Female balding and the politics of headgear: an egghead speaks

After attempting to save my luscious locks, I opted for a hair cover and got quickly - and wrongly - profiled

- Charmain Naidoo

Actor Will Smith notoriously slapped comedian Chris Rock at the Oscars for joking about his wife Jada Pinkett's alopecia-caused baldness. Inappropriate? Perhaps. For a good cause? Certainly.

Baldness! Men hate going bald. Women hand-wringingly loathe it. Being follically challenged, like me, makes women lose their minds along with their hair.

Despair, that's the word for it. Panic, sadness, fear, anger too... but mostly despair.

Not without reason are emotive words used to describe women's hair: crowning glory, lustrous locks, flowing tresses, luxurious curls.

Hair frames your face, determines your identity and creates your personality - long, short, fringe, shaved sides, auburn, green, purple, blonde, dark.

Hair covers a skull that when naked often indicates illness, the worst being the result of chemo for cancer.

I should know. When in 2013 I was diagnosed with breast cancer, I watched with horror as my hair fell out after my second round of chemotherapy. It covered my pillow, clogged my shower drain. One day, as two girlfriends and I shopped in Sandton City, a clump came away in my hand as I ran my fingers through my hair. We, all three, stood in the lingerie aisle where we were looking for soft cotton bras for my newly removed breasts, replaced now with (still foreign) implants, and wept.

Then we resolutely strode into the nearest hair salon and said, shave it off. A small crowd gathered to cheer on the sad process.

I emerged with a head as smooth as an egg.

It's 12 years later and I'm not sick, but I still cannot find any reason why I should be losing my hair by the fistful. It's now so bad that I put off washing my thin strands of hair for days to stave off the inconsolable weeping in the shower as my once lovely (still black at 66) hair comes away from my scalp.