Prematurely Bald

Some don't take it as well as others

Be it via alopecia or a similar condition, really early onset male pattern baldness, some sort of accident... it's not as though high school wasn't already hard enough, now you're losing your hair a few decades early.

Some may try to hide it with comeovers, some may go 'au natural' or just shave it all off to stop looking patchy, but it will often be a saw spot. A few will embrace it and not let it get them down.

A prematurely bald head is not to be confused with a shaved one (unless as mentioned above the person was balding anyway and just finished the job).

See also Charlie Brown Baldness. When done with a small child, or a teenage girl, it's usually case of the Littlest Cancer Patient.

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Examples of Prematurely Bald include:

Anime and Manga

• Kagerou Usui in Sayonara, Zetsubou-sensei has it even worse than most: Though his comb-over covers his bald spot, no one notices him, to the point where he can shout in someone's ear and the listener will wonder what just made a noise. However, whenever his bald spot is exposed (usually after he's gotten accustomed to being invisible and while he's doing something embarrassing, like reading porn in the classroom), people suddenly all fix their gaze on him. They then proceed to punish him, mock him or both.
• Yukimitsu Manabu in Eyeshield 21 is already losing his hair from stress in his second year of high school. At the start of the Kanto tournament, he starts styling his hair differently, and it isn't nearly so apparent. According to a Fourth Wall Mail Slot segment in the manga, he's had a ridiculously high hairline since birth.
  • Unsui Kongo's head hair has been stubble his entire life it seems, and Agon lampshades this, "Still as bald as ever."

Comic Books

• Professor X from X-Men lost his hair in his late teens, as a side effect of his mutant powers.
  • And the movie version of him is played by a man who went bald almost as young.
• Mortadelo lost all his hair to one of Doctor Bacterius's experiments. Filemon combines this with Hair Antennae.
• The Silver Age version of Lex Luthor lost his hair as a teenager, when an experiment in artificial life went wrong. He blamed Superboy for this, and swore revenge. A similar story was used in the Superboy TV series, and it's at least alluded to in Smallville. (In the John Byrne reboot version he just went prematurely bald worrying about Superman).
• In recent times, Black Lightning takes on a bald look. Green Lantern claims that it is a "reverse combover", stating that BL is going prematurely bald, and shaved his head to disguise it.

Film

• Kyle's flashback in Tenacious D: The Pick of Destiny.
• The premise of Harold.

Live Action TV

• Lex Luthor in Smallville lost all his hair as a small child because of the meteor shower.
• Ted from Scrubs began balding at 14.
  • Turk may or may not suffer from this as well. In one episode, he admits that he shaves his head because he's going bald, but in another he rebuts it.

Video Games

• Ricky Johnson of Backyard Sports is a tween, and lost his hair before he was 8 (probably).

Web Comics

• Order of the Stick prequel On The Origin of PCs makes it known that premature baldness runs in Roy Greenhilt's family. Roy shaved his head in college. It is never specified whether he shaves or is naturally bald in the comic's "present".
  • While not directly stated, dwarven cleric Durkon has said he's been bald for "forty years," and is currently 55, meaning he went bald as a teenager.

Western Animation

• Numbuh One in Codename: Kids Next Door. Somehow, the Delightful Children are responsible, and this is Numbuh Five's Greatest Failure.
  • Also Mr. Fibb, as revealed in "Operation: C.O.W.G.I.R.L": He started losing his hair in elementary school.
• Doug even had a haircut episode, even though he only had four or five single hairs on his entire head. The later series openly acknowledged that he was losing his hair at 12, and had him come to terms with it.
• It's been shown that AJ in The Fairly OddParents is naturally bald. In "Fairy Idol" and the "Wishology" trilogy he expresses desire to have hair.
• The main goal of Gerald Bald Z, the young protagonist of Perfect Hair Forever, is to obtain...Perfect Hair Forever.
• In an early episode of The Simpsons Mr. Burns reveals that he lost his hair during his senior year at Yale (although flashback scenes are, shockingly, not always consistent).
• In the Grossology episode "Hairless Whispers" Abby is the first victim of Frederick Follicle's hair loss ray and more people follow.

Real Life

• There is a condition called alopecia that can cause baldness in children and teenagers. A rare female example is the stand-up comedian Renee Hicks, now with her hair grown back and spelling her name René.
• Alopecia aside, if a boy is genetically predisposed to hair loss, hair can begin to thin out in their mid-teens. The primary cause of hair loss is an abundance of a specific type of testosterone, so for many, it can begin as soon as puberty ends and their hormones level out.
• Patrick Stewart lost his hair at the age 19. He said in an interview that after a friend's husband held him down and said friend took off and burned his toupee, he accepted it.
  • The world thanks those friends for their good deed.
• Kenny Chesney began balding at age 19.
• The Other Wiki mentions Jason Alexander beginning to lose his hair at 16.
• Whenever he takes his baseball cap off, you'll see that Doug Walker (who's in his early thirties) has a bit of a bald spot near the back of his head. He seems to be a fan of cutting his hair quite short, though, so that can't help much.
• Michael Chiklis lost his hair due to a makeup malfunction. After shaving his head and applying grease paint (for a part in You Can't Take It with You), he failed to remove the paint, and it killed his hair follicles.