I can’t remember the day when I realized I was losing my hair. I think it was a decade ago, when I noticed I only had to shave my legs every two or three months, instead of every two or three weeks. Or it could have been when the hair ball we extricated from the shower trap grew from pea sized to ping pong ball to tennis ball. Maybe it was when I found I had to de-hair my hairbrush on a weekly basis.
I was thinking about this as I waited in line at Sam’s Club, behind a little old lady with blue hair delicately combed over her thinning scalp. This will be me someday, since I suffer from female pattern baldness. Baldness may chip at the male ego, but it completely decimates the female one.
A little back story: I used to have thick hair – long, luxurious tresses, the kind that made French braids a snap to do. In high school, it was parted down the middle and ended somewhere just above my waistline. Often I would braid beads into thin ropes at either side of my head and then pull them back – a sloppy hippie version of Bo Derek’s head. My hair was so thick back then, an ornamental activity like this one would take a couple of hours to complete.
I once had so much hair I could afford to have someone lop off most of it to achieve the windblown “Farrah Fawcett” look. Everyone wanted to look like a Charlie’s Angel back in the day, even as they were dismissing them as feathered and bubble-headed sex objects that couldn’t seem to keep a minimum of apparel on. When I was single and flush with money, I could afford occasional all-day excursions to Rocco Altobelli’s, where I had to lie down with my head dangling over a table in order to get a spiral permanent. I don’t know how many rollers it took – 100? 200? Beauty hurts, and if you’re not a natural beauty, it hurts even more.
I was proud of my head o’ hair, even though it was flat as a board and wouldn’t take to styling without help from chemical perms in order to add body and bounce. I believed I’d inherited decent head hair genes, having derived some of them from ancestors that included Native Americans, the Greeks, and the Japanese. If anything, at one point I thought I had too much hair. You know what they say about the grass being greener on the other side.
Article comments
1 - Victor Lana
Joanne, I don't know if there is a way to understand the pattern in a family concerning hair. My father has a thick head of hair in his nineties, but his father and brother were bald in their twenties.
It is probably a mystery, but at least there is assistance at CVS.
2 - diana hartman
I only recently learned that males who bald or are balding before age 30 have a LOT of testosterone - that also contributes to their much lower rate of prostate cancer.
What purpose could possibly be served by a woman losing her hair is beyond me (and apparently science).
Glad you found a little something at CVS!
3 - roger nowosielski
Interestingly, most of gay folk - and I'm speaking of males - are on the balding side.
Of course it's anecdotal, strictly personal observation, and limited to the Bay Area, CA., but still . . .
Perhaps the Yul Brynner and Telly Savalas types, including Michael Jordan, are urban myth.
Are there any scientific studies?
4 - diana hartman
Roger, read it about on BBC. The study is out of University of Washington School of Medicine. Baldness 'could be good for your health' say scientists
5 - Joanne Huspek
My bald uncle looked like Telly Savalas (half Greek helped) and he was a straight guy.
Of course, he lived in Portland.