Actor Will Smith notoriously slapped comedian Chris Rock at the Oscars for joking about his wife Jada Pinkett’s alopecia-caused baldness. Inappropriate? Perhaps. For a good cause? Certainly.
Baldness! Men hate going bald. Women hand-wringingly loathe it. Being follically challenged, like me, makes women lose their minds along with their hair.
Despair, that’s the word for it. Panic, sadness, fear, anger too… but mostly despair.
Not without reason are emotive words used to describe women’s hair: crowning glory, lustrous locks, flowing tresses, luxurious curls.
Hair frames your face, determines your identity and creates your personality – long, short, fringe, shaved sides, auburn, green, purple, blonde, dark.
Hair covers a skull that when naked often indicates illness, the worst being the result of chemo for cancer.
I should know. When in 2013 I was diagnosed with breast cancer, I watched with horror as my hair fell out after my second round of chemotherapy. It covered my pillow, clogged my shower drain. One day, as two girlfriends and I shopped in Sandton City, a clump came away in my hand as I ran my fingers through my hair. We, all three, stood in the lingerie aisle where we were looking for soft cotton bras for my newly removed breasts, replaced now with (still foreign) implants, and wept.
Then we resolutely strode into the nearest hair salon and said, shave it off. A small crowd gathered to cheer on the sad process. I emerged with a head as smooth as an egg.
It’s 12 years later and I’m not sick, but I still cannot find any reason that I should be losing my hair by the fistful. It’s now so bad that I put off washing my thin strands of hair for days to stave off the inconsolable weeping in the shower as my once lovely (still black at 66) hair comes away from my scalp.
There’s a name for it, this gradual thinning of hair: female pattern hair loss (FPHL) or androgenetic alopecia, which differs from male pattern baldness. Most women thin across the top and crown, with the hairline remaining relatively intact. I am experiencing the added indignity of losing hair in front, sides and crown.
Another unwanted post-menopausal penalty? An own goal where my body has gone into protest mode? I don’t know. Have you checked your thyroid? people ask. Tick, yes. And nutrition? Enough protein? Tick, yes.
People shake their heads disapprovingly when they hear I’m on the insulin-stabilising weight loss drug Ozempic and behind cupped hands mouth “side-effect”. But I’ve been thinning since 2013 when I underwent brutal chemotherapy and lost all my hair. It came back, only there was less of it.
Have you tried? (Fill in the gap). Yes I have. Countless shampoos (ineffectual, all of them); an expensive imported French drug guaranteed to grow hair (it didn’t); home remedies that include rosemary oil, or a mixture of bay rum, bergamot essence and placenta sprayed on at night. All they did was stain my pillow cases.
The expensive route (which impecunious me has not taken) involves an aesthetics or medical doctor injecting your own platelets made into a rich plasma directly into the scalp, low-level laser therapy using specific wavelengths of light to stimulate hair follicles and promote hair growth, carboxy therapy in which carbon dioxide is injected into the scalp – the list is long, and costly.
Donald Trump apparently has had a scalp reduction where you join up the bits of your scalp with hair, cutting out the bald patches. And see what he looks like!
Potassium-rich tinctures, hard-to-pronounce jars of unappealing mustard paste with dubious ingredients ordered on the dark web, all have been in vain.
My Hail Mary pass is a drug called minoxidil, which apparently stops hair falling out and stimulates new growth.
My last-ditch effort also includes the use of a spray-on/massage-in magnesium oil that has to be reapplied each night and left in for 24 hours before a wash. It makes a mess.
Also, because I can’t be seen in public with hair stuck to my head, my white scalp pitifully showing through the thin stuck-together black strands, I wear a soft cotton under-cap that covers the top of my head, and the tops of my ears.
Here begins my experience with the politics of headwear!
One small change in my everyday attire, the addition of a hair cover, has resulted in a detectable change in how people relate to me.
I first noticed it at the gym when an older man wearing a taqiyah, the traditional Muslim skull cap, nodded at me: Assalamu alaikum. A rare greeting in our secular environment. He wasn’t saying “Peace be with you” to the other gymmers.
It was only later in a Checkers aisle that I twigged. A little girl accompanying her hijab-clad mother whose head and neck were covered in a niftily tied scarf said, “Hello, aunty”.
Her mother smiled, salaams.
Ah. I got it. It was a religion-identifying greeting, and all because I was wearing a supposedly religion-identifying head covering.
It didn’t stop there. In a Woolworths pay queue a young man pointed to a Palestine flag on his lapel, winked and gave me a thumbs-up sign. While I returned the gesture I resisted the temptation to say, “Thank you for supporting my people”. I feared being smited by my (dead) Catholic mother who wouldn’t even let us light little clay lamps like our neighbours during the Hindu festival of lights, Diwali.
Then a Jewish woman I was sharing a large table with in a crowded restaurant – both of us on our laptops working – was at pains to let me know she and her husband were sympathetic to, as she put it, all people.
She insisted on paying for my cappuccino.
And so we have it: the religious-profiling aspect of the head scarf.
Then there is the compassion-hat look, one of extreme sympathy reserved for those who are sick and forced to wear head coverings to hide their chemo-caused baldness.
I asked AI what a compassion hat was: “For cancer patients experiencing hair loss due to treatment, headwear like hats, scarves and turbans can offer comfort, warmth and a sense of confidence. These options provide both practical and emotional support during a challenging time, offering protection from the elements and allowing for personal expression.”
When in 2013 I lost my hair, my scalp and head hurt so much that any covering, no matter how soft, was so uncomfortable that I chose to go bald. It was a bold move.
My rationale was that I was not a prisoner forced to shave my head before heading into the jail system. Nor was I a French woman accused of collaborating with the Germans and punished with being tarred and feathered.
I was sick, and sore. And it was a hot Johannesburg summer and I could go bald. And so I did.
Young black women thought it was a fashion statement, and applauded my decision.
A middle-aged woman told me my bald head made her uncomfortable, suggesting I cover it. I unfriended her.
Acquaintances with a preteen son asked me to explain to him why I was bald; they thought my hairlessness really might traumatise him.
Honestly! Hair!
I am surprised, though why I’m not sure, by just how much hair matters to humans.
How we grow it, cut it, wear it and, most importantly, how we cover it seems to matter a great deal.
The song that is constantly in my head is Hair, from the 1967 eponymous musical:
Gimme a head with hair
Long, beautiful hair
Shining, gleaming
Streaming, flaxen, waxen
Hair…
Grow it, show it
Long as I can grow it
My hair. DM
This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R35.
