If you are a man who is starting to lose your hair, you might also be a little worried about what this means for your chances with the fairer sex, especially with Valentine’s Day having just focused so many minds on this topic.
Normally, it might be considered that male hair loss might be a disadvantage, but there is always an alternative viewpoint out there. Unfortunately, however, it appears to have been trumpeted loudest in the country’s most notorious red top tabloid, the Sun.
According to dating website Illicit Encounters – presumably not the place a man goes to find his future wife – women actually find a shaven male head to be the sexiest feature out there, more so than broad shoulders, blue eyes, or a hairy chest.
To be fair, the paper has only been reporting what someone else’s survey said. A bald male head has not suddenly become the 2020s equivalent of the old Page 3 displays of naked mammary glands.
However, the Sun only had to go and push things too far with the same graphics department that turned Graham Taylor into a turnip.
It reproduced several celebrities who have lots of hair in real life with bald heads, from actors like Leonardo di Caprio, Daniel Craig and Benedict Cumberbatch to politicians like Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak. It’s not as if the embattled prime minister doesn’t have enough reasons to pull his hair out already just now.
Ironically, however, such images might just undermine the claims made in the survey. The men look, frankly, awful. Besides, if a website is calling itself “illicit encounters”, one might hope this is not exactly representative of the average woman. It may be the average bored housewife instead, who might fantasise about an all-action, heavily-armed Bruce Willis.
Even the poll itself is not totally clear; blonde locks are also very popular, so peroxide babe magnet Boris shouldn’t reach for the hair clippers just yet. Dark hair also scored highly, so maybe female taste is rather more diverse than some folk think.
Besides all that, the fact is that men themselves tend to feel less attractive with less hair. In 2022, the Lloyds Pharmacy Hair Loss Report found that 89 per cent of men believed there was a stigma over hair loss, while 43 per cent felt more self-conscious and 25 per cent felt less attractive.
Small wonder, therefore, that 16 per cent admitted researching hair transplants at the very first signs of hair loss, including some as young as 16 (admittedly, almost nobody would expect to be losing hair at that age unless they were undergoing serious medical treatment or had a hereditary condition).
It may help reassure a few Sun readers that bald is best, but given the stick that same paper has reserved down the years for politicians who really were bald (Neil Kinnock, William Hague and ‘unelectable baldy number 2’ Iain Duncan Smith), that may not be the most consistent of positions.
The truth is that if you feel conscious about hair loss, you will be in good company, though not necessarily in the female company of those who frequent a somewhat sleazy-sounding dating site.