Male botox, men's make-up, testosterone oriented grooming salons; we find them all a little, well, disheartening.

Come on lads, our secret fantasy is the notoriously naughty forest ranger Robin Hood, not Robbie Williams. Buffed, bronzed, balding, no thanks. Oops, did we say balding?

Though Ed Harris may be a handsome devil, we'll allow that losing your hair's got to be a bit traumatic. And while we've been waxing poetic about new cures for the female aesthetic obsession, cellulite, it seems that the boys have been doing a little research of their own.

The buzz started with a few plastered pub confessions back at Uni, but these days there's no four pint minimum to get a fine haired man to admit his propensity for the non-surgical alternative to hair plugs, Propecia. The one and only US drug approved to treat male pattern baldness, this "miracle" cure has (since becoming available in 1997) progressively been gaining a loyal, word-of-mouth following.

Put simply, Propecia prohibits hair loss, promotes re-growth and, unlike that £90 anti-dimple cream, been proven to work. Of men ages 18-41 dealing with an ever increasing forehead, 55-66% possessed a thicker head of hair after two years on the pill.