Hair loss is common in men and women, especially as we age. For example, male pattern baldness (or pattern hair loss) occurs in 80% of men and 40% of women. Most of the time it doesn’t matter physically.
However, modern society has an aversion to hair removal. See how the news is speculating whether 10-year-old Prince George and his younger brother Louis will inherit their father’s “bald gene.”
The hair restoration surgery market is predicted to be worth £10bn by 2026. You can also buy baby wigs that claim to “make your child more attractive” up to the age of three.
It wasn’t always like this. Baldness has been revered in many cultures and eras throughout history, from ancient Egypt to the 18th century Isini (now Ghana) people. A shaved or bald head represents purity, a rejection of superficiality, and can be ritualized by daily shaving.
Fresco of the young bald Jesus in the Grotto Church of St. Peter. Peter and Paul, Serbia. непознати/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY
A bald head is also positively associated with divinity. Medieval and Christian art includes bald depictions of Jesus and the Madonna. Today, Buddhist monks, nuns, and other political and religious groups routinely shave their heads.
Baldness began to be celebrated in the West in the 19th century. But it wasn’t for religious reasons, but because of pseudoscience combined with harmful ideas about intelligence and race. This set a precedent for a Eurocentric bias in hair loss research that continues to this day.
Eugenicists and hair removal
Ten years after Charles Darwin published his famous evolutionary paper, On the Origin of Species, in 1859, his cousin Francis Galton expanded on it by suggesting that some human groups are more likely than others to also suggested that it is evolving. Galton and his colleagues use all visible human differences, such as differences in skin color and hair, as “evidence” of different human races, some of which are superior to others. It was considered.
Black people, in particular, had different hair than white people, and were pseudoscientifically classified as being evolutionarily inferior. Victorian eugenicists viewed black hair as animal fur and argued that black people had been “the same black-skinned, woolly-headed animal for the past 2,000 years.”
Related to eugenics is the pseudoscience of phrenology, which attempts to predict traits such as personality and morality from physical characteristics. These include a person’s head shape, complexion, and amount of hair. Although phrenology has been completely discredited, it supports scientific racism, the idea that races are biological and that some races are superior to others. It has been used to.
Victorian author Henry Frith wrote in his 1891 book How to Determine Character from Features, Shapes, and Faces: “Hairless men are intelligent people. Their mental and physical strength are both considerable…In baldness, the brain rules over matter.”
Such ideas were combined with false beliefs in the superiority and intelligence of white men compared to other “hairy” races. Frith writes: “The white race and the relatively hairless races rule the world against the strong, wild, hairy races.”
American medical students were taught that slaves, Indians, women, and donkeys never went bald because their brains were small and underdeveloped. In 1902, physician David Walsh wrote a book on hair diseases, stating that “baldness is almost unknown among the savages.”
Remarkably, such eugenic logic remained unchallenged until the late 20th century. In 1966, dermatologist Ian Martin Scott concluded that “baldness is rare among people of color and virtually unknown in many semi-civilized societies.”
Phrenologists believed that the shape of your skull determined your personality. welcome collection
Diversity in hair removal is important
Today, thankfully, such false beliefs are rare in the scientific community. However, like many areas of medical research, research and clinical trials on hair loss primarily focus on Caucasians, with other racial groups ignored or excluded.
Social psychologist Hannah Frith (no relation) and I recently reviewed a psychological study that collectively surveyed more than 10,000 bald men. Almost all study participants were European or Asian, with only 1% from South America or Africa.
Meanwhile, dermatologists and other hair loss specialists continue to routinely study medical textbooks that contain only images of white scalps and straight-textured hair.
This is a problem because, as recent (and limited) research shows, hair loss is common in all racial and ethnic groups. The 2022 study looked at data from around 200,000 British men (aged 38 to 73). Researchers found that 68% of white men reported hair loss, compared to 64% of South Asian men and 59% of black men. (The relatively small difference is partially explained by the fact that the white men in the study were older).
There are also forms of hair loss that are known to be more common in people of color. For example, Asian women are more likely to suffer from alopecia areata, an autoimmune disease that causes hair loss.
Black people are more likely to develop traction alopecia, a type of hair loss associated with continuous pulling on hair follicles, such as from tight hairstyles. This condition highlights the impact that a racist society has on hair.
Specifically, Black people may feel the need to hide their Afro-like textured hair (which is stereotyped as uncivilized) with braids, braids, chemical relaxers, etc. All of these actions can physically damage your hair, including your hair follicles.
Racially Inclusive Alopecia Resources from the Center of Evidenced-based Dermatology can help dermatologists make more realistic recommendations that place people’s hair concerns in their social and cultural context. Masu.
It is important to better understand racism in hair loss research. This is a reminder that the texture, color, and amount of a person’s hair, evolved or not, tells us nothing meaningful about that person.
