“I am super proud to be like this, I look good, I have been bald for more years than I have hair, it is part of my personality.” The speaker is Jesús Díaz, Churras para los amigos, 43-year-old Cantabrian teacher. Díaz knows that there is a range of possibilities that would allow him to reverse his alopecia, but he doesn’t even consider it. He looks good and is liked. And he likes it. “I have to say that it has worked well with girls, many have approached me and told me that they are attracted to bald men.”
However, his attitude towards baldness was not always like this. “I started noticing that I was going bald when I was 19, and at first you don’t feel good. It’s not that it traumatized me, but I was aware of it. And since people don’t cut themselves, they told me: ‘You’re showing off, Zidane,’ he recalls. His experience represents that of many men, like those consulted for this report, when they notice for the first time that their hair begins to recede from the forehead, or that it thins somewhere on the head. A study from King Faisal University (Saudi Arabia) published in October indicates that baldness seriously affects aspects of men’s lives such as self-confidence, relationships or their job expectations. Another report, prepared in Poland in 2022, indicated that 81.3% of men with androgenic alopecia (the most common) had felt stress when seeing their hair loss and 60% felt shame, especially those between 18 and 25 years.
Lawyer Pau López, born in Lleida 35 years ago, claims that his baldness was incipient when he was 25 years old. “The comments I received were joking, and made me feel insecure about my physique.” Carlos Rodríguez, director of About Beauty Comunicación, 44, says that since his hairline, inherited from his maternal family, has the shape of what is known as a receding line, he has had references to hair loss before. that it was real, starting at 30. “Normally they tell you: ‘You’re going bald’, like that, directly. Lately, the comment has also been accompanied by solutions.” There are, and many, and it is a strong market. The company Coherent Market Insight estimates the value of the hair loss treatment industry worldwide at 9 billion euros last year, and projects that it will reach 13.3 billion in 2030.
In addition to the treatments to prevent it, there are grafts, which through hair transplants from other areas of the body to the scalp allow hair to be recovered on the head, and which also grow year after year. The Insparya clinic, which opened its doors in 2019, has performed 15,000 surgeries in these years (pandemic in between) and 33,000 men have passed through its consultation, as Dr. Carlos Portinha says by email. The Menorca clinic receives between 12 and 18 patients a day worried about their baldness, of which, according to Dr. Sandra Carrascal, 35% continue. “Those who do not continue do not usually explain the reasons that lead them to do so, they only say that they need to think about it, but when they do say it, it is usually an economic issue,” the expert points out.
“I have a friend who has hair and another who is going to do it, and they ask me how I can be like this knowing that I can avoid it, so I feel a certain pressure, but they are my friends and you excuse everything to them,” says Jesús Díaz about your current relationship with your baldness and how others perceive it. The social and personal pressure is such that there are even activists like Harry James, known on the internet as Bald Cafe (222,000 subscribers on YouTube). “If you Google ‘going bald’, the message it sends you is how to avoid it. All he saw was ‘you shouldn’t go bald, take this medicine, comb your hair this way to hide it, get grafts,’” he details about how his idea of creating a community for bald men began to emerge. He shared his experience on his YouTube channel, and soon dozens of men shared theirs with him. “They told me that it helped them, that they didn’t know how to express it or who to tell it to,” he recalls by video call from his home in London. In a opinion column (and incidentally, self-promotion, since he announces that he will publish the book bald, bald in English) in Guardian, on April 16, journalist Stuart Heritage commented how, despite all the complexes and problems that alopecia entails, the issue has always been considered so trivial that men have decided to suffer it in silence. “And this pisses off, because if men talked about hair loss more openly, the big truth about it would be revealed. And it is this: going bald is terrible. Being bald? Not so much,” he writes in his article.
James tries to communicate through his social media channels that baldness is not accompanied by any type of physical pain, that the main problem is mental. “When I went to university I sat in the back so that no one could see the top of my head. He did not participate in class, he did not interact with his classmates; That was the real problem,” he exemplifies. “When you shave, you tell the world: ‘This is how it is,’ you have no way to hide it. At first you may feel some discomfort, but you are free of anxiety and you can be okay with yourself and others knowing.”
This was precisely Pau López’s experience. “In my case, first I shaved my head and it was later when I embraced my baldness. It was in 2020, at 31 years old, in confinement, and more out of necessity than conviction. I went to the hairdresser practically every 15 days to “do” my hair. With a new cut, I felt more attractive and less insecure about my physique, although that lasted three days. I could easily spend 50 euros a month on hairdressers. Right after shaving my head for the first time, I was embarrassed to go out or for my friends, coworkers, or family to see me without hair. However, a few weeks passed and I realized that all those insecurities and problems I had before were disappearing. Somehow, I felt less shaved bald than I did with hair.” Now, he likes it so much that he rejects the idea of getting implants, although he has received quite a few comments about it. “Before they made me feel insecure, now I usually cut them off and tell them that I don’t need it, that I look good,” he says, and points out: “There are comments about a person’s physique that are not socially accepted, but it seems that nothing happens because “suggesting to a man that he wear hair.”
Jesús Díaz remembers two key moments that led him to decide to shave. First it was because of a comment from his friends during a music festival. “We were in the typical back-to-back showers that there are, and when I asked them for the shampoo they started laughing and commenting: ‘It’s the gel.’ The final one arrived shortly after. “At 22 years old, they took a photo of me from above. When we revealed it and I saw myself, I thought: ‘Mother of God, we have to shave it,’ and I shaved it.”
Julio González, coordinator at a sports facility, handled it much better from the beginning. This 34-year-old from Córdoba remembers that he learned about his alopecia at 16, from his barber. “He told me while he was cutting my hair, that I was on my way to becoming like my father.” However, he was no problem for her. “I have always been quite confident in myself, also thanks to my family environment and my friends. When I entered university I started shaving my hair and soon afterward I started shaving.” When asked if at any time he used products to prevent hair loss, as the rest of those consulted for the report did, he responds with a brief no. He, too, has not considered hair grafts.
Harry James recommends that men who don’t have it as well as Julio (most of them) look around. “Go to a soccer game, to the beach, to the park. You will see that there are men with the perfect hairline, others bald, and everything in between. Thats the reality. The people you are close to can be your greatest references.” He also recognizes that celebrities who normally wear his baldness help normalize it, such as Jason Statham, Dwayne Johnson, Stanley Tucci and a long etcetera. Some have even referred to it openly and with humor.
Actor JK Simmons, speaking to the American program The National Desk during the film presentation The accountantin 2016, he referred with irony to the number of bald performers who participated in said film. “I play a bald guy. There are actually a curious number of bald men in this movie. Normally they don’t let us be [John] Lithgow, [Jeffrey] Drum and me being in the same movie. It’s an exception to that rule. “Apparently we are breaking barriers in Hollywood.” In 2008, Patrick Stewart recalled in an interview an anecdote that occurred during a press conference during the premiere of one of the films Star Trek in which he participated, at the end of the eighties. “A journalist told Gene Roddenberry [productor de la saga]: ‘Look, it doesn’t make sense, you’ve chosen a bald actor for this role. Surely by the 24th century they will have found a cure for male pattern baldness.’ And Gene Roddenberry said, ‘No, by the 24th century, no one will care.’ There are three centuries left to know if the producer’s prediction is true or not, but it seems that we are on our way.
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