The Bald Guy Glow-Up Only Happens When You Accept You’re Bald

In 2014, Sabri Mallou left his home country of Syria amid its civil war. When he arrived in Canada, he was 20 years old, and navigating his way in a new country—living in a tiny studio apartment, building a career, and generally “figuring it out day by day.” Between the stress of starting over and the ongoing unrest in his home country, he began to lose his hair. He couldn’t fathom being bald, so he tried to hide the patchiness with longer hairstyles that would conceal the ever-growing horseshoe pattern balding that was forming atop. “It didn’t look great,” the car dealership general manager recounts. Then his sister suggested something: Shave it all off. So in 2017, at age 23, Mallou took a razor to his head. With every swipe, he inched closer to a new identity: a bald man. And without hair to tend to, he turned his attention to other parts of his appearance.“I had to focus on other things about my body: my physique, my skin, my beard,” he says. “They say hair is makeup for the man. I have no hair, so I have no makeup.” Looking back now, the 32-year-old says “it’s probably the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”Mallou is part of a growing cohort of men who are responding to hair loss by doubling down on their grooming, physique, and fashion sense. Despite growing access to relatively affordable hair transplant procedures—specifically abroad in Turkey—some guys are eschewing surgical solutions in favor of embracing their god-given attributes. As a bald positivity movement grows on social media, and trends like looksmaxxing continue to fill men's feeds, men are not only embracing the shift of losing their hair, but also using it as a prompt for self-improvement. Call it the Bald Guy Glowup.“Before I embraced being bald, I genuinely believed I would become less attractive and less confident,” Tariq Kazemi, founder of BLD Bro, a skincare brand dedicated to those with alopecia, says. “I realized the biggest obstacle wasn’t baldness itself. It was the story I’d been told about baldness.”In pop culture, bald guys are often the butt of the joke (George Costanza in Seinfeld), portrayed as the villain (Lex Luthor), or associated with being old. But there is also a set of well-kept, often muscly men who inspire positivity among the hairless: Dwayne Johnson, Stanley Tucci, Jason Statham, Common, to name a few. Combined with the bald influencers helping guide the soon-to-be-bald to the hairless side, they're serving as blueprints for strategies to complement the bald look: improved grooming, evolved style, and maybe even a more serious workout routine.Jon Kopaloff/Getty ImagesEmma McIntyre/Getty Images“I wasn’t always this confident as a bald man. It took a few changes to reach here,” Piiyush Mishra, a bald influencer who goes by @thebaldlifestyle, writes on an Instagram reel. He then captions his post by listing the ways he’s rebuilt his confidence: “Fixing my dressing sense,” “taking grooming seriously,” and “working on my fitness.”Common male pattern baldness, known in the medical world as “androgenetic alopecia,” is the main cause for hair loss in men. According to the American Hair Loss Association, two-thirds of American men will experience noticeable hair loss by 35—that number goes up to 85% by the time they reach 50. But no matter how common the condition, the men interviewed for this story say that going bald feels catastrophic.Mallou, a burgeoning bald confidence influencer, posted a now-viral Instagram reel in February of him doing bodyweight dips with the caption: “When you don’t feel like training but then you remember you’re bald.” The video received nearly 2,000 comments, many of which seemed to relate. “my thought process every damn week,” one wrote.Mallou is not alone in his motivations to invest more in his appearance post-shave. Harry James runs the eight-year-old YouTube channel named Bald Cafe where he assuages the anxiety revolving around thinning hair, convinces balding men it’s time to shave their head, and offers workout tips. He recalls being 26 and shaving his head after a conversation he had with a colleague during a period when James was spiraling about his hair loss. “I'm going to look so old and ugly," he remembers saying. “Are you?” she countered.“The biggest thing I think is misunderstood by people is that hair loss is only a psychological issue that is caused by something physical,” James says. “Hair loss does not hurt physically in any way, in any way. It's purely what you think is going to happen to you.”Paul Souders/Getty ImagesAnadolu/Getty ImagesAfter shaving his head he set goals to better himself, both physically and mentally. That turned into getting so disciplined about exercise that he developed a six pack, growing a mustache, traveling the world, and even learning how to be a coach for guys who had struggled with hair loss like he had. While he can’t grow hair anymore, he reasons, there’s still so much that he can do. “You got to use your strengths,” he says in response to the many compliments he receives on his Tom Selleck-level mustache.Different nooks of the internet have opened up to bald men looking for solace from others in their community. A long-running forum in that space was the subreddit r/bald. For the past 15 years it’s been a gathering space for men and women to commiserate over the loss of their head and provide support to those dealing with alopeciaIts 1.3 million weekly visitors run the gamut from teens to young adults to middle-aged people to elderly folks. In many cases, bald men ask their community for advice on how to boost their self-esteem. Others share their own tips for adjusting to the aesthetic shift. Sometimes it’s about new sartorial choices. “I'd been bald for a few years by this point, but when I got new glasses I opted for thicker frames,” one Reddit user posted. “It adds a bit of something to a hairless head.” Other times, it’s about changing one’s body composition. “I'm not saying going bald will get you jacked, but it could be the confidence booster you need to start taking care of yourself,” another user shared with a before-and-after photo showing not only a hair transformation but a body one.The virtual network has even started to find its way into the real world. In June 2026, New York City’s Washington Square Park became the spot for a “Bald Meetup,” which had been held in Seattle earlier that month and has since popped up in Los Angeles and Vancouver. “We will be congregating as one common bald people,” organizer Justin Bradford wrote in the invite on Instagram. The event had 144 attendees, Bradford says, and an on-site barber was available for buzzcuts. There were also a lot of bald heads touching. One participant was Gabriel Frias, a digital creator who had accepted his fate just two months earlier.“It was cool just to be there with a bunch of bald people,” he says. “I'm new to this bald game, so I wanted to find other people to reinforce how I'm feeling for a little bit.”Frias had noticed his hair was thinning excessively two years ago, and he told himself he would “never want to be that guy who looks like he's trying to hold on [to his remaining hair].” When he found himself doing just that for about a year—getting haircuts to create the illusion of more hair, wearing hats to hide thinning areas—he decided to just shave it off. For at least a couple weeks, Frias felt self-conscious about his new look but that quickly dissipated when people started to compliment the shape of his head.He has since shifted his style choices with his bald look in mind. Hats are no longer a tool to hide balding but rather a finishing touch to his outfits. He also adopted a strict grooming routine. “Since going bald I care way more about my skin,” Frias says. “And that has made me way more confident when I don’t wear a hat—my head and skin looks great.” Once he got used to his new look, he says a chrome dome simply became another accessory—a form of self-expression, much like his painted fingernails, body tattoos, and well-groomed mustache.For some bald guys, a patch of hair anywhere else on their body can be a welcome substitute to the absence on the top of their head. Rashaun Hall, a 49-year-old television consultant and freelance journalist, sports a large, thick beard similar to a slightly shorter version of James Harden’s iconic facial hair. Since he was 25, Hall has been shaving his head, and around his 30s he started to grow out his facial hair. A chinstrap turned into a goatee before its final form today.“I do get a lot of compliments, but I also tell people: ‘You can at least grow the hair on your head,” Hall says. “So this is where I grew mine.’”