The Lost Art of Going Bald

8 min read

I, like many men, can recall with perfect clarity when I first realized I was losing my hair.

On a sweaty summer night in college, friends and I were playing drinking games in our dingy apartment. For some reason, the conversation jumped to my buddy’s hairline, which culminated in a curly black widow’s peak.

“I have one too,” I replied, pushing the dark bangs back from my forehead. A pause ensued. Did they know something I didn’t? “Oh, honey,” said that same buddy’s girlfriend. “That’s not a widow’s peak. That’s a receding hairline.”

That night birthed a morning ritual. Wake up, look in the bathroom mirror, push hair back, think, hope, pray: It’s not that bad. The denial ran deep, though not deep enough to avoid buying thickening shampoo—just in case.

Poor kid. If only he realized it wouldn’t do jack shit.

Men throughout history have grasped tightly to their youth by fussing over their hair. Powdered wigs? Weird, gross, but George Washington wore one anyway. Toupees? Ugly, finicky, but Time reported that 2.5 million guys owned them in 1970.

Now there are dudes like me, balding in the surgically and pharmaceutically obsessed 2020s. In a survey conducted by the International Society of Hair Restoration Surgery, the number of hair-transplant patients has surged by 20 percent since 2021, an overwhelming majority of them doing so to “become/feel more attractive.” That worry is commercially exploitable. The hair-restoration market—surgery and drugs all—is projected to reach almost $19 billion by 2033.

I sympathize. Years after my hairline revelation, trapped in the throes of Covid-19 with nothing but Internet advice and a growing spot atop my dome, I purchased my first canister of topical Rogaine. The foam smelled weird. Felt greasy. But I rubbed it all over my head anyway. Every day. Twice a day. For more than two years. Until I upgraded to a finasteride-minoxidil-hybrid cream, which I could only obtain via doctor’s prescription, because it promised better results than Rogaine could provide.

Could I be one of the success stories? One of those lucky guys who elicit “Looks great, bro” comments on before-and-after Reddit posts? Or was it time to embrace the attitude that runs counter to the looksmaxxing male masses and lean into what many men experience, whether at 25 or 52?

Should I just go bald?

Mankind has always been afraid of hair loss, says hair historian Rachael Gibson: “The reason for that used to be more primal. … Hair represents health and vitality, and it suggests that you are young and therefore going to breed and produce offspring.” The cruel irony is that, at the same time, balding is a sign that your body is behaving properly. Men’s bodies produce the hormone dihydrotestosterone (DHT) to promote growth and repair of the prostate and penis. But some dudes’ genes make them sensitive to DHT, which causes hair follicles to shrink and eventually quit growing hair. You know that anecdote that says your mom’s dad’s hairline predicts your own? There’s a teensy bit of truth to it.

Across time, from the Romans to the Industrial Revolution, men have felt the affliction deep in their souls. Gibson runs through a whole slew of snake-oil remedies. Ancient Egyptians applied pastes made of ground-up animal fat to their cueballs. In Ancient Greece, Hippocrates supposedly blended opium and wine, “maybe to make you forget your problems rather than solve them,” as Gibson wrote in an email. Sixteenth-century remedies included, among other things, the ashes of hedgehogs. Hair transplants aren’t anything new either. Nineteenth-century German surgeon Johann Friedrich Dieffenbach grafted hair follicles from his arm and embedded them into his shedding scalp. Apparently, a third of them survived

“If you look outside of the Western world, in China and India, there’s lots about headstands and various kind of acrobatics,” says Gibson. Not a terrible idea, she continues. Stimulating blood flow is a key part of many modern remedies, like using spiky handheld “derma-rollers,” which poke tiny holes in your scalp to better absorb topicals.

To me, it makes a sort of sense that men in days of yore would give in to such lunacy. Life expectancy was much shorter. How long did these folks actually have to be bald anyway? Like ten years, tops, before they died? Today, the American Hair Loss Association reports that two thirds of American men will experience hair loss by 35 years old. On average, we live to 76. Sure enough, the hair-restoration industry as we know it today harks instead back to the point at which we began to live beyond the expectation of: You’re born, you procreate, you die.

“Spend five minutes in any Victorian newspapers, and there is an overwhelming amount of hair product being sold, targeted at men,” says Gibson. She describes an 1800s L’Oréal ad that featured sad-looking older gentlemen and paraphrases the caption “You’re going to lose your job. You’re going to lose your wife. Sort your hair out.”

Though advertised to work, such products never did. As such, when we reached the golden age of Hollywood, plenty of receding hairlines graced the silver screen. Even a leading man like Yul Brynner was unafraid to rock a shiny cueball look. As the entertainment business entered the 1990s and 2000s, handsome, rugged action stars went bald gracefully—probably because there were no miracle cures, just bad hair plugs.

