When Doña Quixote is more anguished about the holes in her HAIR than the holes in her HEAD…

Featured image: Detail of the Portrait of Macee Leodepard, Wife of The French Trader Jacques Coeur, by the French School (15th century). Jacques Coeur ( 1395-1456), a contemporary of Joan of Arc (1412-1431), was a significant patron of the arts, one of the wealthy merchants who helped shape the artistic landscape during the period when art shifted from the Gothic to a more Renaissance-inspired style. Peter has digitally altered the image of Jacques Coeur’s wife, Macee, to show my face rather than hers. 

I came across the Portrait of Macee Leodepard while researching hair loss (alopecia), a topic of anxious interest to me—yes, over the last year or two my hair has been thinning all over and falling out in patches. The painting fascinates me because it shows Macee Leodepard‘s prominent forehead and high hairline without trying to mask her creeping baldness. On the contrary, the astounding hat draws one’s eye to her head. The black ropy decorative loop, which might be a device to hold the hat to her head, serves, moreover, as a pointer to her hairline, which (like mine) has eroded into an M-shape above her high forehead. She was clearly not trying to hide her advancing baldness!

The whole of  Portrait of Macee Leodepard, Wife of The French Trader Jacques Coeur  (15th century), from which Peter cropped the detail shown in the featured image

In the face of Macee Leodepard’s accentuation of  her hair loss, I admit that the last thing I imagined in regard to my thinning scalp cover was  to flaunt it. With my dementia diagnosis, in contrast, I right away started broadcasting my diminishing brain to friends, colleagues, in talks and on my blog. Good goddess, I even wrote four blog posts about my 3 pelvic floor surgeries! In my earlier “tell all” cases, I stuck to my belief that shame does NOT apply to blows upon my mental -or physical state from an indifferent universe but only to wrongs I do to other people. So why is taking me so long to reveal the holes on my head ? Isn’t losing one’s mind—by every measure of quality of life—far more significant than the loss of  “biologically insignificant” cranial padding and protection from the sun’s rays? Show and tell is hard because my subconscious has learned society’s lesson very well: “hair is one of the female features that make some people more love-worthy than others.” Of course we know it should not be true. As one of my fellow baldees says, though, “as any women who has suffered from hair loss themselves could tell you, the sterile medical explanation of hair loss rarely correlates to the human experience of being a woman that’s losing their hair.” Below, Ghost in Golden Sneaker (2023), by Suima, a Japanese digital artist who works anonymously and doesn’t reveal her face or personal details. Without a traditional art education, she started making digital images (focused on emotions) in 2023 and has since exhibited in various countries around the world.

“We are not the first culture that has embedded our self-identification as women into our own notion of our female identity (“Psychology of Hair Loss Patients and Importance of Counseling,” 2021). One of the oldest links between beautiful hair, womanhood, and love was was professed around 330 BCE  (written down around 500 BCE): In Song of Solomon 4:1, a lover expresses his besottedness with the hair of his beloved: “Behold, thou art fair, my love…thine hair is like a flock of goats descending from Mount Gilead.” While the metaphor falls discordantly on our non-pastoral ear, it is clearly a compliment, something like “I love your long and flowing hair that bounces with life.” It’s a compliment that’s still relevant today. For who of us, haired or not, does not gasp with envy at the beauty of Dame Helen Mirren’s “healthy, voluminous gray mane”? Below, Helen Mirren (then 77) at the premiere of Golda (Vogue, 2023).

From at least the ancient poet’s time onward, we women (and men!) have evaluated not only a woman’s femininity in terms of her hair, but also our own love-worthiness. For example, a month after her divorce from Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo cut her hair short and painted Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair (1940). She wears an oversized men’s suit and crimson shirt—possibly Rivera’s—instead of the traditional Mexican dress of her usual style. Her “masculine” clothing contrast with her delicate, dangling earrings and petite high-heeled shoes. Above the scene, she depicted musical notes and lyrics from a Mexican folk song: “Look, if I loved you it was because of your hair./ Now that you are without hair, I don’t love you anymore.'” (MOMA ).

