SIX THINGS I WISH I'D KNOWN BEFORE I WENT BALD – AND HOW I GREW TO LIKE IT

I have been bald for almost three years. Some people – primarily my brother – will tell you that I have actually been bald for much longer than that, but I like to count from the moment I realised it was pointless to pretend that I still had hair. The moment I stopped trying to keep it in place with chemical sprays. The moment I abandoned the comb-over. It has been almost three years since I bought an electric razor from Argos and buzzed the whole lot off.

It’s perfectly normal to go bald – two thirds of men will experience some amount of hair loss by the age of 60 – but, when it happens, it can swipe the legs out from underneath you. Because it’s only hair, isn’t it? No one needs hair. The expectation is that, as men, we should just bottle everything up. Nevertheless, I found myself destabilised by my baldness, so much so that I wrote an entire book about it: Bald: How I Slowly Learned To Not Hate Having No Hair (And You Can Too), to help me adjust to my new reality. But now that I’m out the other end of it, I’ve started to look back on my pre-bald self with pity. If you’re going through the same thing at the moment, I feel for you. To help, here are the things I wish I’d known.

01. All Of Your Feelings Are Valid

My dad is bald. And as a kid, completely unaware of the karma that was aggressively winding up to kick me in the arse, I used to tease him for it. Now, obviously, I wish I had never done that, because losing your hair is an enormous thing to go through. It shouldn’t be, because hair serves no biological function – it won’t save you from freezing to death or cushion your skull in an accident – and yet it is.

An entire quadrant of the scientific community seems to exist solely to remind balding men how bad their lives are. Last year, a study was published entitled ‘The Psychological Consequences Of Androgenetic Alopecia’ (the fancy term for male pattern baldness), and the results were stark. Men who were losing their hair, it found, were consumed by bad feelings, including the fear that others would notice, feeling less attractive and getting teased by their peers.

And it isn’t entirely in our heads. One study sent out a fleet of near-identical CVs to employers, some attached with photos of bald men and some with pictures of non-balds. Guess what? The majority of employers invited the non-balds in for an interview. Studies that have asked women to attribute personality types to photographs of men have shown that we’re seen to be less successful and friendly than other men with hair. Imagine starting to see your hair go and realising that this is your future. So, be nicer. I say this as much to my younger self as I do my six-year-old, who teases me for being bald even though he is definitely going to be bald as an adult.

02. Talking About It Is The Key To Acceptance

Here’s a slightly grim story. My mum died of cancer a few years ago. Aside from the obvious, the worst part of it was when we knew she had cancer but couldn’t bring ourselves to say the word ‘cancer’ out loud, for fear that it would somehow make things real. Which was a very stupid thing to do because it was already real. By avoiding the word, all we were really doing was deluding ourselves. As soon as we got it together enough to openly say ‘cancer’, things got easier. We could discuss it. We could hold it in our hands and examine it because it had a name. Suddenly, it wasn’t so scary.

On a much less serious level, the same can be said for baldness. The worst part of going bald is the self-deception. If you don’t acknowledge the fact that you’re going bald, then maybe it means that you aren’t actually going bald. This is silly. Go and talk to any man who has been bald for any length of time. As soon as you cross the line from ‘going bald’ to ‘being bald’, everything improves immensely. I’ve spoken to a few men in their seventies who have been bald for decades – my dad is one of them, Larry David another – and it doesn’t matter to them at all. They simply absorbed the hit and moved on. I’m a relative newcomer to baldness, and I’m already starting to see their point.

03. Hats Will Become Important

When you are bald, you will spend half the year with a very cold head and the other half with a very sunburned head. The answer to both of these problems, you’ll be pleased to hear, is hats. In the winter, you will keep a balled-up beanie in your coat pocket and pull it out whenever the temperature dips below about 7°C. Likewise, the warmer months will also be spent wearing a summer equivalent because there’s really no pain on earth like having a warm shower with a sunburned head.

You’ll spend your first bald year trying on endless variations of summer hats, until you find a style that suits you. Maybe you’ll get lucky and suit baseball caps. Maybe you’ll have to work a little harder and explore panamas and baker boys. Either way, every Christmas morning from now until the day you die, you should expect to unwrap a hat. Embrace the journey.

04. You Will Become Part Of A Wonderful Brotherhood

When you’re bald, other bald men will come up and tell you about how they went bald. And it’s brilliant. Hand on heart, I have never once heard a bad Going Bald story. One person I spoke to only realised they were going bald when they took off their cap to scratch their head and touched bare flesh. Another didn’t realise until a university professor slapped them on the bald spot as they walked past.

Some saw the signs early and shaved it all off. Others, like me, preferred to cling on to the bitter end. Men, we’re always told, aren’t natural sharers. We don’t like being vulnerable. But if you put a bald man in a group of other bald men, that all goes away. I’m always surprised at how sweet and sincere men are when they discuss how they went bald. It’s an unexpectedly lovely community.

05. No One Else Cares

This is the important one. So much of the negative feeling that the bald and balding experience is rooted in other people’s perception of us. We don’t care that we’re bald, but we do care that you might care about it. But the truth is that most people absolutely do not care one iota. Most men, over the course of their lives, will lose some of their hair. Basically, the world is full of bald men. One game I’ve started to play whenever I’m out in public is to pay attention to how many bald men are around me. It’s always loads, and I wouldn’t have noticed a single one of them if I hadn’t been looking for them specifically. See? Even I don’t care about bald men, and at this point I am essentially King of the Balds.

06. You Might Even Start To Like It…

While it’s true that baldness prematurely ages you, there’s an upside to that: now that you’ve prematurely aged, everyone else is going to age so much faster than you. Exhibit A here is Patrick Stewart. He looked old and bald when he made Star Trek in the 1980s, but he hasn’t changed a bit in the 45 years since. He’s ageing beautifully. And so, bald friend, will we.

In fact, as much as I grouch about it, I actually prefer being bald most of the time now. It’s much more practical, as I don’t have to worry about brushing my hair before I leave the house. It’s much more efficient, now I no longer have to spend whole chunks of my day making awkward small talk with a disinterested hairdresser. Honestly? It’s pretty great.

Bald: How I Slowly Learned To Not Hate Having No Hair (And You Can Too) is out 25 April (£11.95, Profile Books)

2024-04-24T15:03:45Z dg43tfdfdgfd