There are thousands of videos, all the same yet each one wholly remarkable. A balding man sits in a salon chair, sometimes looking sheepish. He can be any age, often younger than you’d expect. His receding hairline is tidied and clipped neat. A glob of liquid adhesive is smoothed over the bald spot, then a hairpiece that matches his natural color is carefully lined up, adhered and styled. You'd never know it wasn't is own hair if you hadn't just seen it applied.
The man is transformed. He can look five, 10, 20 years younger. His smile at the end is always bigger than it was at the beginning.
Toupee application and styling videos are huge on TikTok, some getting millions of views. It’s easy to get sucked into a toupee TikTok vortex, swiping through dozens of videos in a sitting and marveling at the transformations – even if, like me, you’re a woman who’s never experienced hair loss and have otherwise paid little thought to toupees. There’s something soothing about the process, uplifting too.
Just think: How many times have you seen a toupee celebrated instead of mocked?
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Toupee stigma is real, and it’s still a problem
Search for toupees on TikTok and you’ll inevitably come across a Prism Elites video. The Los Angeles salon specializes in hair replacement and has posted dozens of hair transformation videos, the most popular of which have over a million views.
And those TikToks are bringing in clients, according to Josh Williams, the man responsible for making them; he estimates that half of their new clients find them through social media. Williams, 31, started wearing what he calls a “hair system” in his 20s before he began working in sales and customer relations at Prism Elites.
“There’s such a negative connotation around wearing a toupee, we’re even renaming it,” Williams says. “We don’t even call it a toupee anymore, we call it a hair system because we’re trying to end the stigma around it.”
That stigma is evident looking at the comments on Williams’ TikToks. While most are supportive, a fair number are critical, even mean-spirited.
“That stigma is internalized a lot,” Williams says. He points out that many of the negative social media comments come from other men. “A lot of the men are saying, ‘Oh, just go bald, be a man!’ There’s so much more to being a man than that. It’s OK to wear a hair system.”
Changing fashions and media representation feed into the toupee stigma
Peter Lehman, professor emeritus in film and media studies at Arizona State University and the author of "Running Scared: Masculinity and the Representation of the Male Body," says toupees have traditionally been depicted as a joke in popular media, an emasculating punchline at a man’s expense.
“Toupees used for gags and humor, in film and television is commonplace, and it's been going on for a long time,” Lehman says, even though some of the most famous, manly actors to ever grace the silver screen wore toupees and “it was largely not known by the moviegoing public.” Even Lehman, who’d done extensive scholarship on John Wayne’s western films with the director John Ford, including his doctoral dissertation, never knew until long after that Wayne wore a toupee.
Lehman points out that in the 1960s and '70s, hair on a man was considered sexy and more virile – male chest hair, for example (think Burt Reynolds or Tom Jones) was highly prized.
But bodies, like fashion, are subject to trends and shifting cultural expectations. Hairy chests and bell bottoms give way to waxed skin and skinny jeans. Now baldness instead of hairiness is a cultural sign of virility and masculinity. “Now (being bald) has nothing to do with them being comic or humiliated. In fact, it's the opposite,” Lehman says. He points out action heroes like Bruce Willis, Jason Statham, or Dwayne Johnson. “Now, being bald can be a way of emphasizing that alleged masculine power.”
But mocking hair growth or lack thereof, as with mocking small penis size (another popular punchline in film and TV), is body shaming, indicating nothing about a man's strength or worth.
It’s time for the gendered double standard to end, and TikTok might be helping
However popular the toupee TikTok trend is, sometimes it’s hard for Williams to find willing subjects for his videos. Privacy is a huge concern with clients, he says, noting that some men are even hesitant to get their hair systems applied in front of other clients. And while he won’t name names, Williams says celebrities have come into Prism Elites to get their hair systems installed, and that the public doesn’t know they’re balding.
He sees a gendered double standard in the difference between how men’s hair and women’s hair are treated in society and represented in media, noting how dramatic hair makeovers and extensions are received warmly for women, including celebrities.
“With women, people are always giving really positive feedback and encouraging,” Williams says.
He’s hopeful that’s changing as social media videos like his help to demystify and normalize men’s hair care and styling. Plus, Prism Elites is in the process of renovating a new, bigger space so they can expand.
“It seems like it’s slowly but surely becoming more accepted in the community,” Williams says.
And that’s a good thing because even if baldness is as fashionable as Lehman says, not every man feels confident bald, nor should he have to.
“I tried to feel confident in myself, but there’s the expression ‘Look good, feel good.’ And if you don’t think you look good, then it’s kind of hard to manifest that confidence,” Williams says. When he had his first hair system put on, “Not only did I look like I was five years younger, I instantly felt so much better about myself because I loved the way that I looked.”
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English (US)