Amid all the “Nicole Richie pregnancy scare!” stories in this week’s tabloids is a much more amusing story about the tiny pregnant do-nothing. Nicole Richie was said to have been seen at a Santa Monica drug store with six boxes of Rogaine for women in her cart.

Pregnant headed-to-jail-bird Nicole Richie spotted [sic] at a Santa Monica drugstore looking pasty/skeletal, which explains those vitamin bottles stacked high in her shopping cart - but what really raised scoop-snoopers’ eyebrows were half a dozen boxes of Women’s Rogaine hair regrowth treatments. Said My Spywitness: “Nicole’s hair was looking thin and stringy.”

[From The National Enquirer, Mike Walker's column, August 20, 2007]

Nicole has looked like she’s having hair loss for some time, and she usually hides it decently with extensions. In the latest photos of her pregnant she looks much healthier with no-longer stick thin arms and some baby cleavage. Pregnancy usually results in hair and nail growth, so maybe she won’t need that Rogaine, or maybe she’ll attribute her pregnancy hair to the effects of the stuff.

I looked up the recommendations for Rogaine use by pregnant women and it’s not forbidden, it just “hasn’t been tested on pregnant women” according to the package insert. It’s probably not a big risk if they’re not advising against it. I know I was vain and dyed my hair when I was pregnant, so it might be a similar situation.

One thing that Nicole might find annoying after she has her little baby is the fact that women often lose their hair postpartum. It could have something to do with thyroid levels, but I know I had thinner hair after I had a baby and it took a few months before it was back to normal again.

Nicole Richie is not my favorite person. She seems like a class A bitch, especially given the way she treated Lauren Hastings after Lohan stole a bunch of clothes from the unsuspecting model. Interestingly enough, in the Vanity Fair story about star f’ers that we published earlier, quotes Richie’s boyfriend Joel Madden as saying “You can always tell how cool someone is by how they treat the people around them.” Hopefully he’ll be a good influence on rude-as-hell Richie, or maybe he’s just as much of a bullshitter as she is.

Here are new pictures of Nicole and Joel in Soho yesterday, thanks to WENN. Her newfound cleavage and baby bump are well hidden, unlike photos from late last week.