Going. Going . . . Bald !

Going. Going . . . Bald! Why men are obsessed with their hair

Prince William has finally been sheared — a shining example to other men clinging on to wispy hair

From left: Jason Statham, Stanley Tucci and Prince William

Prince William has taken the plunge. On Thursday he revealed his new buzz-cut, a shorter, closer cropped look believed to have been sheared by one of the team who look after the Duchess of Cambridge’s hair. The odds are (bookmakers are taking bets) that he will keep the new skinny Wills for Harry’s wedding. And why wouldn’t he? Now that it’s gone gone, as opposed to sort of wispily hanging in there around the back and sides, you wonder why he didn’t shave the whole lot off years ago.

Of course it’s not that simple. Second only to accidents downstairs, men fear the retreat of their hair more than anything. Last year Ronnie Wood of the Rolling Stones refused chemotherapy on the grounds that were he to lose his shock of hair life would not be worth living anyway. Mad vanity? Or just clear-headed acceptance that a major chunk of his rock’n’roll cred is tied up in that unfeasibly black pirate hair. We associate a good head of hair with youth and vigour and all good things — there is no upside to losing it, not really, unless it transpires that you suit a bare head more.

And there are plenty of men — OK, some — who look better bald. Generally they tend to be the ones we don’t remember with hair (which suggests that they recognised early on that they were one of the ones who just don’t suit it).

Samuel L Jackson. Bruce Willis. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. You can’t imagine Jason Statham with a full head of hair. Stanley Tucci looks far better bald than he did in Big Night; not only that, baldness has given him an edge and made him seem quirkier and more interesting.

Yanis Varoufakis happens to have one of those noble, sculpted heads that just gets cluttered up with a topping of hair. With some men hair is surplus to requirement. With others you think it’s a crying shame that they are going bald, you feel their panic, then against the odds you like them much better that way: Andre Agassi, Mark Strong and Billy Zane (who, unless I am mistaken, were all fighting it at one point, to the extent of wearing wigs) are all better off bald. When Zane finally came out as a baldy it was a revelation (as with Sinead O’Connor the hair had drowned out his chiselled good looks).

To be brutal, Prince William is not in this hotter bald camp. If only that were true. Pictures of him on his graduation day remind you that for a while he had a thick thatch, just the right shade of dirty creamy blond, and a distinct look of the young Val Kilmer.

The prince definitely suited his hair, and it suited him. More to the point, given his unusual position, hair gives you options. You can do preppy, louche or just a bit longer and rougher than it probably should be. If you’re a prince, obliged to conform and stick to the script at every step of the way, hair is a terrific bonus, like a rebellious mate you can take along with you for the ride.

The bald icon: Zinedine ZidaneGETTY IMAGES

This of course is the whole issue with men’s hair and the process of balding. Their hair is practically all they have got to tell the world who they are (especially if they live in a conventional environment). Think of Boris Johnson signalling “I’m a maverick, me” with that bleached mop (which he has been seen deliberately messing up before making an entrance).

Would bald Boris, out running in his swimming trunks, be such a crowd-pleaser? Almost certainly not. His hair sets him apart, gives him that naughty-scamp get-out-of-jail-free card. He’s like a rubbed-up-the-wrong-way bichon frise, too cute to scold.

There’s also something untamed and charming about lots of healthy hair on an older man. The current poster boys of ageing the way most men would dearly love to are Andrew Graham-Dixon and Giorgio Locatelli, who are scoffing their way around the historic cities of Italy, having the time of their lives and making everyone on their sofas back home — especially the men — green with envy.

And it’s mainly the hair. Very slightly too long, thick, grey, lustrous, not too kempt: the sort of hair you can only have if you lead the life of an educated bon viveur. The sort of hair that gives you permission to wear French navy sailor’s jackets and periwinkle cashmere scarves and have the sort of job that pays you to stay up late drinking and dancing with the locals. Melvyn Bragg has the slightly older, more bouffant version of this hair. Not many can carry it off, but it’s the type that fills with longing men who have receding issues.

In 2018 the men to be envied are the ones with super-lush hair, but it must be all their own in every sense. Dyed hair always looks dyed and the dyeing automatically cancels out the achievement of having a full head past its sell-by date.

