Bald men would pay up to $30,000 not to be bald anymore

The average bald man would pay as much as US$30,000 to restore hair to their head, finds an illuminating new study out of Appalachian State University.

Entitled Willingness Toupee, the report surveyed 151 bald men and determined that they would gladly part with thousands of dollars for even slight improvements to their hairline.

“Balding men are willing to pay considerable amounts of money for an improvement in coverage,” concluded the study’s three authors, none of whom appear to be that bald. “There are obvious incentives for innovation in the hair care industry,” they added.

Test subjects were recruited using Amazon Mechanical Turk, an online crowdsourcing marketplace. One hundred and 51 American bald men responded, representing a diverse array of baldness from pronounced widow’s peaks to total hair loss.

The men were first asked to rate their baldness using the Norwood Baldness Scale, a seven category scale that ranks baldness from “1” (no hair loss) to “7” (cue ball). The partial hair loss of future king Prince William, for instance, ranks as a “4.”

Test subjects were surprisingly young, with 71 per cent aged 18 to 35. They also generally exhibited shame for their baldness, with 23 per cent saying they concealed their hairline with hats and more than a third reporting that they’ve attempted a comb-over.

The men were asked how much they would pay to advance a single category in the Norwood Scale. For example, how much they would pay to advance from Leonardo DiCaprio’s current mature hairline (2) to the complete lack of hair loss he exhibited when starring in Titanic (1).

“The situation is that you could pay a one-time fee to improve hair coverage,” read the survey.

On average, the men were willing to pay between $5,000 and $6,000 per Norwood category. Taken to its greatest extreme, this means that the men valued a move from total baldness to complete hair at roughly $30,000 — about the same as the current median annual income for a U.S. citizen.

It’s also well within the range for many types of rudimentary hair transplants.

“Future research could also consider compensatory facial hair and mitigation of back, ear and nose hair,” concluded the paper.

The paper is not peer-reviewed and given its preponderance of puns, may not be entirely serious. Regardless, it still ranks as one of the few studies looking at the economics of hair loss.

Prior literature on the subject is mostly company-funded studies, such as a 2015 survey from the hair care company MR. claiming that men are more fearful of losing their hair than their job.

A 2016 study in the journal JAMA Facial Plastic Surgery also came to the somewhat expected conclusion that men who had undergone hair transplants were “rated as appearing significantly more youthful, attractive, successful, and approachable.”

However, this contrasts with the findings from a 2012 study finding that men with shaved heads were perceived as being stronger, taller and more dominant than those with full heads of hair.

“Men experiencing natural hair loss may improve their interpersonal standing by shaving,” it wrote.