Men's Vogue
Spring 2006 Issue

There comes a time in every guy's life when he wakes up and realizes he has an appointment that afternoon with the baldness doctor.

A few years ago, it was only the desperate who woke up and went to their appointment with a doctor at a hair-restoration clinic, and the hair that they had restored looked less like hair and more like something that has been farmed hydroponically. But these days - in part because the procedures have improved, in part because people are having more and more elective surgery - meeting with a scalp-specializing dermatologist or, more radically, a surgeon is an increasingly viable option for people who suffer from alopecia, a term that makes you feel bad until you realize that alopecia means only baldness. Indeed, America would today appear to be moving beyond Rogaine, or at least balding Americans are. This is my story.

I met with Matthew Leavitt, D.O., a recent winner of the Golden Follicle, the Oscar of the International Society of Hair Restoration Surgery, awarded for outstanding clinical contributions in the field of follicular-unit transplantation, a kind of transplant that's like a heart transplant but with hair; as far as restorative hair surgery goes, he is one of the best, his methods state-of-the-art. He is five feet ten inches tall, with cheerful brown eyes, a healthy complexion that belies his 46 years, and, most crucial, a full head of dark flowing hair - hair that if it were a story would be Greek epic. The doctor has re-haired doctors, lawyers, movie stars you know, and about 50 to 60 professional baseball players, most of whom think their baldness has to do with their caps, even though it does not. Leavitt is the kind of guy who sits toward the back of the plane and notices all the hair loss in front of him, even hair loss not yet noticed by the people owning the hair. "I notice," he says.

If the realization that one's own hair loss is occurring can be said to take place in one dramatic lightening-bolt-strike-like moment, then that moment occurred for Leavitt in 1980, when he was attending the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and dealing with this hair loss by wearing hats. "I started collecting hats, which was good for a while," he recalls. At a party, a woman he had been interested in pursuing greater leisure-activity time with suddenly (not to mention dramatically) pulled off his hat, asking, "Are you bald?"

While Leavitt had previously toyed with the idea of becoming a professional baseball player, he subsequently focused instead on restoring hair, studying with the pioneers of the hair-restoration field, the doctors who were the best at the procedure that was done with all the finesse of a John Deere seed planter. "To this day we live with this terrible legacy, and Joe Average in the street thinks this is the way it is done," Leavitt says. "But really, anything that'd done cosmetically, short of breasts, you don't want it to be noticed; you want it to blend in." Eventually Leavitt underwent the procedure himself - five times, beginning in 1989. He is quick to point this out and does so by leaning forward and pointing his hair at you, while simultaneously tugging at a strand, the tug proving the hair is in fact his hair, growing from his head in a place that before there had been no hair, and that is definitely not a wig. "People will come to me and they say, "I'm tired of people kind of looking at my eyes and then kind of gazing up when they talk to me," he says. "There's a general obsession."

Leavitt has also sampled just about every cure for baldness that has come down the pike. "I use Propecia, and I also use Rogaine, and I also use the Laser Comb," he says, laughing. "I would be what you call a hair junkie. I barely have time to talk to you 'cause I have to take some medicine." The laser comb of which he speaks is the still-being-developed, low-level laser technology that is incorporated into a comb. (One theory has it that the laser may stimulate hair-follicle activity, but the jury is still out, and naturally, Leavitt is one of the dermatologists paid to be on the jury.) When he used the laser comb most recently, his wife said, "Why would you want to use that?" He then proceeded to suffer from what dermatologists refer to as shock loss - usually temporary hair loss that comes from a specific treatment. And while he knew intellectually that the shock loss was temporary, he took it, in a word, "badly."

"It makes you totally empathetic when you go through it," Leavitt says. His hair has recently been returned to him.

Leavitt began my consultation with a discussion of the mechanism of hair loss and the state of America's hair loss in general. Most hair loss is hereditary and hormonal in nature, and the likelihood of hair loss by age is simple to remember: about 30 percent for men in their 30s, 40 percent for men in their 40s, and so on. When Leavitt talks about hair loss, he talks about hair loss that is "cosmetically significant," not that there is another significance for hair. Despite the all-too-popular belief, hair loss in an indication of too much testosterone, or DHT, which, given the correct genetic coding, first shrinks hair follicles, resulting in an attendant shrinkage in the size and thickness of individual hairs; then kills off hair follicles. Like the balding man, the haired man also has loses hair every day, the difference being that his follicles live on and new hair grows back.

Where did Leavitt place my hair as far as bald or balding America goes? When he threw around phrases such as "as bald as you are," and "This guy was in serious trouble," and "His family history stinks," in reference to other people's hair, I knew his appraisal of my hair loss was not going to be good.

Read the rest of Robert's story in the Spring Issue of Men's Vogue!