Lately, more and more Black femmes with alopecia have been empowered to embrace their bald heads as a public aesthetic. Since alopecia is a socially disabling condition, being naturally bald in public can feel like a radical statement. Granted, as a bald girl myself, there are days when I don’t want to feel like a “radical statement.” It can get exhausting! There are days that I am tempted to trade authenticity for the safety of conventional beauty, which is equally as valid. I, for one, consider wearing wigs again every once in a blue moon!
What encourages my aesthetic authenticity is the care and attention I put into the health and beauty of my skin and scalp. So, on the one year anniversary of my first piece with ESSENCE about my journey with alopecia, I’m following up by sharing my personal approaches to maintenance and adornment for my bald head. Below, I aim to empower beautiful, bald Black baddies who are interested in rocking the look.
Cleansing
One of my top priorities for my skin and scalp care is the simplicity of hygiene and cleanliness. Many bald Black women swear by shampooing their scalp with a light product to remove sweat, oil, and general buildup. My secret tip is to extend your face wash to your scalp instead! The skin on your face and your scalp have the same pH, so the exfoliants in many face washes can also work well for your scalp. Cleansers can often be even gentler on your scalp than shampoo, especially if you have Alopecia Totalis and Universalis and none of your follicles grow hair.
Just make sure you don’t overdo it, and follow-up with a light oil or moisturizer as needed, just as you would the skin on your face and body.
SPF
Sunscreen is a must! Many Black people denounce sunscreen under the premise that “Black folks are made for the sun, so it can’t damage our skin.” But science knows better, as do those of us who learned this lesson the hard way. In the first few summers of being bald in public, I spent a lot of time at the beach, but very little time applying sunscreen before I went. As a result, my fall seasons were met with looser, saggier skin (in my tender twenties)!
Now 28, tretinoin has reversed the effects of my earlier negligence. Since then, even in winters or on home-dwelling days, I’ve been applying SPF on my skin to keep it tight.
My makeup hack: a little dab of a lightweight SPF moisturizer over my cheekbones, the tip of my nose, and my collarbone at the end of my makeup routine. This doubles as skin protectant and a dewy highlight!
Headwraps
Since temps are dropping, tans are fading, and the “put something on that head!” command from childhood is ringing loudly in our ears again, it’s time to start pulling out our headwear. For bald girls, I recommend ditching itchy hats and caps for satin and silk headwraps. Remember: the purpose of headwraps for us shouldn’t be to conceal what we don’t have underneath, but to protect what we do: our minds, our power, and that magic thing Black femmes have that just can’t be put into words.
Hair in our cultures are known to carry energy, but the lesser known fact is that our bald heads do, too. Wearing headwraps is a sacred tradition of protection and self-preservation for us. However, just because the tradition is sacred doesn’t mean my styling needs to be solemn or stoic. I’ve recently made a hobby of experimenting with coiffing headwraps into styles inspired by hairstyles! Getting creative with my style nurtures the confidence that empowers me to show up in the world authentically.
Makeup
Speaking of creative exploration and self-expression, I’ve had so much fun over the years pushing myself to create bolder makeup looks. It’s often said that bald girls have to rely on our face cards to carry looks since we can’t rely on hair. I mostly agree, but my face card is more about how tea my face gets when I don’t shy away from creativity with makeup! Some days, the best beat is a fresh, clean face, but I also love a colorful liner, a bold lash, an artfully-designed lid, and a generally dramatic paint!
My most secret sauce: embracing my browlessness. For a girl like me who is bold in essence but soft on the inside, not drawing brows brings my tenderness out by softening my features. It is an unconventional look for some, and many bald girls are encouraged to draw brows to compensate for not having them. But personally, not having brows is one of my favorite, most naturally feminine omissions from my face. (Contrarily, however, I live for a lash!)
Less is More
This is the most important to me, on many levels. Logistically, the fact that maintenance for your hair gets easier when you don’t have any is obviously true! But even skin and scalp maintenance gets simpler since our bodies are super generative and do a lot of the work for us. As baldies, we don’t need a plethora of chemicals and products to give our skin the goodies it already has access to. Sometimes, too much product exiles moisture and nutrients, slows healthy skin processes, and even mixes company chemically, which is all risky on hairless skin.
But more simply, some days, the healthiest regiment for my little moon of a bald head is my own loving gaze in the mirror. I remind myself often that beauty is not in a standard, but in our capacity to be authentic. And some days, as a practitioner of that kind of beauty, that simple sentiment is all the care I need.