The art of going bald gracefully
As Rob Lowe laments Prince William’s hair loss, Harry Mount reveals how he learnt to live without his own crowning glory
Sadly, I don’t share many attributes with Rob Lowe. But we do have one thing in common – a pathological fear of baldness. Yesterday, in The Daily Telegraph, Lowe confessed that “one of the great traumatic experiences of my life was watching Prince William lose his hair. He’s going to be the f------ king of England! And there’s a pill! The first glimmer that a single hair of mine was going to fall out, I was having that stuff mainlined into my veins. And that’s what I did for the next 30 years.”
And that’s one of the many differences between Lowe and myself, besides his dazzling looks and movie-star career. He did
something about his incipient baldness – while I did absolutely nothing. Lowe’s right when he says that “British men set a low bar”. When it comes to vanity, I agonised about losing my hair, but didn’t do a thing to stop it.
I remember exactly the moment I saw that first – literal – glimmer of baldness. It was just after a family funeral when I was 30. A photo showed me from the back (those pictures, like photographs from the top, are the killer baldness shots) with a faint halo around my crown.
I tried to push the baldness worries to the back of my mind – just near the back of my head, in fact, where the problem was intensifying. As with Prince William’s condition, my baldness was a slow-burner. It wasn’t
Great streaks of scalp were visible, bouncing back big, juicy rays of Tuscan sun
until I was 33 that I saw another killer photo, this time on holiday in Italy, taken from above, just after I’d gone swimming. Great streaks of scalp were visible, bouncing back big, juicy rays of Tuscan sun into the blue skies.
Ever since – I’m now 47 – I’ve gone for the shaven look. I’ve been asked about the benefits of going bald, but sadly, there aren’t any – except that I can cut my own hair for free, and in five minutes. The things people say to cheer you up – baldness correlates with higher levels of testosterone; women don’t mind it – do anything but. Horrible as it is to have a shiny dome, it is the best of many horrifying alternatives. The comb-over – once the self-deluding device of a billion baldies – is over. Its greatest exponent, Sir Bobby Charlton, has long since said goodbye to his.
I do, though, applaud Prince Charles’s magnificent effort. The Prince of Wales hasn’t quite got a comb-over. He’s happy to display a starter-plate-sized bald spot on his crown, but his hairdresser does a brilliant job of taking his generous supply of hair at the front and whipping it up into a decent mass which, from the front, gives a good impression of a full head of hair.
Charles has fallen prey to the curse of the Windsors, which has struck Prince Edward (but not Prince Andrew) and is rapidly doing for Prince Harry’s ginger barnet, vanishing daily at the crown.
Funnily enough, recent kings have avoided the curse. George VI, Edward VIII and George V all had good hair. I wonder whether the Queen Mother introduced the dreaded bald gene into the family.
If pills really did cure Lowe’s baldness, then he’s pulled off a miracle. I know plenty of people who’ve tried them and all they’ve done is lose loads of money and loads more hair.
The wig as a bonce-covering mechanism is beyond parody. I delight in spotting them. No wigmaker I’ve ever seen has managed to disguise that telltale ridge between real and fake hair.
The most convincing option is the hair transplant: I’ve got friends with some really impressive ones. But they tend to have a lot of thick hair circling their bald crowns, which allows them to transfer hair supplies from the edge to the middle, without having to manufacture the very tricky front hairline – almost impossible to recreate convincingly; it always ends up looking far too neat and even.
President Donald Trump has apparently used a combination of cover-ups, too. Comprising a comb-over stuck into place with buckets of hairspray to disguise the remaining bald patch, he has done his best to create an iron fence around his remaining locks – though a strong gust of wind revealed the emptiness beneath as he climbed the steps to Air Force One last year. “I try like hell to hide that bald spot, folks. I work hard at it,” he said at a conference soon after.
Why put yourself through so much effort and worry? It is why I’ve taken the Prince William route, and let nature take its course.
Yes, it’s miserable being bald. And yes, I desperately envy older men with a full head of hair; I log every single one of these lucky individuals as I pass them in the street. And yes, I hate seeing myself in a mirror or a photograph.
But the truth is, I don’t think of it all that often now – except when I’m looking at a mirror, a photograph or someone else’s full head of hair. If I had tried any of those treatments, I’d be constantly looking at the back of my own head, using the two-mirror technique, frantically worrying as to the state of play.
The best thing about hair is that it’s on top of your head; or, in my case, isn’t. I very rarely get to see my baldness. Out of sight, out of mind.