By the age of 30, although it might have looked as though I had a full head of hair, evidence of thinning had become so apparent that I adopted a side parting as a precautionary measure. And, look, yes, I know that every bald man reading this just stood up and shouted, “But the side parting is a gateway drug that leads to a full combover!” — but I was young. I didn’t know any better.
By 32 it was becoming harder to hide my thinning crown. My hair became more elaborately messy, like a painstaking abstract installation called Thatching the Impossible. By 34 I had become a nervous wreck, my hair less a traditional haircut and more an ornate but useless flap. Soon the moment could be delayed no further: I had to shave off the whole thing, or what pathetic amount was left of the whole thing. Now, at the age of 44, I am extremely bald.
The day I cleared away the thinning scruff from my head and stepped into my new life as a bald man I visited my dad. He was also bald, and had been for 35 years. He was the most important bald man in my life. How would he respond? Would he warmly welcome me to the bald fraternity? Would he have secret advice that only a true veteran of male pattern baldness would know? Would my baldness connect us on a level at which we had never previously connected?
To answer those questions at once: no. None of those things happened. Instead I got to Dad’s house and I waited for him to say something. He didn’t say anything and I eventually left. I spent a few weeks dissecting my visit. Why didn’t Dad say anything? Was he trying to spare my feelings, knowing the lasting damage that a careless word could cause? Maybe he knew me better than I expected and realised that reacting too quickly — positively or otherwise — would overload my delicate feelings. No, it was none of these, as became apparent on Christmas Day.
Now, bear in mind that I went bald in June. At dinner, at the exact opposite end of the year, my dad sat across the table from me, looked up at me in shock and said, “When did you shave all that off then?”
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So. Lots of people won’t notice. But plenty will. And their reactions will carry weight depending on a variety of factors, including how long you have known them, how much you value their opinion and whether or not they are an idiot. Let me run through the spectrum of bald reactions I’ve received. And, just for the hell of it, let’s score them too.
Step forward my wife. Obviously I care enormously about her opinion, so I was acutely braced against rejection here. After all, baldness isn’t explicitly mentioned in traditional wedding vows. Yes to “in sickness and in health”. Yes to “for richer, for poorer”. Less so “for having beautiful golden hair like Thor, the Marvel superhero I most regularly declare my love for, or for looking like a potato”.
To make matters worse, even when my baldness was impossible to hide, my wife kept subtly egging me on to grow my hair longer. This, I suspect, is because my baldness indirectly confronted her about her own mortality. Nobody wants to be reminded that death comes for us all.
My wife was the first person I saw post head shave. Her reaction was measured and muted. There was a moment of slight shock (in retrospect I should have warned her that I was going to do it), followed by a semi-convincing “I like it”. Obviously I don’t believe her, but I do believe that she’s reluctantly willing to accept it. In other words, she feels the same way about my baldness as I do. 8/10
If you’ve outed yourself as a newly bald man, brace yourself for acquaintances to tell you that “at least you have a nice-shaped head”.
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Good compliment, right? Wrong. Listen — of course colleagues, school-gate parents and friends of friends are going to say that. Put yourself in their shoes. Someone you’re on nodding terms with has approached you with a radically altered appearance. You’ve been put on the spot to say something, anything, to acknowledge this. You don’t know the person well enough to be completely truthful, and you’re human enough to realise they’re probably sensitive to criticism at the moment. So instead you reach for the nearest platitude. The compliment feels nice to hear, but the skull-praisers would say the same thing to anyone, even if their head were the shape and texture of a pine cone. 5/10
I have a group of friends from my school days whom I cherish. Especially since — with one notable exception whom the rest of us secretly hate — we’ve all gone bald. I was the last of the group to go bald, and it was pleasing to know that they treated me as I treated them: by saying something like, “So you’ve gone bald then,” before moving the conversation along without ever referring to it again. 10/10
The weirdest, but also sweetest, reaction to my baldness came from a school mum. We don’t run into each other often. But a few weeks after I went fully bald I saw her in a supermarket. “I like your new haircut,” she said.
