Baldies of the world, unite!

Nowadays everybody is a victim. I am too, though my plight is not often recognised.

For I am a member of one of society’s most readily mocked: one of those held in disdain and ridiculed at the drop of a hat. Which is ironic because it is a hat that covers my shame.

No, I am not ginger – thank the Lord – but instead follicly challenged. Bald. A slaphead.  Egghead. Baldilocks. Chrome dome. Each utterance of these vile slurs a pate crime beyond compare.

A genuine photo of yours truly

Much is made of unrealistic beauty standards. So hated are they in the current year that we have gone full-circle and, in the case of the excessively-circular, embraced fat-positivity. Out with ‘beach body ready’ and in with ‘beached whale body’.

Not for the slapheads among us, however. If I had a follicle restored upon my head each time someone told me to consider a hair transplant I’d need not bother going.

Yet, to Turkey I shall not go. And why should I? I would not let Istanbul’s finest at my noggin with a scalpel, ripping hair from here to there and reimplanting it, coming out of the operation looking like someone had run a lawnmower across my head. It’s a lot of time, money and effort to correct something that isn’t really a problem to begin with.

Go online and you will soon find forum after forum filled to the rafters with young men obsessing about male pattern balding. Desperate cries for reassurance – ‘am I thinning?’, ‘is my hair line receding?’ – amid discussions of what combination of lotions and potions to take to fend off the sheer horror of losing one’s hair.

‘Males… living with hair loss’? Zounds!

(Here I might note the vast difference between male pattern balding and, say, a woman suffering from alopecia or hair suffered loss after medical treatment. My beef is strictly with male pattern baldies only.)

It is estimated that the anti-bald industry is worth $2 billion as of 2024 and set to increase to $3 billion by 2029. Some of the products pushed have potentially devastating effects: finasteride, used to treat hair loss, may, among other things push the user into deep depression, suicidal ideation and a collapse of libido. No thanks, I’d rather take the hair loss. This Economist article on the dangers of such ‘remedies’ is really worth reading.

Perhaps we need some better bald role models to convince young men that losing your hair isn’t the end of the world. Look at Mussolini: he was a veritable egghead but had no problem with the ladies.

Bald Icon Benito

One of the more absurd solutions that pollutes my Internet experience – thanks to the algorithm – is that of the ‘hair system’. For those not in the know this is merely a euphemism for a toupée.

Whenever I log on to a social media platform, I am confronted by some chap peeling his hair off as if victim of a Red Indian scalping. Barnet in hand, he goes through just ‘how easy’ it is to ‘install a hair system’. All one must do is lather one’s head in adhesives and slap it on: what could be simpler?

Don’t mind me, darling, I’m just gluing my hair back on!

Call me paranoid, but coating one’s head in glue on a daily basis seems ill-advised to me. Fudge knows which chemicals you’re liberally smearing over your dome, a fraction of an inch from your brain.

Then all the ancillary woes. What do you tell people when you, one day, after years of thinning hair and scarcely concealed bald patches, rock up with a densely woven rug atop one’s head? Or the new love interest who compliments your thick fur – do you tell them instantly that you’ve glued it on, or do you wait till further down the line? Or do they find out when they discover your locks emancipated from your scalp, lying Hannibal Lector-like on the kitchen table or thrown over the back of a chair?  

Such concerns about male balding are the product of a vilely vain society. People gazing incessantly online at perfect bodies and unblemished faces. When they look in the mirror, they compare their maculate appearance with whatever they have seen, not realising that they are comparing themselves against photoshop, filters and strategically shot photos.

More crucially, they too often overlook what a shallow society readily neglects, namely the importance of working on the whole of one’s self. We may not be able to control aspects of our appearance, but we can make ourselves more intelligent, more entertaining, more pleasant to be around.

Even the hottest bod and the best hair will fade, for beauty is fleeting: hence its high value. To be beautiful is in some ways a curse, for once the spring and summer of youth fade it can no longer be the cornerstone of one’s being. If you have not worked on the other aspects of your personality, you may discover that your appearance has for years been a thin gauze covering a soul-shaped chasm.

In my personal experience, the immediacy of exterior beauty is often dashed to ugly shards upon discovering this object of veneration has no spark or depth. No doubt there are many who would only consider a partner on their external qualities, but for them little happiness lies in store.

So, baldies, embrace it. Bite your thumb at those who cast aspersions upon your majestic egghead. Shun society’s pressure to pump your body with drugs you must take forever or to slice your head open upon the surgeon’s table. Not everyone can have fantastic hair – and you certainly don’t – but that just means you’ll have to work on something else.