CNN
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There are three important days in the life of every bald man: The day you realize you’re losing your hair, the day you realize you should shave off the rest of your hair, and the day you finally do. To gracefully bald is to reduce the distance between these landmarks as far as possible. I learned this the hard way.
Before recounting my decade of denial and deception, here’s the bare truth: I suffer from baldness that I call “Prince William”. It incorporates an extended circular patch at the top (“The Friar Tuck”) and back corners (“Jude Law”). The last two must meet. Or to put it another way: The bridge between the last strongholds of my follicular activity is getting thinner and thinner, my hairline drifting apart like two continents. What once resembled Pangea is now little more than a pedestrian bridge across the Bering Strait.
My mother was the first to notice this tectonic shift. “You’re getting thinner,” she commented, glancing over at the then 25-year-old me at the family dinner table. It seems that the woman who brought me to this world should also detect my first signs of aging. After all, hair loss means you’ll likely look like a big baby again. (Though my mother recently confirmed via WhatsApp that my head was full of hair when I was born. “I don’t make babies go bald,” she added futilely.)
What follows will be familiar to men around the world. Realization is a process of denial gradually eroded by moments of shock and then resignation. Denial is believing that what is not in the mirror (specifically, the panorama in my head) does not exist. Shock is to come across a photo of myself, taken from above, and wonder, ‘Who exactly is that bald guy standing where I am?’ Resignation is seeing an acquaintance walking past a bar, his shiny hair just fooling himself, and muttering to my wife: “Don’t make me like him”.
I almost did. Five more years will pass until I admit defeat. I moved to Hong Kong and found a magic barber who proved that coolness is more than just a hairstyle. As a budding breakdance (and bald by choice: hair is what gets in the way of turning), he’s adept at arranging my remaining curls in a way that maintains the illusion.
We had an unspoken understanding. But when I moved in again last year, my attempts to explain his magic to new hairstylists became increasingly awkward. It felt like I was making them accomplices in my hoax. “Just to make it look… better?” I say, before taking off my glasses and hoping what comes out will keep me going for another month or three. Barbers kept playing together. But I, too, was just deceiving myself.
Instagram’s algorithms discovered my situation and started feeding my feed with clips of cool makeup looks. Suggestions from loved ones are even less subtle – like when my wife returned from a business trip with a present, only to reveal a bottle of UV-blocking scalp spray. Who said romance is dead?
In the meantime, I started making self-deprecating jokes and became more comfortable discussing my fate. Friends invariably offer the same three condolences in response: 1) That “at least” I can grow a beard, 2) that I have a “nice head”, whatever that means, and 3) that, if I were lucky, I might end up like the common gold standard of attractive bald white guys: Bruce Willis.
If you find yourself reassuring a bald man that he looks like Bruce Willis, I assure you he’s heard it many times before. That’s reassuring, anyway.
As your hair thins, small curls begin to stick out in new and unexpected directions. Human hairs long for company — and when their neighbors leave, they don’t know where to go.
I would spend cumulative hours trying to convince the individual strands to stick together. Then one winter morning, as I was messing around with a group of strays, one moment was clear: I had become more insecure about my hair than what lurked underneath.
That night, I bought a trimmer, took it to the bathroom, and gave myself the only hairstyle that I will wear for the rest of my life. More than 10 years after diagnosis, male pattern baldness has finally won. A chapter of my youth ended with a pile of limping corpses on the bathroom floor.
My wife tells me that I look a lot better than before. But she had to say it. Meanwhile, my editor assures me that I look “fitter” (indeed, my elongated figure may have cost me a few seconds of my swim time). I tell myself that other benefits include faster drying after a shower, no money to cut my hair, and less time getting ready every morning.
Immediately after completing the deed, I sent a selfie to my friend Anton. “Welcome to the sexy zone, comrade,” he wrote back.
