PHOTOS: The truth about whether Donald Trump is really bald

There is one very good reason why Americans should vote for Donald Trump and make him their president next year: If he is elected he has promised to stop styling his hair in the familiar "onion loaf" look, as Saturday Night Live once called it, and opt for something simpler because his current "do" takes too much time in the morning.

Thus we might get an answer to a question that has vexed the globe for decades: Is Donald Trump really, actually, bald underneath that combover?

A White House spokesman said Trump's hair was "fake."

Could that be true?

Here is the best photographic evidence on the current state of the TrumpDome.

Trump's hair is styled in a way that strongly suggests he is trying to disguise the fact that he is actually bald. (Note to all bald men: No one is fooled by the combover. Just trim it short.)

But the best we can say is that Trump is not technically bald, but he probably is thinning.

Surprisingly, Trump has been fairly open to challenges about his hair.

In 2010 he appeared on the Ryan Seacrest radio show and let a producer touch his hair. He also raised the front of his hair to display his hairline. Here is a gif of the crucial sequence:

And a sharper screengrab:

You can see the full video here. It looks as if he has a full head of hair. Albeit very long hair, styled in a way that appears to place a large layer of hair on top of the hair growing immediately out of his head. His hair has two layers, in other words.

On the campaign trail in June, he again let a stranger touch his hair:

This moment came when he was talking in a press conference about the people who don't like him. "Maybe people don't like my smile. Maybe they don't like my hair - which is real by the way, look at that sucker!" He lifted his fringe to show that hair is growing out of the front of his head. The press lapped it up.

Trump continued, insisting that a woman from the audience get on stage and examine his head with her fingers.

"Is that sucker real?"

"It's thin but it's real" she replied.

At another campaign stop, Trump again talked about his hair. In this Business Insider video you can see he invites yet another woman to look at his head and asks her if it's real. "It is," she says, but she doesn't touch it.

In 2014, Channel 4 persuaded him to take his hat off and run his hand over his hair, with the same result:

Trump's breezy, unafraid, unforced style suggests he is telling the truth. Men who are trying to disguise their baldness don't generally invite public inspections.

But that doesn't solve the mystery completely.

Professionals disagree

While Trump has let people look at the top of his hair, and while he has lifted the front of his hair, his locks are nonetheless so strange-looking that professionals believe there may be another explanation.

Business Insider spoke to hair surgeon William D. Yates who speculated that it looks as if Trump has received a "flap" procedure.

With a flap, surgeons cut away the bald part of your scalp and stretch the remaining hair-covered skin into the gap, sewing it up over the wound. A 1993 book about Trump's life contains a section which alleges he had this done, according to Men's Health:

In the 1993 highly-unauthorized book Lost Tycoon: The Many Lives of Donald J. Trump, the Donald allegedly confronted his then-wife, Ivana, over a botched scalp flap surgery by a plastic surgeon she had recommended.

"Your fucking doctor has ruined me!" Trump purportedly screamed at her, before pulling out fistfuls of her hair.

Trump has, to say the least, denied these allegations.

Professionals are divided as to whether he has had work done. In Men's Health, Dr. Paul McAndrews, a Los Angeles dermatologist believes the giveaway is that Trump does not have the natural "apex" hair recession above his temples that all men get as they get older. Even when men retain a full head of hair they generally still have deeper apexes (think about Dracula's hair).

The lack of apex recession is indicative that Trump may have had hair flap surgery to pull hair-bearing skin over his apex areas, he says.

But "a top celebrity hair stylist - who asked to remain anonymous," told Popdust for a (surprisingly thorough) discussion of Trump's hair last year that the hair is all-real:

"I don't believe Trump has had a transplant of any type, or that he wears a hair piece. To me, it looks like a case of the classic old "double combover." I would hazard a guess that Donald's daily hair styling routine involves some rigorous back-combing, followed by teasing hair from the left of his head over to the right side-then, teasing sections from the back over the front, finishing off with an Ozone-busting fix of industrial strength hairspray.

That theory is bolstered by this series of photos of Trump landing at his Scottish golf course in a helicopter on a windy day. His hair gets blow around. It certainly isn't as thick as he'd like it to be. But it doesn't reveal actual baldness or, as many suspect a wig or toupee.

Verdict: He's not bald. Just weird.