Bruce Willis had a receding hairline when he starred opposite Jennifer Aniston on Friends. Where’s that kind of representation in 2026?

Bruce Willis’s receding hairline didn’t stop him from playing a romantic interest on Friends. The Rock chopped the Afro off and stuck with it. And has Jason Statham ever let his hair grow out? Other bald celebs from the ’90s, who are not ripped or particularly handsome, are at least funny. See: Larry David and Jason Alexander. (Ideally, I’d be handsome, ripped, and funny, but it is not a perfect world.) Then there are athletes from that era like Michael Jordan and Charles Barkley, who were never afraid of a bare dome.

Looking back, those decades seem like the bald renaissance. I challenge you to find a young heartthrob today with a receding hairline.

I could propose the obvious reason why modern men feel pressured to treat their head like a science experiment. Not only are we faced with our shortcomings constantly, but procedures are so good, so accessible, that it feels like there’s no excuse not to “fix” yourself. In this very magazine, we have touted the glories of both hair transplants and hair-loss-prevention treatments. And on social media these days is a landscape of “looksmaxxers” who desperately chase eternal youth by optimizing their appearance. The online subculture has hit the mainstream media, propelling a strange and obsessive zealot named Braden “Clavicular” Peders off the Internet into everyday conversation. The New York Times recently reported on his “extreme methods, bizarre argot and nihilistic worldview, in which the universe is a Darwinian nightclub full of aggressive men jockeying for status,” which have rewarded him with over 800,000 TikTok followers.

Guys, we don’t have to forever grasp for the happiness of youth, then fail in our 30s and 40s, only to find acceptance after some weird midlife crisis during which we buy a convertible that our teenage sons accidentally total after they first get their driver’s license (sorry, Dad). When researchers study happiness, they’ve found we’re happiest at our youngest and oldest, least so in middle age. But new research suggests a different trend: The young are now in the pits but climb out as the years go on. Researchers attributed the findings to a multitude of factors, including the Covid-19 pandemic, the labor market, and, yes, you guessed it. From the study:

“The third hypothesis relates to the advent of smart phone technologies and the way they have impacted young people’s perceptions of themselves and their lives relative to their peers’ portrayal of their lives via social media. This new information about their lives may result in greater dissatisfaction with one’s own life.”

The last thing men need is more Claviculars, more hair-loss drugs, more Hollywood heartthrobs with questionably perfect locks. The irony of it all? Though we’ve dramatically improved our ability to preserve our hair and maxx our looks, all we’ve done is prove that vanity makes us miserable. When we look back in 100 years, won’t this all seem just as hilariously mad as standing on our heads? Men need acceptance and encouragement, the kind that, ironically, exists on the r/bald subreddit, recently celebrated on the Substack “Okay Zoomer” as “a community that offers solidarity and encouragement to men losing their hair [and] a bright spot in the increasingly dark online ecosystem of looksmaxxers.”

Michael Jordan is arguably the king of the bald.

Maybe we can learn something from the people of the past after all, despite their flawed methods. In the tombs of ancient Egypt, researchers discovered texts and artwork depicting the search for a hair-loss cure. Alas, though the Egyptians developed surprisingly advanced natural remedies to cure other diseases and disorders, a magical hair-regrowth serum wasn’t among them. But on those artworks and in those texts, the phenomenon was signified by one short word in hieroglyphics. Those letters, when translated into the modern alphabet, spell is. Though certainly coincidental, it’s a little poetic, no? To be bald, is. To just exist.

When I turned 29, I had an epiphany antithetical to anyone who’s ever turned 29: Thirty is a promised land. Marriage, kids, a steady career—all terrible anxieties just a year or two before—actually looked enticing. And within the coming decade, I’d collect wisdom and insight, twin assets unattainable by those convinced they’ll live forever. I’d distill the messy memories of my youth into orderly, purposeful stories. And hindsight: Though my vision will degrade, my hindsight will certainly improve beyond 20/20.

A man must trade a piece of himself to receive such gifts. It’s as Guy Martin wrote about baldness in the October 1982 issue of Esquire: “…if you really pay attention to what flux is doing to your form, you can reach an understanding with Father Time, face Death squarely, and avoid the contrived mid-life crises experienced with such needless agony across America.”

Gradually, I noticed I no longer participated in my morning ritual: Wake up, look in the bathroom mirror, push hair back, think, hope, pray. There was a dog to walk, a fiancée to cook breakfast for, work and chores to do. That $60 white tube full of minoxidil-finasteride-hybrid cream? Well, it wasn’t worth the time nor money anymore. So I grabbed it out of the bathroom cabinet and tossed it. Sure, my forehead looks longer. And just as sunrise breaks through clouds, so shines my bare crown. I keep a closer crop these days, grow my beard longer, wear my favorite baseball cap when the occasion allows. And why shouldn’t you? There’s so much life ahead. Who needs hair to live it?