You don’t need a cure, just a trim.
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Male pattern baldness will effect up to 70% of all men. By the age of 50 about 85% of all men have significantly thinner hair. I started to thin in my early twenties so I knew what was coming, but my hair hung on longer than I expected. My father was bald at a young age and my maternal grandfather had hair. People always told me that your maternal grandfather passed on the gene for baldness, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. In fact you’re 2.5 times more likely to go bald if your father is bald.
When I started to go bald I wasn’t very happy about it and there were no men at the time who looked cool bald. Then Bruce Willis started balding and he just accepted it and then eventually shaved his head and showed us all how to handle it. Andre Agassi wore a wig while playing in the French Open, he was so afraid of going bald, then his wife Brooke Shields convinced him to shave his head and another bald role model was born. They gave me confidence to do the same.
Then everybody started shaving their head, bald or not and it really became less and less of a big deal to be bald. I still wonder how certain people in the public eye will handle it such as Prince William and Jordan Spieth and certain celebrities like Bruce Springsteen and Nicolas Cage seem to get more hair every year. I do think for the average person the cure to male pattern baldness is to simply shave your head.
I’ve been using Wahl products for as long as I can remember to get the job done. Leo J. Wahl received a patent for his hair clipper in 1921 and the Wahl company was born. I’ve tried other clippers over the years, but none as effective or as long lasting. I even tried one that was rounded and covered more of your head, it was a good idea but the motor went out very quickly.
Wahl sent me their Elite Pro Haircutting Kit and I found this razor to be their best I’ve tried. It has more power, and power makes the job of cutting your hair easier. I find the less power you have the more you have to go over your head and this is a hassle. Wahl also has a five year warranty on their products. I’ve had trouble with their cordless shaver in the past and sent it back and they promptly sent me back a new one. The Wahl kit is very reasonably priced and they never just give you the razor, they always throw in lots of extras.
The Elite Kit comes with a storage case, scissors, oil for the blades (which I rarely use because it doesn’t need it often), a barber’s cape and a lot of guides. The guides let you cut hair to different lengths. For my head I don’t use any guide to go as short as possible. Like a lot of bald men, we’re also lucky to have a lot of body hair. I also use the Wahl for the rest of my manscaping and this is where the guides come in handy for me.
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We live in a good decade for the balding man. It’s strange how times change for men and their grooming. It must have been tough not to have been able to have long hair in the 60’s and 70’s and to think that a comb over and the monk look were the only options up until the early 80’s. Although the stigma for balding seems to be all but gone, people are still having a field day making fun of chest and back hair, I bet Burt Reynolds never thought he’d see the day when chest hair wasn’t cool.
All opinions in this article are mine. The Wahl Elite Kit was provided by Wahl.
This is a take on the whole head-shaving thing that I hadn’t thought so much about; I guess I had tended to think of it as a fashion statement that was getting overdone, but maybe all those shaven heads are just heads that were balding like mine. Two personal reasons I haven’t gone over to the shiny side: first, what hair I still have actually looks better than it did when I was young, not that that’s saying much; and second, I don’t have a nicely shaped little head like Michael Jordan, but a great misshapen cranium with a point… Read more »