So what could make the “hard, traumatic, beyond excruciating experience” of “losing about 100 hairs every day” worse? Other than scouring our personal history to see what we did wrong, we have to suffer the well-meaning remarks of people who try to cheer us up: “It’s just hair, who you are isn’t tied to your hair,/ “Well, at least you look good bald”/ “You’re lucky you have that jawline”/ “You don’t even need the wig”/ “Why don’t you just shave your head?” And from doctors or people in their offices who should know better, “Dr X can’t see you for a few weeks, because it is not an urgent case compared to others and, anyway, there’s no cure”/ “Don’t worry over something as trivial as hair loss” (Women’s Hair Loss Project). “Trivial.” Physiologically, yes. But not in our minds: Linda Haberfield of Southampton, England, went hermit, not leaving her house for 14 years. Another woman who has had 25 years of loss says, “I lived the first 13 in darkness, nothing will matter unless ALL my hair comes back.”  While all these comments might provide useful self-affirmation—or black humor—to us baldees when we eventually decide to “suck-it-up-and-go-on-with-our-life,” the only person entitled to utter them is the baldee herself. Until then, leave us be to hide in whichever way our hearts need to. Below, Three Mighty Ladies from Livonia, Albrecht Dürer, engraving from 1521.

When I caught up with my alopecia (or it with me), I was still having the shaved-one-side-and-longish-on-the-other-side hair cut I’d had throughout my adult life. This short a style does not yield much to work with to do a comb-over. I skipped a few haircuts to get a bit more length and I tried to “pass” by parting the longer swatch of my hair in a different place, meticulously fanning what-hair-I-still-have over the bald spots and glueing it in place with with gel and hairspray. The “style” would fall apart in as short as half-an-hour. Other baldees confirm my experience: “The puff it up and fluff for volume just doesn’t work.” I then dabbled with the low-cost end of the dermatological medical hair loss treatments that had become mainstream in the 1990’s: I tried an over-the-counter topical treatment recommended by my hair stylist, who herself had great success with it after having lost her hair due to an autoimmune disease. Despite my conscientious application of the shampoo, waiting 5 minutes, rinsing, applying the conditioner, waiting 5 minutes, rinsing, applying the concentrated hair growth serum, and styling my hair, there was no discernible difference in my hair cover. In fact, I seemed to have lost more hair throughout…. However, my remaining hair looked healthier, so I kept on using the product. I did not, however, graduate to higher-cost dermatological options such as oral medications ($80 to $,5000); injection therapy ($200 to $1,000); and surgical transplants ($7,400 and $25,000 for various sessions over 4 months to a year, with results typically starting about 9 months in). They do work. With my kind of alopecia, though, the same immune system attack that destroys one’s original follicles will also wallop your new plugs. Quoth Doña Quixote: “Well, eff  you, universe! Who needs hair anyway?” I jumped behind my alter ego on her high horse. “Nevermore,” I concurred. “I’ll just focus on my personality.” Below, Childhood portrait of Empress Margaret Theresa of Spain in red-with-silver-threads silk dress. unknown artist, circa 1662-1664, Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna.

My next thought was shaving my whole head. After all, I’d tried it during Covid. Thanks to some of my precursor baldee-buddies, bald-headed women have become much more accepted (among the enlightened denizensof our culture) from about the 2000’s onward. Women with hair loss as a result of  alopecia or cancer treatment joined Pride-like support groups such as Bald Girls Do Lunch, founded to alleviate the emotional and practical needs of women with alopecia. Participants get together over an informal lunch where they developed a nurturing camaraderie.  As baldness became more familiar to baldees themselves, the option of “head art” sprouted: what better use to make of one’s egghead than regarding it as a canvas for an artsy wink at yourself? (Bald Girls Do Lunch ; CBC/Radio-Canada; FashionBeyondFashion; MetroUK; Infringe.com).

