I’ve known my friend Alan for the best part of two decades, and whenever we have one of those wonderful 3am sozzled heart-to-hearts, one element remains the same: the Hair Loss Interlude.
This is the point at which Alan, often seemingly out of the blue, sighs sadly, ‘…and I’m losing my HAIR!’ — something he attempts to prove by furiously tearing out clump after clump. ‘See! See!’ he’ll wail, as I scrunch up my eyes and wonder how we can get back to talking about me again. If it all feels, as a method, counterproductive, I’ve never had the heart to say.
There’s something both deeply banal and horribly cruel about male hair loss. A large chunk of us know to expect it, but only a few can face it with good grace. Statistics tell me that about 6.5 million men in the UK will struggle with the most common kind of baldness, male pattern hair loss (MPHL); it affects 50 per cent of men over 50. There is also alopecia areata, where small specific chunks of your hair will randomly fall out, and alopecia universalis, where, unfortunately, at its worst, your whole body will end up bare. Still, if it is a natural process, and, in MPHL’s case an everyday one, it doesn’t make it any easier, as I’ve recently noticed among my group of friends. For me, you see, Hair Loss Interlude is cropping up more and more. I noticed it at dinner with a friend on Tuesday, another Thursday and at Sunday brunch. I had it with a mate at the cinema yesterday. In other words, help! My social circle is thinning.
In an age of wild technological advancements, it feels slightly quaint that baldness is still such a thing. Is it quite right that we’ve now had at least 11 iterations of the iPhone, but no one has twigged how to stop a balding pate? It’s not as though it’s a new concern: in ancient Egypt, people used to rub bat dung on their heads. Later ‘cures’ have included boiled porcupine hair, or goat urine, or a fun combination of opium, horseradish, pigeon droppings, beetroot and spices. Nowadays, of course, we’re not so silly as to put such concoctions on our heads; instead, we choose to eat them in Shoreditch restaurants. The treatments are much better, as is the discussion too, confirms hair specialist Anabel Kingsley.
‘I think it’s less of a taboo subject for men,’ confirms Kingsley, whose family’s trichology clinic has been ahead of the field for more than 60 years. More men than ever are getting treatment, she says, simply because more are available and there is more education online. Presumably, more discussion about it between men, too. The treatment her clinic offers doesn’t recover all your lost hair — that would be a miracle cure, I’m afraid — but ‘stabilises’ the process; the classic formula is combining application of Minoxidil solution to the scalp with taking a pill called Propecia. She says that clients vary from those who come in wanting hard facts and a scientific solution, to those who need a lot more hand-holding. I’d imagine a lot of her job is psychology, I tell her. ‘About 90 per cent,’ she laughs, only half-joking.
The last time I had the Hair Loss Interlude with Alan, and indeed Bill, Dom and Lee, I gave them my stock response: this is total nonsense! Or at least, barely noticeable. Your partner still fancies you! Which is always a victory, whether you’ve got an old-school Michael Bolton barnet or not. Still, I know it’s no consolation. After all, there is, at a basic level, the fear that hair loss will a) make you comical, and b) make you less hot, and who can imagine two worse things? This is what panics everyone, despite clear evidence to the contrary. Grant Mitchell, anyone? Okay, enough jokes. Vladimir Putin? Actually, a study by the University of Pennsylvania has shown that bald men are generally viewed as more dominant, as more likely to seal the deal. The catch is, though, that they’ve shaved all the hair off, and not dithered in a wispy, halfway-house space. They’ve not tried to defer the inevitable by clinging to the comb-over, the wacky fringe, the toupee. It’s cruel to mock those, but it does highlight an eternal problem: the more frantically you try to conceal something, the more horribly you tend to be found out.
And Kingsley is so right: managing your baldness is about managing your confidence. Basically, you cannot let it psych you out. Admittedly, some don’t: some men don’t care about balding; some men don’t have an issue with confidence. But its implications about ageing, attractiveness and generally being vulnerable are hard to dodge. It feels indicative, for instance, that the biggest supposed side effect of taking Propecia is that it lowers your libido. This the first thing my mates bring up when we talk. Yet in the end, few think it has radically altered things, and Kingsley says she basically never sees that effect on her own clients. Because it is primarily psychological. If you go into the treatment thinking about it, the battle is already half-lost. ‘And if a man is really worried about that side effect, going back and forth, I just tell him, don’t do it,’ she says.
As for what else causes hair loss besides genetics, the list is surprisingly long. It could be scalp problems, it could be deficiencies in B12 and iron. It could be overdosing on tuna, weirdly — Kingsley says an awful lot of her clients gobble it after a workout, but the problem is that the fish can contain high levels of mercury, which also causes hair loss. In fact, diet is the main issue, she says. Crash diets are really bad for your hair; when you starve yourself, your body diverts all the nutrients from creating hair cells to things that are admittedly more vital, like, say, your organs. Six to 12 weeks later, your hair will fall out, and you haven’t sussed why. ‘I think that’s something that’s not talked about very much,’ she says. ‘Men can have eating disorders as well; they can have body issues, they go on fad diets. And it can affect their hair.’
And this is where you have to slightly pity the modern male: you spend so much time and energy on one problem, trying to get your summer abs, that you invariably end up creating another. In fact, sometimes it seems that trying to be a man is like being the wall to a really large fortress. You have to keep everything high and hard, and you’re always trying to fix the holes and cracks. With time, though, the edifice can only give way, so you do eventually get to thinking: who cares about the turret? That’s the rough theory, anyway, but I’m not sure if it helps. I really must try it out on Alan, next time we’re waffling on at 3am.
HOW I BECAME BLISSFULLY BALD
By Nick Howells, deputy chief sub editor
It started when I was 17. I went to the barber for a ‘flat-top’, a very groovy hairstyle (imagine a skinhead rockabilly) in my part of rural Wales back in the 20th century. And suddenly it was cruelly revealed: my receding widow’s peak. Over the following years, I tried to ignore my vanishing hairline, evermore struggling to make what little I had left look like Robert Smith from The Cure.
About 10 years or so later, I was sharing a house with four male friends. One of the guys bought a pair of hair clippers and everyone went crazy for them, shearing themselves into brutally cool Vin Diesel-alikes. I had to join them. But I was scared. Self-conscious.
I did it anyway, but I didn’t feel very Vin at all. A few unconfident days went by and then I visited an old friend. The first thing she said after seeing me and picking herself up off the floor was, ‘I never knew until now, but you’re actually quite good looking.’
One candid sentence was all it took to make me realise that hair doesn’t necessarily make you happy, attractive or self-assured. Not everyone fancies a baldy, but plenty do. And if you can channel just a little bit of Diesel, they might even fancy you more. It’s a Vin-win situation.
PS. Still not convinced about baldness? Keep your hair and you won’t save £6,000 on haircuts, like I have so far. When a builder in the street oh-so-wittily shouts, ‘Your head is on upside down!’, you won’t be able to retort: ‘At least it’s not on inside-out like yours!’ And after a shower you will never, ever dry your head in 1.28 seconds flat.
