print and broadcast news and current affairs stories from foreign media about Britain. The question in the title was meant to imply bewilderment.

What I remember most about it is that Americans were obsessed with the loss of Empire "Having lost an Empire.." seemed to litter every explanatory report.

Punks were the other obsession at the time. Here's a clip from the show, of a japanese (it says..I think it was actually iranian, from memory) report explaining the phenomenon somewhat imaginatively to its home audience
Click to expand...

Excellent find! I'd seen that propaganda film somewhere before (love the bit about meeting in a stable and deciding to shave their heads like horses). Down with the decadent capitalist West!!

Good to be reminded of Do They Mean Us? ('they surely do'). DJ was a kind of lower-brow Clive James, eh?
 
Cochise said:
I have been drinking fresh untreated water since 1993 and at 62 I still have my hair, albeit thinner and more brittle. And very very grey.
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I’ve also drunk untreated UK tap water for much of my 62 years. I have a fine crop of hair, though admittedly much of it is confined to my back, toes, ears and nostrils.

I’m also fit and well, apart from the standard UK maladies: hallucinations, impotence and anal leakage.

Tally-ho, yippety-dip and zing zang spillip!

maximus otter
 
Frideswide said:
Glasgow's water is nice :) It's soft, and tastes good. Issues I've heard of seem to come from eg the pipes in older buildings.
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Doesn't it taste faintly of Irn Bru?
 
My parents had a plumber fix our cold water tank in our home in the 70's and he (the plumber) found the skeletal remains of a dead pigeon .. so we'd all been drinking that water, Elisa Lam style, for ages.

I haven't got much hair on top these days, I tell people I haven't got a receding hairline, just a small face ..
 
Not relevant to the hair topic, but this is the appropriate thread nonetheless to share another international stereoptype that apparently exists about the British that we have failed to pick up on. You'll be quite surprised.

An Egyptian doctor who stayed a few weeks ago for a short while told me that the British reputation - not merely in Egypt, in his understanding, but generally among the outside world - is of not having a sense of humour. The reputation in fact the British like to impose on the Germans.

In his area of the world at least it was believed Americans could be funny, the British not at all.

He informed me of this apparent reputation in being - i assume - pleasantly surprised by the normal casual jokiness, wordplay and insincere insult of my (and as far as im concerned everyone else's around here) everyday conversation.

Trying ever to be objective and not self deluded - after all every country, city, village and hamlet in the world is under the false impression they are both uniquely and famously friendly/funny etc - i deferred to youtube videos purporting to analyse the difference between US and UK humour. He repeatedly expressed surprised and delight that things attributed to the British sense of humour were identical to the characteristics that define the Egyptian sense of humour. (To which i cynically thought..so basically generic human humour then?). Apparently in the Middle East at least Egyptians are the renowned kings of comedy. Perhaps an Iranian may demur, who knows.

But anyway now you know.. some other anglophones might think the British are famously witty, but it seems its not a universal cliche at all. Along with hair shedding tap water we're humorless bastards.
 
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