The bald and the beautiful
Every six to eight months, I become convinced that I am finally losing my hair.
VANCOUVER — I’ve just bent over to tie my shoe when I feel Leah’s fingers flitting through my hair.
“Am I crazy or is it looking a little thin back here?” she says.
This has become a recurring question for me in recent years, as every six to eight months I convince myself that I am finally losing my hair. It started around the time I turned 30. I was combing my hair after a shower and became convinced my hairline was receding. I asked Leah to take a look. She told me she couldn’t be sure, but that I did have a bald spot on the back of my head.
When I was 8 I fell off of my parent’s couch and cracked my head open on the floor. I’m not sure if it’s from blunt force trauma, or stitches, or scar tissue, but ever since I’ve had a barren strip at the point of impact. Sometimes barbers and hairdressers ask about it. I tell them about the accident, and how it happened when I was very young. I ask them to cut my hair so that the spot is covered.
I knew this was the strip Leah was likely looking at. Still, I sat in bed Googling hair restoration clinics in the city. My pulse was racing.
Growing up with a bald father and bald uncles, I thought that I would embrace hair loss relatively easily, that I could stare unflinchingly into the abyss of aging and never blink. “I don’t understand why people hold onto the scraps,” I said. “They should shave it off. It looks better.” I was sixteen with a full head of hair. Sometimes I straightened it, sweeping the bangs off my face like I was Tom Delonge.
Secretly I hoped to avoid balding altogether. I had seen my father struggle with his own hair loss, how it affected his self-image starting in his 30s, how he viewed this private recession through the same crushed lens as Seinfeld’s George Costanza. The sitcom, which we watched together most nights, cast baldness as a loss and bald men as the ultimate losers. Losers for living their lives without hair, but also losers for trying to grow it back. In one multi-episode arc, George — played by Jason Alexander, who started balding when he was 17 — starts wearing a toupee, only to be offended when he is rejected by a bald woman. In another episode, he plays advisor to Elaine’s boyfriend Kurt, who has recently discovered he, too, is balding.
“Live every moment as if this was the last year of your life,” he says “Because in many ways it is.”
Every joke contains a kernel of truth. My dad, I think, recognized this. For him, being bald kind of sucked. The least society could do was acknowledge it.
As I booked a free consultation at a clinic on Burrard Street I wondered, however irrationally, whether admitting the problem might expedite it, whether my hair follicles might wither and die at the first whiff of a bad vibe. I had spent my teens and 20s like a Chia Pet, growing my locks out on a whim. At 25 my hair was long enough for, if not a man bun, then a man dinner roll. Some people graciously told me I looked like the guy from Criminal Minds. Others, then-Alberta Premier Rachel Notley.
I hoped that embracing a Use It Or Lose It attitude would strengthen, if not my hair, then at least my resolve to trim it when the time came. But my long hair suggested otherwise. Like pretty much every other surface observation you can make, my hair informed the stories people told about me, as well as the stories I told about myself.
But stories can change. For every George Costanza or Prince William, there’s a Michael Jordan or Jason Statham. While bald men often score lower on attractiveness than those with hair, studies show they score higher on perceived leadership. They are not, in other words, inherent losers. And yet modern perceptions of male pattern baldness remain similar to those held in the era of Must See TV. There’s evidence, for example, that Western bald men are viewed as less attractive and older. Another study, conducted using Tinder, found that bald men attract less attention from women (though, interestingly, bald men seem to attract other men just fine). While Seinfeld co-creator Larry David has become an oft-cited celebrity hall pass, his experience is likely the exception and not the rule.
In November, pictures of Harry Styles with a shaved head circulated online, leading some (mostly female) fans to speculate he too had gone bald. Some went so far as to theorize that the singer had been using wigs to maintain his famously shaggy appearance. While ultimately untrue, the conspiracy tapped into a harsh reality rarely discussed by male celebrities. Namely, while they will always be afforded more grace than their female counterparts, they too are forever on notice.
After all, why go bald when you can go to Turkey for a cheap hair transplant?
That was more or less my feeling as I rode the elevator up to NuHair Medical. After filling out the requisite paperwork, a guy roughly my age combed through my hair wearing white latex gloves. I told him about my post-shower discovery, that hair loss runs in my family.
He took off his gloves. “At this point, I wouldn’t recommend anything,” he said. “If you’re still worried about it you can always come back.”
I was there for all of 15 minutes.
Three years later, I would stick my head under a red light every day forever if it meant having a full head of hair. But I also know that, in doing so, I’d be propagating a specific narrative, one where I am nothing without these dirty blonde locks. This simply isn’t true.
I know because I have seen it.
On the side of my fridge, there is a picture of my father playing the guitar in a white t-shirt and cut-off jeans. His hair is already thinning. In front of him, you can see me, a toddler, smiling.
In that moment, he is my everything.
