David Barr always knew that baldness would come for him. He just didn’t know when.
Most men on both sides of his family were bald, so he took advantage of his dirty-blond hair while he had it. As a teenager he grew it into long, curled locks and rocked out in a punk band. More recently, he strolled the halls of the university in Durham, England, where he works, with a cultivated look of dishevelment.
“As an academic, I’m allowed to grow old ungracefully,” Mr. Barr, 36, joked.
Still, his hairline crept ever backward, and his inevitable reality encroached. Occasionally he’d see photos taken from above that reminded him of the thinning zone hiding at the top of his lengthy mop.
For Mr. Barr and many other balding men, deciding whether to accept or fight their fate can feel existential. Even though male-pattern baldness affects up to half of men by age 50, the change can feel drastic and isolating. Studies have shown that the condition can contribute to low self-esteem, anxiety and depression.
Late last year, not long after his marriage ended, Mr. Barr came across posts from r/Bald, a Reddit forum for bald and balding people (mostly men, some women). On it, users post photos of themselves before and after shaving off what remained of their hair, and are cheered on, and congratulated, by thousands of commenters.
The community has grown in recent months after several viral social media posts heralded it as a rare example of positivity among men online. It now has 1.4 million weekly users.
Scrolling through the photos, Mr. Barr quickly realized that a vast majority of posters looked better after buzzing off their hair. Inspired, he shaved and posted his own conversion from a thinning Rapunzel to a suave Mr. Clean.
By the next morning he had more than 5,000 comments, his own well of positivity.
“From a cave man to a gentleman!” one user wrote.
Another user commented that Mr. Barr had gone from “part time record store clerk to vice president of marketing.”
The post has since garnered more than 120,000 upvotes. “I don’t think I’ve had a single negative comment,” Mr. Barr said.
The Reddit forum can be a haven for balding men who are inundated with messages to keep their locks at any cost — from “looksmaxxing” influencers, from advertisements for hair-loss medications like Minoxidil and Finasteride and from a booming hair-transplant industry.
This targeted marketing contributes to the pressure men feel to regrow their hair, said Glen Jankowski, an adjunct assistant professor in psychology at University College Dublin and author of the forthcoming book, “Branding Baldness.”
Bald men inherently know that their physical appearance is normal, he added, “yet they’re in this environment that is telling them: This is a problem, this is going to devastate you.”
So, many balding men who do want to stick to the natural route still need an extra push. That’s where r/Bald comes in. The community, whose ethos is to “embrace bald and strive to make the world a more bald-friendly place,” is honest in its assessment.
If users do not believe a shave is necessary, they often comment, “Hold.” When a shave is advised (which is more often than not), an edited image from a 1970s Japanese anime is often posted, which has come to mean that “it’s time.”
“The subreddit is filled with people that held on far too long,” Mr. Barr said. “I was definitely guilty of that.”
For Navtej Singh, a 33-year-old tech executive in San Francisco, a head shave was perhaps inevitable. In college, the signs of his thinner future began. He took Finasteride early on before deciding that he no longer wanted to take a daily medication for years on end. He was skeptical that a transplant would last. But as his crown showed more and more, Mr. Singh started to consider the next phase of his appearance.
Over time, shaving it all off seemed like the best long-term solution. So after Mr. Singh found the r/Bald community, he posted anonymously to gather unbiased opinions. “The community makes it feels like you’re not in it alone,” he said.
Michael Burdekin, 34, in Columbus, Ind., was also apprehensive about a self-inflicted makeover. Shaving off the rest of his hair would force him to accept aging, he said, and that seemed difficult. But after scrolling through the forum, he said, he gathered an important insight: “No one ever looks worse.”
So he did it.
After the shave was done, new questions arose: Would he grow a beard? A mustache? And who would be his new celebrity look-alike? Luckily, his wife already had a particular villain from the “Austin Powers” films in mind.
“She’s been calling me Dr. Evil,” he laughed.
Why are bald men online so positive? Community spaces that don’t emphasize or advertise treatments give men room to explore their options, Mr. Jankowski said. “It helps them to make informed responses to what, if anything, they do with their scalps,” he added.
For Mr. Barr, who has even been recognized on dating apps, the community gave him a fresh sense of agency. “Going bald is stigmatized,” he said. “But shaving it, that’s a choice.”
Stefano Montali is a news assistant at The Times who contributes reporting across various sections.
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