I’m with Debutante Anna: I was dreading this topic because I don’t feel one way or another about bald men. There are certainly bald men (or fictional characters anyway) I love:
- Gordon from Sesame Street
- Mr. Clean
- Captain Picard
- Keith from Six Feet Under
- Lex Luthor (in most incarnations, including the portrayal by alleged natural baldy, Kevin Spacey, see below)
- Charlie Brown
- Kojak
- Conrad from Weeds
Then there are the men who have (or are rumored to have had) balding issues and chose to hide them by wearing a hair piece. Fortunately, I happen to have a friend who is a celebrity baldness expert, so I picked his brain a little. As a balding man himself, he prides himself on his knowledge of the hair-challenged rich and famous. Here are some of the names he threw at me:
- William Shatner (Okay, I knew this, but I didn’t know that it went way back and that he was wearing a piece during the early days of Star Trek)
- Mel Gibson
- Fred Astaire
- Mike Douglas
- Rudy Giuliani
- Ricardo Montalban
- Liberace (Rumor has it he once refused to remove his toupee for an MRI)
- Kevin Spacey
- Sean Connery (Wore a hair piece even back in his youthful 007 days – then shed it, post-Bond and launched a second career)
- Chuck Norris
- John Wayne
- Humphrey Bogart
(For a more thorough list, see Wikipedia’s toupee entry which includes “suspected toupee wearers” – like it’s a crime!)
More than baldness itself, the lengths that people go to to deny it and cover it up amaze me. Remember the infomercial for spray-on hair? I have it on good authority that excessive sweat and/or rain will cause this innovative product to melt… in gelatinous clumps. Cute! And hair plugs and hair replacement sounds downright painful.
My friend the baldness expert is very self-conscious about his baldness. He is rarely without a hat or bandana. A few years back he decided to go all the way and asked me to shave his head. I did. I thought he looked hot. For the first time, he started going around without a head covering. Then someone told him he looked like a serial killer on death row. Out came the hats and he let his hair (what there is it of it) grow.
It seems to me that this is a good time to be bald. It’s hip. A friend of a friend calls head-shaving the “new comb-over.” And I have to say, given the choice of the two, I find full-on baldness much more attractive.
I gasped out loud over your self-conscious friend. Poor guy! Tell him a pair of funky glasses and his bald or cut-so-short-he-might-as-well-be-bald head are very sexy. His serial killer friend has no taste and should be slapped. Or shaved. Or something.
Maybe we could hold an intervention on the blog. Fill him with bald confidence.
The lengths balding men will go to in an attempt to not appear bald tends only to make the problem more obvious. On the other hand, shaved heads are “in” and more than acceptable… Hmm, do you think William Shatner is completely bald by now?
There is nothing about spray on hair that sounds attractive. Unless you wanted to pretend to be the bearded lady from a circus. That would be sort of fun. Wander around the mall waiting for people to say anything. Stop at the makeup counter in the fancy department store and ask if they carry Nair.
Nothing’s worse than a man who doesn’t wear his obvious baldness with confidence. I can say that because I’m not bald am I? There’s a woman at my gym who’s in her thirties, lovely, but has always shaved her head smooth as an eight ball. That’s the way she likes it. I have to admire her for having the guts to fly in the face of societal expectations. John Wayne was balding? No way.