Crowning Glory: How Alopecia Changed People's Perception of Me
I have been mostly, often near completely, bald for much of my adult life; I have alopecia, and so my hair comes and goes - sometimes coinciding with periods of stress, sometimes not. I have felt more and less ambivalent about this at different points. When I was younger and cared less what other people thought of me, cared more about my punk credibility and didn’t have to maintain any kind of professional façade, I would draw designs in eyeliner on the large bald patches on my head and I looked, I am sure, completely insane. For most of the time, however, I have worn a wig.
When I started wearing wigs, I had all sorts of styles - different lengths, colours and cuts - but quite quickly settled into a bright white bob. I wore it daily. I am pictured in it in my profile pictures, in party polaroids and in the picture on my work security pass. (Although sadly, I was not allowed to wear it in my passport photo. The resulting picture is, I think, the worst ever taken of me. I look desolate in my enforced baldness.)
I could have gone for something more natural, but it somehow felt disingenuous to wear a wig that pretended it wasn’t a wig. This strain of logic didn’t make any particular sense, but was similar to my eyeliner-drawings phase - better to draw the eye to something that will attract it anyway, rather than have others question the possibilities of a brunette wig being my own hair. It didn’t help me to feign ignorance on the basic facts of my own appearance either.
___STEADY_PAYWALL___
Still, when feeling lazy, or when it was very hot out, I sometimes couldn’t be bothered with my hair piece at all and went about my business bald-ly. There is a particular way people look at you when you appear to be visibly ill, as though they have been given some kind of permission to stare. You can see them assessing, taking in information from your appearance in a way that is quite unlike a normal once over. It is not hostile, more like you have caused problems in the internal pattern-matching that goes on in all of our heads, like they are registering an error and need a moment longer. It’s hard to feel like an error, but sacrificing my comfort for the comfort of others was never an option to me.
I have always been reluctant to claim I have any kind of problem. After all, having an appearance that unsettles others is not a disability. It is a problem that only exists in the reactions and assessments of others; but, then again, that is where we live a great deal of our lives.
When a difficult employment situation bled into the winter lockdown recently, I lost almost all my hair, my eyelashes, and all but half of one eyebrow (although the other half hung on boldly.) Not having eyebrows does nothing for your facial structure - they are a key facial landmark - and not having eyelashes means you involuntarily cry, a lot. You probably don’t think very much about the hair on your face - the fine, downy hair on our foreheads or our cheeks - but you would notice if it was gone and your skin felt like vellum.
Fortunately, things got better shortly after this shedding and my hair mostly grew back. I have spent the last 8 months or so growing it out. While somewhat patchy, I now have a fullish head of hair and stopped wearing the bob a few months ago. People I have met many times do not recognise me without it, rarely hiding their astonishment and doing obvious double takes. After years of looking like a cartoon character or a sick person, I now have a very unexceptional appearance. I am unsure what to think of it. If looking unwell makes you an expert in how people look at others, you notice the lack of attention when you appear better.
On the level of the day to day, how we look matters. Our faces and our physical appearance are how we negotiate the world and relate to other people. As anyone who has ever been uncomfortable with how they look knows, what’s on the outside matters a great deal.
My hair will probably fall out again, despite my purchase of a caffeine shampoo that makes my scalp tingle and comes in a gunmetal grey bottle, clearly aimed at men who eye their retreating hairlines in the bathroom mirror each morning. I doubt, however, that I will ever lose my sense of just how acutely we are all perceived.
“If looking unwell makes you an expert in how people look at others, you notice the lack of attention when you appear better.”
Nothing will teach you the limits of convention quite like falling outside of it in a way that cannot be re-packaged as “striking” or “unique”. They are hard limits, set deep in the part of us all where culture and perception meet. There is no point pretending otherwise, but there is value to understanding this too. I like how I look, and have liked different things about each iteration of my appearance - but probably above all, however, I know how I look and how I am looked at, and what includes right now, when people’s gazes skip lightly over me.
Words: Morgan Jones