A very positive thing that I have learned about high-end “prosthetic scalps” is  that they are NOT your mother’s wigs. “The latest systems are nothing like the heavy, unnatural looking wigs of the 1970s or 1980, which looked more like an item of clothing.” So says Jessica Kidd, who provides a range of hair-loss treatments at a hair replacement clinic in Dublin. As is generally the case in manufactured objects, wigs, too, have their “Fords and Ferraris.” Not surprisingly, the high quality ones are very expensive, which is a barrier for a lot of sufferers. You can buy a synthetic wig for $4o-400. According to critics, they have vastly approved since the cosplay-quality styles of twenty years ago. An “entry-level human hair” wig is made with a combination of synthetic and real hair. It goes from $200-1200. “Mid-range human hair” wigs are machine-made and may have some hand-sewn details. $1200-3000. “High-end human hair” wigs can have some machine construction and also hand-tied features, made by individually sewing or knotting each strand of hair onto a fine mesh cap. “Top of the range high-end human hair wigs,” the Ferraris, are fully hand-tied. “They can stand up to anything from a vigorous gym session to a swim in the sea.” Their prices ranges from $3000 upwards. Celebrities known for having paid the  highest prices (in 2025 money) for wigs include Michael Jackson ($75,000) Elizabeth Taylor ($16,000)—and then there is Lady Gaga, in a league of her own.

Usually the goal of “prosthetic scalps” is to look as close as possible to  a woman’s natural in her “good old days” or a make-over of her real hair by changing the color and/or style. Lady Gaga’s wigs, on the contrary, have a completely different goal: their main purpose of her headpieces are to function in the same way as  a wig described in a line from  Dexter Palmer’s novel Mary Toft; or, The Rabbit Queen, a wig that “subtly signifies its artifice through the regularity of its locks.” as close as possible to a woman’s own hair or a make-over of her real hair. Lady Gaga, though, does not use “regularity” to indicate artifice, but rather signals it by the colors of tropical birds, impossible volumes, and mixed media concoctions with oodles of texture. A wig moment that strikingly illustrates her iconoclastic approach appears in her performance of Hair on The Paul O’Grady Show in June 2011. She opened the show sitting on the piano in a teal-colored dress. Appearing bald (but actually wearing a wig cap to achieve a bald look), she sang an acoustic version of Hair while staring at a teal colored wig placed in front of her. Halfway through the performance, Gaga took the teal wig and placed it on her head to the words “Whenever I dress cool, my parents put up a fight/ And if I’m a hot shot, Mom will cut my hair at night/ And in the morning I’m short of my identity/ I scream, ‘Mom and Dad, why can’t I be who I want to be?'”

If I were ever to be lucky enough to afford a wig as spectacular as those of Lady Gaga, I’d love nothing more than to be Salt Lake City’s Senior Barbie Wig Lady. I fantasize about coming upon the perfect (affordable—Ha!) wig that meets Gaga-style criteria of artifice and playfulness. Other than Lady Gaga’s stylist, I found hardly anyone else who creates hair designs befitting my fantasy. One of them is Xaro Ferri Sanchís, who began her career in the world of hairdressing at only 13 years old when she started work in a salon in her neighborhood. At age sixteen, she took a hair styling and wig-fitting course at an academy in Valencia, and from their took off to fulfill her goal of “becoming a top client stylist.” Xaro inaugurated the first of two salons in Valencia, cosy gathering places where customers feel at home. Today she combines her work in the salon with the development of her artistic fantasy side, creating avant-garde wig- and -style collections (first two photos News4hair.com). Even should I have the energy and finances to travel to one of her salons in Spain, I could not come away with anything like the wigs below—they are museum pieces belonging to the body of her and others’ artistic work showcased by the Cooperativa de Peluquería de Valencian, a hairdressing body that chooses participants from several thousand competitors to design and execute avant-garde wigs for display over a period of two weeks.  Last photo, infringe.com .