With her athletic build and razor-sharp cheekbones, Dublin-born Amber Jean Rowan was the kind of teenager other girls envied. Then, at 15, her hopes of becoming a model were dashed in an instant when a friend who was admiring Rowan’s freshly done highlights found a bald patch at the back of her head. “Within the year,” she says, “all my hair had completely gone.”
Now 29, Rowan is one of the estimated eight million women in the UK living with hair loss. Yet female hair loss is a condition very little is known about. When Rowan’s mother first took her to the doctor, “they told me it was alopecia and there is no cure. I remember the doctor prescribing me loads of steroid creams and steroid shampoos and suggesting that my mum bring me to see a counsellor. That was kind of it.”
Even the advice on the NHS website today says that although hair loss in women is often temporary, “there are no cures” and “if you’ve lost your hair, even temporarily, life will be easier if you can accept what’s happened and learn to live with your altered appearance”.
Which is a tough ask, especially when you’re a teenager. “I was a young woman trying to find her feet and have boyfriends and snog in bushes,” Rowan laughs. “But I was preoccupied with dealing with this hair loss. I just wanted to completely hide it — I was ashamed of it.”
She turned to wigs, but that became a challenge too. “I was still a teenager, I really just wanted to fit in, so wigs became my armour, but the whole process of buying one was an absolute nightmare. You’d go in and the guy would be much older, he’d put the wigs on you and his hands would smell like cigarette smoke. He doesn’t have alopecia so he has no idea what he’s talking about. Sometimes they would make insensitive comments about you or your baldness. Often the hair would be shoddy.”
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For Rowan, the self-esteem boost she needed came in the form of reality television. The esteemed model scout Fiona Ellis spotted her potential in The Model Agent, an Irish TV show searching for the next big name in modelling and in which Rowan took second place. “Fiona saw me and said, ‘It doesn’t matter that you have hair loss. You can do this.’ ” Rowan says that Ellis’s belief that she could be a working model is what gave her the courage to give it a go, but she still wore wigs constantly, feeling unable to face the world hair-free. It was a secret she was preoccupied with keeping.
She moved to London and started working as a model, but then, aged 19, her eyebrows started to fall out. “My agent at the time said, ‘There’s nothing else we can do for you. I think you need to go home and see if you can grow your brows back.’ ” In an industry that had yet to learn about diversity, Rowan was crushed, returning to Dublin to focus on acting and model when the opportunity arose. “I didn’t really truly deal with my emotions, so it was almost a case of delusion — I just kept going, kept trying, kept pushing down doors.”
In 2018 Rowan started Hair Free, an online information-sharing community for women managing hair loss with the aim of building a network for herself and other people with alopecia. “I had so many people contacting me through Instagram and Facebook asking for advice, and I thought why not create a place where women can gather to ask these questions?”
They ranged from where she buys her hairpieces to how to apply eyebrow pencil (she has become adept at drawing on natural-looking hair strokes with Illamasqua Eyebrow Cake and a flat angled liner brush). “It was by starting that community and building this lovely safe environment, as well as growing older and learning to appreciate myself, that things started to change. Getting to see and meet other bald women was such a huge thing for me. I took baby steps — a shorter wig one day, a lighter one the next.”
This, along with meeting her partner, Ben, whom she told about her alopecia on their first date, changed her outlook. Ben was the only partner she hadn’t waited several months to tell. Rowan says he asked a couple of questions and then the two just went on with their date. Five years on, they live together in Hoxton. In time, Rowan stopped seeing her alopecia as a secret she had to keep and eventually felt comfortable going without a hairpiece altogether. “Once I decided to embrace being hair-free, I saw the world shift.”
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Out of this has come her eponymous brand Amber Jean — launched this year and sold exclusively via her website — a range of stylish, ethically sourced wigs that cost from £1,100, scarves and hair and scalp products. Rowan also gives online consultations through the site. Some women have alopecia, but many are losing hair because of chemotherapy. The aim is to make buying a hairpiece a joyful experience.
As a teenager, once Rowan had found a decent wig, she felt bound to it for fear anyone would notice a change in her hair length or colour and figure out she was wearing a hairpiece. Now, though, she switches up her looks. “Experimenting with hairpieces can be so much fun. I can choose to be whoever I want on a given day. People perceive you differently with blonde hair or auburn, and that is so interesting.”
Today, she wears wigs only when she wants to. Expanding her brand is now her focus, with an unprecedented range of stylish and contemporary grey hairpieces launching, among other things, next year, but she still models on her own terms. After our chat she is leaving for work — she’s shooting a campaign for John Lewis, something she says would have thrilled her as a teenage model.
While getting to this point has been liberating, she still has hard days. “Sometimes when I hop on the bus and there’s some creep sitting behind me who won’t stop staring, that is still so challenging … If you’re having a bad day, maybe you can’t see past the fact that it’s their issue.” The difference for Rowan now, though, is that she recognises her beauty even on those days when the creep on the bus doesn’t. This is how she understands the distance she has travelled between the frightened 15-year-old she once was and the woman she is now.
Amber Jean hairpieces are available from amberjeanshop.comhttp://www.amberjeanshop.com