Fake hair, the surgically implanted plugs preferred by some celebrities (Wayne Rooney and Gordon Ramsay, for example) is a definite no-no. Occasionally we feel a burst of sympathy for the dyers and the transplanters (after all, no one bats an eye when women have highlights or extensions), but in the end you just can’t get your head around the vanity, plus you can’t help thinking of mustard and cress. Or cut-and-come-again salad.

The truth is, we like hair, but not at any price. And we really like naturally greying hair. What’s the problem with grey (as Huw Edwards may have asked BBC’s Washington correspondent Jon Sopel)? The Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard has the grey midlife shag down to a tee, and if you look back at pictures of him as a young man — same hair, but blond — he’s nothing like as attractive. Some of our most hotly fancied midlife men — George Clooney, Adrian Dunbar, Alec Baldwin — are as grey as you please and all the better for it.

Anyway. That was not, as we have established, an option for Prince William. His hair has gone the way of Statham’s — slightly more so — and when that happens you need to cut your losses and own the situation. There are few sadder sights than lovingly tended oases of hair in the middle of a shiny pate and we all know that clinging to the wreckage is anything from sad to being a sign of deep-seated insecurity.

The most topical example of this, of course, is Potus’s theatre of hair. Thanks to Michael Wolff’s new book, Fire and Fury, we have the inside on Donald Trump’s hair regimen, which involves dyeing it, using Just For Men, then manipulating his remaining hair (following scalp surgery to reduce the area of baldness).

According to the book he has “a furry circle of hair around the sides and front, from which all ends are drawn up to meet in the centre and then swept back and secured by a stiffening spray”. Not even his daughter Ivanka (allegedly the source of the hair rituals) finds The Donald’s hair anything other than comical and unbecoming for a man of his office. The rule is that when you lose your hair you’re judged not on how much you have, but how you manage it.

Prince William has wisely gone for the full shear. He could have dallied with a Prince Edward, but he opted to break with the convention of holding on for as long as possible and make a clean start. His new look most closely resembles Stephen Kinnock’s, which is no bad thing — and these two have more than their number-one cuts in common. Both went bald early, and both are married to strong, image conscious women (Kinnock’s wife is Helle Thorning-Schmidt, the former prime minister of Denmark). We already know that Kate’s hairdresser is behind William’s bolder cut, and even if we didn’t, it’s got a wife’s intervention written all over it.

Oh yes. Every woman with a husband who is losing his hair (or what in our house we like to call “very slightly thinning, but you can’t tell”) is managing hair hopes and expectations on a daily basis. Kate will have picked her moment and then — maybe citing Bruce Willis as a good hair role model — summoned the stylist to make it happen (because we don’t want to end up looking like Steve Jobs, do we darling?). Jude Law’s girlfriend is probably at this very moment coaxing him to get rid of that half landing strip (he will argue that it’s attached to the back so still worth hanging on to).

However, if Law were in his thirties he would almost certainly see things differently. The younger you are, the more likely you are to cut your losses and embrace bald before it becomes an issue. Thanks to Zayn Malik and Brad Pitt and any number of voluntary head-shavers, the buzz-cut is a modern statement. You can look tough-bloke like Statham, or seriously smooth like Varoufakis, or just like a bloke who isn’t having a crisis about his hair loss. Go early, go bald. That’s the message.

Bad bald: Donald TrumpGETTY IMAGES

Bad bald
Donald Trump
Calum Best
Guy Ritchie

Calum BestREX FEATURES

Good bald (or hotter bald)
Yanis Varoufakis
Stephen Kinnock
Zinedine Zidane
Woody Harrelson
Jason Statham
Billy Zane

Yanis VaroufakisGETTY IMAGES

The best barnets in the business
Ronnie Wood
Rod Stewart
Billy Idol
George Clooney
Karl Ove Knausgaard
Adrian Dunbar
Melvyn Bragg
Giorgio Locatelli and Andrew Graham-Dixon

Types of baldness

Type I
Minimal hair loss.

Type II
Insignificant hair loss at the temples.

Type III
The first stage that requires treatment.

Type III (vertex)
Receding hairline and thinning hair on the upper surface of the head.

Type IV
Bigger pattern on the upper surface and hairline.

Type V
Patterns at both sites are bigger but a thin division line is still present.

Type VI
The bridge is gone but several strands of short fine hair may remain.

Type VII
The most severe form of hair loss. Little hair on the front or top of the head.

The Hamilton-Norwood scale is the accepted standard for describing the progression of male baldness. The scale was developed by James Hamilton in the 1950s and revised by O’Tar Norwood in the 1970s.