"I first realised I was losing my hair during a night out at university." File photo / 123rf
Tariq Kazemi began losing his hair at 21 and suffered immense anxiety. Now 40, he says it’s time to champion “baldness positivity” amongst men.
All of my male relatives were bald: both grandfathers, my uncles, and my father. So while a part of me knew it was a probability, I never made peace with it. Instead, I chose to bury my head in the sand.
I first realised I was losing my hair during a night out at university. With the bright lights above the bar and the mirror behind it, I was struck by my reflection. I used to have a good head of hair, sometimes I wore it slightly longer, and then suddenly I glimpsed this thinness. I could see my scalp across the bar. It was like I’d been hit by lightning. It was like the world had ended. All you’ve been trained to think is “now you’re old, now you’re not attractive”.
Suddenly my whole life was about keeping whatever hair I still had, preventing anyone from recognising that I was losing it. I avoided the barbers for months, growing my hair much too long to try to prevent anyone from noticing that it was thinning.
I used to love swimming and I played on the university water polo team, but suddenly I felt super self-conscious because the thinning was more accentuated when my hair was wet. I insisted on wearing a swimming cap whenever I could pluck up the courage to go in the water, but part of me held back from swimming at all.
Like a lot of balding guys, I started wearing hats – even at inappropriate moments – because I was trying to hide my hair loss. I had a baseball cap that I wore everywhere to the point where it became pretty revolting: it was all scuffed up, sweaty, probably smelly, but it was like a comfort blanket. I never went anywhere without that hat; dates, nightclubs, lectures. It was the most disgusting, horrible item of clothing I owned but I couldn’t get rid of it.
In my dating life, I completely lost confidence. All I could think about on dates was whether the girl sitting opposite me had noticed my hair. I felt like damaged goods. Fear consumed 23 of the 24 hours of my day. Even when I was sleeping, I’d have nightmares about being bald.
I remember once, I was standing with a group of my friends, a few weeks after I’d made the initial discovery that my hair was thinning and a friend pointed it out too. It was utterly mortifying. Suddenly something that I’d been privately anxious about was public property; that friend had validated my concerns and I became convinced it was all anyone could see when they looked at me.
For those who haven’t experienced hair loss, it’s hard to understand how much more conscious and aware of your hair you become. It saps your confidence. It was constantly running through the back of my mind.
Suddenly, the quiet anxieties I had suppressed for years came flooding in. The certainty of what was to come, the inevitability of hair loss stripped away more than just my confidence. It shook something deeper. My self-esteem, my sense of youth, how attractive I felt; all suddenly felt tethered to strands of hair that were disappearing.
As irrational as it might seem to some, this is a common emotional journey for many young men confronting male pattern baldness for the first time. The message is clear: to lose your hair is to lose part of your worth.
The best descriptions you can give of a man are “he’s young, he’s got a good job, and he’s got a full head of hair”. That’s the key thing. You think you’re going to be less of a man.
Immediately I started looking for a solution to stop it happening. I found a drug called Propecia [one of the brand names for finasteride]. I got a private prescription and began taking it.
Finasteride works by reducing DHT levels, which can slow hair loss to a certain extent. [DHT, or dihydrotestosterone, is a hormone that influences the development of male sexual characteristics. When it builds up in the scalp, it causes the shrinking of hair follicles, leading to baldness.] What I didn’t realise at the time were the range of side effects the drug can cause.
For the first few years of taking finasteride, I didn’t notice anything. The effect wasn’t immediate. In fact, I kept taking finasteride for 10 years and I kept my hair.
Gradually, though, I began to feel like something was amiss. In moments where I felt anxious, it felt like my natural resilience had been eroded. Anxiety is a part of life, thoughts come up and you dismiss them. I found that I was less able to do that.
In the end, it wasn’t a doctor telling me to stop, but I felt like those mental defences had gone, so I stopped taking it. I was quite lucky to recognise that and stop myself rather than doing more damage. [Some research has linked finasteride with suicide risk.]
When I came off the drugs, I started to see some hair loss. You feel it getting thinner. I just ignored it because I still had hair, but then one day someone touched the bald spot on my head and all those feelings I’d experienced at university came flooding back. I was back at square one. That was when I knew I needed to do something.
I turned to my uncle, who is bald and happy about it. He was born in 1948, so he’s very much of a different generation. He told me that when he started to lose his hair and had gone to the barber and said, “What shall I do?”, the barber had said, “There’s only one thing you can do: don’t worry about it.” My uncle followed that advice from then on.
It took a couple of weeks – I did consider a hair transplant, but I worried it might not look good and I’d need to take finasteride again – but eventually I made up my mind.
I realised there was only one choice, so during lockdown I shaved my head.
It took two days to get used to it and then I realised, after shaving my head, I could just get on with being me. I could focus on fitness and hobbies. Finding that peace with myself was so powerful. Being bald and owning it helped me control the narrative: I wasn’t constantly thinking about it, I was just me.
The fear of baldness is massively compounded by the hair-loss industry: the finasteride producers, the minoxidil makers, the hair-transplant surgeons. They come in and take this narrative and amplify it, which in turn amplifies the anxieties that young men have.
An $8 billion industry has been built around the idea that there’s something wrong with losing your hair, but it’s a perfectly natural and normal thing and, apart from the fact that you’re slightly more likely to get skin cancer if you don’t wear SPF or a hat, there are no health risks.
The societal narrative, the commercial narrative is that there’s something wrong with you: that it’s something that needs to be cured, prevented or treated. The question is always “are you suffering from hair loss?”
After I’d shaved my head, a university friend of mine, Richard Boazman, who was also bald, reached out and asked if I’d be interested in setting up an Instagram account championing baldness positivity. The feedback we got when we did was brilliant.
I think people appreciated that we weren’t just accepting baldness, we’re saying it is a good thing. The other day we had a comment on one of our social media posts where a guy with a full head of hair said we’d made him wish he was bald – that made me smile.
We were interviewing some people outside a Pitbull concert, which everyone turns up to in bald caps, and asking if they find bald men attractive. Without reservation, the majority said yes. People have preferences, as some people prefer blondes or brunettes, but if it was better known that people find baldness attractive, young guys wouldn’t worry so much.
We soon realised that there was a gap in the market for an SPF specifically for bald heads to reduce shininess and moisturise the skin, and that’s when we founded BLD BRO. We hired a team of chemists, and after two years of development, we found the formula.
We put it out to our community as a bit of a passion project; it sold out within two months. In the past year it’s gone totally bonkers. Our revenue is over £2m [NZ$4.5m], we’re doing 10,000 orders a month, we’re one of the fastest-growing male-grooming companies in Europe.
Now my attitude to my baldness has completely flipped. I was suffering all these narratives, but once you shave your head, you realise there’s nothing to fear. You realise nothing’s wrong and there’s nothing left to be afraid of: you’ve taken control.
We want to spread that message and shorten that horrible odyssey men go on between losing their hair and embracing being bald.
I wish that someone had tapped me on the shoulder when I was 22 and said, “Listen mate, it’s fine, just embrace it and move on.”
– As told to Jack Rear