How on earth do you respond to that? My gut instinct was to scream, “What? You think I wanted this? Lady, I look like a thumb now! Who could possibly want that?!” But I’m glad I didn’t because that would be a psychotic way to react to a well-meaning compliment from a relative stranger. Eventually, after fumbling around for a while, I settled on, “Thanks, but I didn’t have a lot of say in it.” 7/10
If you’ve been going bald for a few years, you’ll almost certainly have one person in your life who has been egging you on to shave the whole thing off. In my case that person was my younger brother Pete. When he first saw that I had, he yelled, “Oh, thank God!”
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It’s hard to not resent a reaction like this. Because not only is it the sort of infuriating, button-pressing “I told you so” response that a younger sibling can land, but — and you must never tell him I said this — he was sort of right. My hair looked terrible in its final years. I just wish he wouldn’t enjoy being right as much as he does. 2/10
This has only happened once, so don’t get your hopes up. Your baldness will not attract romantic advances in any quantity. The only way that you are going to increase your attraction to anything is to paint your head yellow and hope that a passing moth mistakes you for a lightbulb. But, nevertheless, this happened to me.
I was talking to a person who hadn’t seen me without hair before. We discussed it and she said, “This is my favourite look on a man.” She explained that she has dated a number of bald men in her time. Some of them had shown her pictures of themselves with hair and she maintained that she still preferred them bald.
Now, it is my theory that she prefers bald men because they are meek and entirely lacking in self-esteem, which gives her an edge in the power dynamic, but she denies this. Either way, as nice as this was to hear, she followed it up by saying what I suspect most women keep to themselves. “I’m one of the 30 per cent of women who find bald heads attractive,” she said. “Not like the other 70 per cent, who probably find you repulsive.” 3/10
This one stings. Christ, nothing says, “You are forever a changed person,” like failing to be recognised. The first time it happened was at a crowded work event, where I was looking to find an acquaintance. We had met only once before — and although the pandemic had happened in between — I located her quite easily.
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I said hello. I received a blank stare. I told her who I was. Then she said, “Oh my God, Stu! I’m sorry, I didn’t recognise you, because . . .” and then she gestured loosely at the top of my head. Which, sadly, was a hypersonic missile blast to my entire sense of self. 0/10
One crumb of solace I’ve found from going totally, irrevocably bald is that, without saying a word, my head lets people know that I can roll with the punches. Am I happy being bald? No. Do I like how I look? No. Am I doomed to grimacing whenever I see a photo of myself? Probably.
But, on the other hand, does the state of my head signal to the world my capacity to live with failure? You bet it does. When people see me they should think, “Well, that man’s life clearly hasn’t gone the way he hoped it would. But look at him. He’s still moving through the world despite all this disappointment. What an indefatigable inspiration this man is to all of us.”
© Stuart Heritage. Extracted from Bald: How I Slowly Learned to Not Hate Having No Hair (And You Can Too) by Stuart Heritage (Profile Books £11.99). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on online orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members.
Exactly how bald are you?
In 1975 an Oklahoman doctor named O’Tar Norwood developed the Norwood Classification, which is essentially a bunch of pictures to show you how bald you are. If you’re Norwood Stage One, then it means you’re not bald (so pleased for you). By Stage Three you’re either starting to develop an unstable forelock or a thinning crown. By Stage Five you have a pronounced bald spot that is starting to split the bridge of your head. If you’re Stage Seven then congratulations! You are Stuart Heritage. This is the baldest you can get, a level of baldness so pronounced that people who perform hair transplants suck air through their teeth like perplexed plumbers when they see you coming.
Baldism is real!
In 2000 a German study sent CVs to prospective employers with photos attached. In some jobseekers had full heads of hair. Others had been Photoshopped to make them look bald. With crushing inevitability, despite their identical professional experiences, the fully haired candidates were picked for interview more often. The same goes for love. In 2021 Canadian researchers asked women to describe the personalities and traits of several men, some with hair and some without. Again, the bald men were generally judged to be less successful and friendly. Small wonder that, in a 2022 survey of bald and balding men, three quarters claimed to have had less luck than their hairier friends when it came to dating.
