Honestly, Is Baldness Really That Beautiful?

It’s easy to say bald is beautiful when you’re a female with hair down to your ankles, but what about the poor bald guys who have to look in the mirror?

Would you believe the man in this picture is only 35?

Okay, I’m lying. But if you died his minimal remaining fringe hair brown and smeared his face with a bit of anti-wrinkle cream, that’s how he would have looked at age 35 – or hell, even at age 25. Men like this one, with only the thin horseshoe fringe barely clinging on, are termed Norwood Class 7 balders. That’s the summit of the top of the bald mountain no man wants to climb. You don’t get any balder than this. Men with seemingly no hair are Class 7’s who shaved off their fringe hair, like the actor Telly Savalas or Michael Jordan. All these fellows started losing their hair shortly after they obtained their driver’s licenses, maybe before. By the time they graduated university, they were walking around with the shiny scalps they’ll display for the rest of their lives. When you see flashbacks of a youthful Homer Simpson or Jeffrey Tambor’s patriarchal character on Arrested Development, both are shown with half decent heads of hair. In reality, both men, as Class 7’s, would never have had hair as adults. You can actually see a young Jeffrey Tambor in his mid-thirties in reruns of Three’s Company and in its spinoff The Ropers. He was as golfball bald then as he is now.

I’m not a vain man, but bald scalps never looked becoming to me. At just 10, I was paranoid I’d end up looking like the man in our picture. My grandfather on my mother’s side was balder than a bald eagle on chemotherapy, and back then I was told and believed that baldness was inherited through the mother’s father. Actually, baldness can be inherited from either side of the family. Well, no saving grace there. My father’s father was a Class 5, and my own father, as far as I can remember, was emerging into a Class 5 of his own. My chances for growing into adulthood with a hairy scalp looked bleak. Was I to be one of the doomed to have to smear sun screen upon his chrome domed scalp?

If I’d known anything about genetics then, there were a few meager strands of hope for me. Baldness is a sex-linked gene, which manifests more obviously in men than in women. My maternal grandmother’s brothers all possessed full heads of hair, and my paternal grandmother also came from a family where apelike scalps were not unknown. If my mother were carrying hairy genes, there was a chance my scalp would receive her endowment. Problem is: how do you know what genes your mom is carrying?

Male pattern baldness is triggered by hormones, a genetic predisposition, and an internal clock that governs when each follicle starts to shrink. The hormones don’t kick in until puberty. That’s why you never see any prepubescent bald tykes roaming about the playground. Nonetheless, by age 14 I was already using special anti-dandruff shampoos to prevent inflammation of the scalp. A short while later, I was using biotin shampoos and hair gels that purportedly counteracted the enzyme 5-alpha-reductase from turning the male hormone testosterone into dihydrotesterone (DHT).

[Click the picture to read the rest of this brilliant article]

Related posts:

1. The Baldness Song
2. Are You Really Only As Old As You Feel?