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This is The Manthropologist, a column by Charlie Sosnick about the Internet and the male mind.
Two weeks ago, I attended a press preview of the Gain Lounge, a pop-up in Williamsburg hosted by Rogaine and Amazon to promote new Rogaine products. There were mocktails, a Rogaine-branded ping-pong table, and a dermatologist on hand to explain that the average man is starting his hair loss treatment three to five years too late. We had gathered here during National Hair Loss Awareness Month (August) to make sure men know they have options.
The press preview was attended by PR agents, grooming writers, and beauty influencers, which meant the audience was almost entirely women. In talking to them, I discovered they did not realize the state of Hair Loss Hyperawareness young men are already living in.
I am 28 years old. When I talk to a group of men my age, it is inevitable that hair loss will come up. Guys who could not tell you what kind of toothpaste they use know about minoxidil and finasteride, whether Hims or Ro is cheaper, and that you can take minoxidil orally off-label. We share cautionary tales of finasteride—what it did to our mental health, and our boners—and how to avoid side effects with different dosages. We peel our hair back and let our friends inspect our hairlines, asking them to confirm what we already know.
Men in their twenties and thirties, theoretically, shouldn’t be that concerned about going bald. One rule of thumb holds that the percentage of men going bald matches their decade in life: 20% of guys in their twenties, 30% of guys in their thirties, etc. But as the Rogaine doctors pointed out, your window to respond is fairly short. And we are neurotically concerned about missing it.
Young men do not usually talk about health or grooming topics so openly or eagerly. So why is hair loss the rare exception? For one, young men are generally healthy, and hair loss is one of the only medical problems we all worry about. We don’t have bad knees or enlarged prostates bringing us to the bathroom in the middle of the night (yet). But that first little creep in the corners of your forehead is the first sign that you have finished growing up and begun growing old.
Another reason is that you can fix it. I would argue that the foundation of a healthy body image is acceptance: I look this way and I have to live with it, because what choice do I have? But today’s young men are the first generation to live with truly widespread, effective, discreet, and affordable solutions to baldness. We are the first men for whom balding is entirely optional. You don’t have to accept hair loss: you are the master of your pate and captain of your skull.
The ability to prevent hair loss has dramatic implications for the cultural acceptability of it. For one, it can encourage judgment of people who do go bald. (“Why didn’t they just take the pills? That’s their fault.”) But more meaningfully, the rise of minoxidil and finasteride has shifted men more broadly from acceptance to action. If you can halt the march of time on your head, why not in the rest of your body? If this pill can save your hair, shouldn’t there be another pill for your waistline or your muscle tone or your sex drive? And if you start young with cosmetic enhancement, it stands to reason that you’ll be more committed to it the rest of your life.
That’s not to say that any of this is bad per se. It’s your body, and if there are safe ways to make it look and feel better, power to you for using them. But treating aging as something we can actually postpone, versus something we must live with, represents a profound shift that we are perhaps unprepared for.
When I was 19, I walked into a random Manhattan barber shop and got a cut from an old Russian guy. While running his hands through my hair, he matter-of-factly told me I was losing it. I panicked, spent the rest of my summer vacuuming up information about balding and how to stop it, and finally booked an appointment with my dermatologist. (This was a couple years before the online finasteride telehealth business exploded.) She inspected my scalp with a microscope and told me the barber was wrong. I was fine, and the worst thing I could do for my hairline was to start worrying about it now. But, I said, there are these new pills and they say you should get on them as soon as possible, even if you’re not sure your hairline is receding. She shook her head, and told me that I was experiencing the effects of a grooming industry that had run out of insecurities to sell to women and was now selling them to men.
As always with any topic related to cosmetic enhancement, we men are lightyears behind women and deal with a small fraction of what they contend with. But this also means that boys are given less preparation about how to develop a healthy, durable body image that can withstand the relentless barrage of the beauty industry. The most intense cosmetic marketing men my age ever experienced were Axe commercials. We were served up to Hims and Rogaine like lambs to the slaughter.
