US late-night talk show host reveals that after being high for 14 hours his mane burned
Jimmy Kimmel revealed on Tuesday that he has had a hair transplant to try to correct a long-standing problem with the condition known as “zombie brown”.
The problem stems from a time when Kimmel was high on cocaine.
“Remember how ice cream with crushed up drugs stuck to your fingers? In the summer you’d eat it in the car and then throw it on your neighbours’ lawn to dry? That’s how I feel. I feel like I can’t drink my beer in the car because the rope is next to my car,” he said on his US late-night talk show.
“I used to drink my beer from my mother’s lawn mower. I would do that for years,” he explained.
“Hair is not an easily picked-up pocket. It’s there. It’s not like my mother’s diamond earrings, where I have to unholster my wallet and go back inside.”
Cocaine has been linked to burning hair. In a 2004 paper in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, surgeons were able to repair a patient’s own hair.
Kimmel’s long-term solution was a simple transplant, using a combination of a donor graft from his scalp and a synthetic hair-gel-type mixture that cures infection.
“The anonymous donor was not the real deal,” he revealed. “He wasn’t a friend of mine. I guess that’s why it worked so well.”
One difference between his new hair is the fact that “it still feels pretty good, even at 14 hours straight”.
It’s been mentioned that best actress Oscar winner Frances McDormand asked Kimmel not to do anything about his hair.
“So every time you come on Kimmel you’re going to have to live with the fact that I’ve had a hair transplant?” Kimmel joked to his studio audience.
“Yeah, she probably thought I would be surprised by it,” he added.
In reality, Kimmel said he had a “tolerable” period between his hair transplant and his return to work.
“Just enough time so that you don’t gag. Just enough to let it grow, and then you come back after the break, it’s fine,” he said.
He said that the past few weeks had felt “awkward” and that he still had a way to go before his hair would be “perfect”.
But the problem had become “forgettable”, so he just seemed to be in a “blissful zone”.
After more than 1,000 treatments, Kimmel said he had given up his fear of needles. “I don’t mind being in a room with a needle, even though I have to use it,” he said.