This may come as a shock to you, especially if you’ve spent the past few years using my byline photo as a reference, but I am bald now. Completely, permanently, irreversibly bald. So bald that my children have taken to calling me Egg. So bald that the first thing strangers notice about me is my scalp, rather than my excessively sour personality. So bald that, if I stand under just the right sort of overhead light with just the right level of perspiration, I in effect transform into a sort of sentient disco ball.
I am telling you this upfront because baldness has endowed me with a renewed sense of defensive self-deprecation. If you meet me and I don’t attempt to get ahead of the curve by drawing attention to my lack of hair with a bad joke, know that something has gone terribly wrong. I am so determined to inform everyone that I am bald, despite the wealth of visual evidence already at hand, that I have just written a book about going bald. It is called Bald. It has an egg on the front.
Bald is an account of my awful, hopeless, drawn-out attempt to reach a basic level of acceptance about my hair loss. I’m certain that few people throughout history have made as much of a mess of going bald as I did. In my early 30s, when I first noticed that my hair was thinning, I ran towards the expensive (and, clearly, unsuccessful) embrace of minoxidil, the chemical they put in foams that promise to halt male pattern baldness. Worse, I also endured a few years where – and I am truly ashamed about this – I sported a comb-over. All to try to hold off the simple truth that I didn’t have any hair left.
Baldness can absolutely wreck a man’s sense of self. Every few months, like clockwork, some kind-hearted researcher will publish a brand new study designed to reinforce how miserably the bald have it. Last October, for example, researchers from King Faisal University in Saudi Arabia determined that androgenic alopecia (the scientific term for male pattern baldness) can “significantly impair” aspects of a man’s quality of life, including his self-esteem, confidence, relationships and employment prospects. The previous year, another study found that 60% of bald Polish men experience a sense of shame, just because they’re bald. It’s truly upsetting.
And please don’t think that this is all in our heads, because there are also plenty of studies exploring just how prejudiced the world is against the bald. A few years ago, German researchers sent out fleets of near-identical CVs to prospective employers; the only difference between them being that some had pictures of bald men, and others had pictures of men with hair. With deadening inevitability, despite the similar qualifications, the hirsute men were invited for interviews with far more regularity than their poor bald counterparts.
So baldness is not great. But, hey, we’re men, right? It’s too trivial a subject to get worked up about, even though it makes us paranoid and anxious and has obliterated our sense of self-esteem. Even though we’re suffering through the grief of losing something we’re powerless to keep, we’ve all decided that it’s better just to suffer in silence.
And this is infuriating, because if men did talk about hair loss more openly, the one grand truth of male pattern baldness would quickly reveal itself. And that is this: going bald is terrible. But being bald? Actually not bad.
You won’t feel like this at first, of course. Before you reach the equilibrium of bald acceptance, you’ll have a number of painful obstacles to endure. You’ll have to meet everyone you know as a bald person for the first time, and you’ll find yourself having a heightened response to their reactions. There will also be a period of time where you suspect that your baldness is the only thing people will ever notice about you, as if you were the only bald man who ever walked the face of the planet. But, I promise you, it does get better.
Now, with the benefit of hindsight, I find myself wishing I had committed to my baldness long before I actually did. This is mainly because I’ve realised that bald men are everywhere, and nobody cares. A few months ago, when I was feeling particularly sensitive about the state of my head, I attempted a quick audit on my fellow passengers. I cast my eyes around and realised I could see at least half a dozen men with differing levels of baldness. The amazing thing was that I hadn’t noticed any of them until I actively started seeking them out.
Another unexpected consequence of my baldness is that I’ve found it easier to make male friends than before. I’ve always subscribed to the notion that it is almost impossible to make new friends as an adult. But now, at the school gates, other dads start chatting to me so regularly that I’ve started to believe it’s only difficult to make new friends if you have hair.
I think there are two potential reasons for the sudden friendliness of other men, and the one I favour depends on how monstrous my ego happens to be at any given moment. At my worst, I think I was just too beautiful with hair. I can only assume that men saw me, my amazing golden locks bouncing against the side of my angelic face, and thought: “That man is far too sexy for me to realistically befriend. What if my wife falls in love with him and leaves me to die alone?” But now that I look like a potato, that particular barrier has dissolved.