Anton was the first of my friends to go bald. While I had the honor of holding out until the age of 35, he was an easily angered 18-year-old when he first discovered the curls on his pillow. The phase of denial lasted only until his early 20s, when it was broken at a theater studio by a teacher instructing the whole class to “lean until you can see Anton’s baldness.” “. He then performed what Anton describes as “a tap on the top of my head”.
“I was like, ‘What the hell?’” he recalls via Zoom. “I didn’t say it, but I felt attacked. Not just because he knocked on my head, but because I didn’t even know I was bald! That was the first time I heard about it.”
He soon found looking at his pictures boring. He’s also assured that “at least” he has a beard and a “nice head” – again, whatever that means. Someone told him he looked like Jason Statham, who was just the British equivalent of Willis. For Anton, going bald was a “very lonely” experience, especially at such a young age.
“There is something particularly isolating about something that happens to you that is socially acceptable to laugh at,” he said. “No one feels anything other than, ‘It sucks to be you.’”
For the record, Anton looks very bald – and I’m not just responding to his compliments. Unlike me, he has some muscles on his body. As a boxing trainer, he suits the bald look. in one 2012 . researchwhich I cite simply because I endorse the results, University of Pennsylvania researchers have found that images of men having their hair removed digitally are said to be “superior, taller and healthier” when compared with the original photos.
“It’s a lot less appealing to keep your hair than it is to just get rid of it,” says Anton. “You can see sharper. You just change the image of yourself in the mind’s eye, and then you suddenly appreciate it for a different aesthetic value.
He added: “It took me 35 years, but now I really like the way I look. “I’ve come to realize that any criticism of my appearance is not based on anything other than an impression of what other people might think.”
I’m not too worried about being seen as unattractive. I also don’t worry about looking older or being called a ‘scumbag’, the way we are denigrated in the UK. It’s a loss of identity that I struggle with.
My hairless head will forever be my outstanding physical attribute. For strangers, I am now officially “that bald guy”. Who ordered the lasagna? The bald guy at table seven. Where is the bathroom? On the left, just past that bald guy. EASYoes queue start here? No, it goes back to that bald guy.
My fear that all men without hair look the same is reinforced by the fact that people keep saying I look like my dad. no one has when noted this similarity before. Now, suddenly, we were like two bearded, shiny-headed peas in a pod. There is a certain poetic justice here, and I often have to reminisce about the silly jokes I would tell my father. He assured me that he did not receive them personally.
My father started going bald when he was 16 years old. When he was my age, his bare head rivaled the mullet and perms of the 1980s. But he seems really calm with his baldness. He told me via Zoom: “I can’t remember ever being sensitive about that in my entire life. Maybe boomers don’t like talking about their feelings, but I trust him.
“I was not a great or attractive teenager at all,” he recalls. “But I tried to build a good social life because I could make people laugh. I decided, pretty early in life, that I could only achieve anything if I relied on my intelligence, charm, and personality. Baldness is pretty low on my priority list.”
Whether he’s to blame for my hairline is up for debate. Learn Identical twins have found that genetic factors account for about 80% of male pattern baldness, although the genetics are still poorly understood. An old wives’ tale holds that hair loss is passed on from the mother, and therefore, your grandfather’s hairline is the best predictor of your own. However, there is no convincing evidence for this and my father sees “no observable pattern” in our family (his generation includes a Friar Tuck, a Jude Law and a full-haired person).
Lifestyle factors may play a role, and I often wonder if my fate is due to eating trans fats and not getting enough sleep, or living in Beijing during those dark years. most heavily infected of the city. But my narrow retreat was probably predestined. As such, I feel at peace with it. Even though I’m not gracefully bald, I can still yearn To be bald with grace.
Anton’s advice to me and friends new to his “sexy zone” is as follows: Moisturize your head daily, shave every few days, and wear a hat to block the sun and cool down. If you have a beard, groom it; If you are muscular, look out for scary people and disarm them with a smile. And remember, he concludes, how you treat yourself is more important than what — or doesn’t — sprout from the top of your head.
My father’s advice was a bit blunt: “If I were you, I would focus on developing your intelligence, your charm, and your character.”
