4 hours ago
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It is with mixed emotions that I announce the end of baldness. Rest in pates, old friend. This year will see the very last generation of men who, having arrived at the threshold of their 30s, are forced to accept the loss of their hair, with all their future sons and grandsons nipping instead to Turkey for a little implant and some kofta. Gone today, hair tomorrow.
It’s true, look around. Compared with the Sean Connerys and Bruce Willises of yore, the number of bald celebrities on screen today can be counted on a single fist. The surgical technology has evolved, the transplants have become more accessible, the preventative drugs have improved, the death of bald is nigh. Like combovers, the hair plugs bring their own acts of faith of course, with hairlines so straight and thick it appears sometimes as if they are creeping down the face at night like a mask – every time I see one on telly I’m reminded of the Simpsons episode where Homer gets an evil hair transplant that plants its roots in his brain, leading him to murder Apu and Moe.
But their proliferance means, God, this will be the last generation of combovers, truly a dying art. All these small monuments to youth sculpted in a bathroom mirror at 7am, designed with thickening powders and special brushes to look dense even under strip lighting. Each combover is a poem – and if not exactly a poem, then at least a limerick. Each one is an act of gorgeous magical thinking. And each one is destroyed daily, not just by rain and wind, but by other people’s limited empathy, and crucially, eyesight. I joke but I respect it, I do – these small acts of concealment are often oddly moving, and tell, not always the story their wearer intended, of youth and vitality, but one far more vulnerable and authentic: about loss and fear, and other things that have no words for them yet.
What’s happening, too, as more men have these procedures, is that more men are talking about them. The shame of vanity is lifting. Something which always interests me when people talk about their cosmetic surgery rather than keep it a secret or deny they’ve had it, is the accepted dissonance between image and reality, the insistence that appearance and fantasy creates its own reality, overriding time and nature and what has come before. Like, does a facelift still give the illusion of youth if everybody knows you’ve had a facelift, and you’re blowing out the candles on your 60th birthday cake? Sure, a hair transplant un-balds you, but unless you’re willing to start a whole new life where nobody ever saw you recede, doesn’t the baldness always remain, right there under the hair? And what does that mean?
I don’t want to sound like a scold – I understand as well as anybody the impulse to, if not perfect, then at least improve yourself and your appearance, but living within that dissonance is almost as uncomfortable, perhaps, as living in a body that looks its age. While the lack of shame at discussing procedures is undoubtedly a good thing, there’s probably an interesting calculation we could do to try to quantify variations of hair shame.
There’s the shame of being bald compared to the shame of having a transplant and thus, on your return home, red-headed and woozy, admitting that initial original shame, weighed somehow against the external forces that insist on all these shames… Each one rattles in hand luggage against the next. The politics around women and body image has evolved to the point where pride in things like wrinkles and bellies is encouraged, but as far as I know there is as yet no such movement towards acceptance of hair loss, or room to talk about it as a kind of grief.
The death of baldness coincides, perhaps uncoincidentally, with a renewed interest in men’s hair. A recent Observer news story reported on the rise of the men’s perm, “inspired by curly-haired style icons such as actors Paul Mescal, Jeremy Allen White and James Norton”. A fashion lecturer at Southampton University said, of the move towards textured curls, “You can have money, wealth and power. But thick hair for men is linked to masculinity, virility and identity.” In my local barbershops, boys are all having the “broccoli” (short back and sides, with a long bouncy sheaf of hair on top that falls forward over the forehead, resembling… broccoli) and parents are largely outraged at either the upkeep, the hair product (and sometimes perms) required, or its messiness, or both. If we were to dig in a little deeper, perhaps there would be anxieties there about their sons’ masculinity, hair acting as a mark of gender identity, with long hair and treatments of course traditionally associated with women.
It made me think: maybe the perm is one small marker of progress in the evolution of hair in regards to masculinity. If male body image and its associated issues of shame and surveillance is catching up with women’s, then surely a similar positivity activism around acceptance of hair loss is due? Leading soon to a mainstream embrace of baldness, and (my prediction for 2026) a mass Googling of transplant reversals.
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