The much more likely reason, though, is that baldness helps to erase who you are a little bit. If hair serves any function at all, it is to act as an instant signifier of someone’s entire personality. Look at somebody’s hair closely enough – the style, the colour, the level of maintenance – and you can learn everything you would ever need to know about them.
Now go and look at a bald man. Harder, isn’t it? True, he isn’t completely unreadable. The man who is closely cropped all over gives out a different energy from the man who sports a luxuriant grown-out ring, for example. But, still, it’s harder to figure him out. Where does he get his news? Did he vote for Brexit? Has he ever thrown a piece of plastic furniture through a pub window? Is he the action star Jason Statham? All these questions are impossible to answer from visuals alone.
I can’t overstate how brilliant this has turned out to be. It’s like I’m perpetually in camouflage. Strangers call me “mate”’ now, because they can’t get a read on me. I found a puncture on one of my car tyres two weeks ago, and went to get it repaired. The last time I visited a mechanic, my stupid floppy milquetoast hair was a dead giveaway that I didn’t have a clue about anything to do with cars, and I was treated with the contempt I probably deserved. But that hair is gone now and, although I still don’t know the first thing about cars, it was much easier to bluff enough competence to escape without scorn.
I think people talk to me now because I could be anyone. A plumber, maybe, or someone who possesses a rudimentary level of knowledge about competitive sport. By the time they’ve taken the time to get to know me, and realised that I have no practical skills or traditionally masculine cultural touchstones whatsoever, I already represent a sunk cost to them. What are they going to do? Put in all that effort with someone else from scratch? Hardly. It’s too late. My baldness fooled you and now we’re BFFs.
Factoring in my vanity just a little, the portrait mode on my phone actually works now that I’m bald. This is unprecedented. For the uninitiated, your phone’s camera probably has a mode that artificially creates a narrow depth of field by blurring out the background in a photo while leaving all the humans in perfect focus. Portrait mode works brilliantly for everyone, except the balding. When your hair is a threadbare candyfloss tuft – as mine was for about six years – then your phone can no longer distinguish where your hair stops and where the background begins. As such, all portrait mode photos of men with thinning hair show the top of their head as a weird nondescript smudge. While this is quite reassuring (what a relief to know that Skynet can be defeated by something as simple as crap hair), it is a bit of a bummer when all you want is a nice photo of yourself.
Which isn’t to say that baldness will solve all your camera problems – I recently used a “here’s what you looked like as a child” filter on TikTok, and my bare scalp overwhelmed the algorithm to such an extent that it ended up giving me a kind of nebulous, floating stubble cloud where my hair should have been – but one step at a time.
I also cannot overstate how much baldness will save you time. There’s no need for me to brush my hair before leaving the house, or towel it off after swimming. There is zero difference between me at my most dishevelled and me at my most preened any more. A little while ago I had to get dolled up for a big event. Do you know how I did it? I got out of bed and put a tuxedo on. That’s all. No combs. No shampoo. From the neck up, I looked exactly the same as I do when I’m chugging Doritos in front of Emmerdale. Everything is so easy now.
I can walk through rainstorms without worrying what it will do to my hair. I wouldn’t say I’m entirely weatherproof, because goodness knows there is nothing more painful on planet Earth than a slightly sunburnt scalp. Nevertheless, compare this with the total fear that marked my balding days, when even the slightest breeze threatened to undo all my careful hair-based latticework, and I suddenly feel untouchable.
Finally, when you lose your hair, you realise that the entire internet is full of information designed to make you feel bad for being bald. Perform a Google search on the subject and you’ll be inundated by two types of content: newspaper articles that breathlessly recount all the new research that might one day eradicate baldness, even though stories like this have been published for decades, and baldness very much remains a thing; and websites for hair loss clinics, all desperately trying to attract every passing click with articles about how awful it is to go bald and how easily they can get your hair back. “Come with us,” they coo, “give us all your money and we’ll have you looking like a normal person again.” Might be wigs. Might be lotions. Might be transplants. Doesn’t matter. The first time you look at these sites, they’ll probably work. You will end up feeling bad about your hair, because they want you to feel bad about your hair, because that’s how they earn their money.
But just you wait. Hold your nerve for a few months and you’ll be as bald as I am. You’ll be so bald that no treatment on the planet will be able to give you hair again. At this point, you will achieve a level of beautiful freedom. You are now a wonderful, proud, bald man.
Bald by Stuart Heritage (Profile Books Ltd, £11.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
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