Male premature hair loss group. I started losing hair on my temples when I was 16

I join the list. I'm 24, balding. It started right after puberty, my elder brother is 27 and has a bald pate. :-(

I'm 20 and this summer at the beach friends told me when I came out of the water I looked as if I was bald because I had so little hair. I didn't believe them but they took a photo and I was shocked. I never noticed but my hairs have become very thin and there also seem to be less and when they're wet and stick to my head you sea the skin between the strands. I don't have a bald spot except for the temples but it's like that all over the top of my head. On the sides and on the rear my hair is normal and thick. Now I started to count the hairs on my pillow, in the drain and so on and I loose 250-300 each day. I have an older half brother but he's got a full head of hair so I asked my mother about my father whom I never saw and she told me that yes he was bald when she met him at 26 and that he had told her he had started to loose his hairs right after puberty and had ended up bald at 23. We went to a doctor and he made a test and said that nearly all of my hairs were in their last cycle meaning that they will not regrow after they have fallen out, that's also why they're so thin, and that with 300 each day I had only months or a year to go. I'm very upset and sad.

amazing you didn't notice earlier, I wouldn't have believed your story had it not been for my partner who hadn't noticed either and I was the one to tell him, really in a way of admiration, because he was losing his hair so young and I think balding is very manly (also being bald of course, but I like the process of it best). He has generally thin hair, but with a large bald spot developing on top of his head. He was very depressed but since I like it so much he accepts it better I believe. Plus he's got a great headshape. He's started to cut his hair very short, so there'll be less of a difference when he'll have lost all of it.

yes some boys and men check their hair constantly and others don't and it comes to them as a surprise. I was the one telling my brother one day when I saw him in the bathroom before he had dried himself and his hair was still soaked and flattened and when he bent I saw his skin through it on the top rear part of his head and his whorl was nearly gone. There was no bald spot but there was a spot of a couple of inches where his hair was really thin and short. He was furious with me because I had come in without warning but I asked him to lean over and he saw I was serious so he let me examine his head and afterwards he took a mirror and examined it himself. He became very self conscious after that. He was 17 at the time. He had had bald temples during puberty but a lot of boys do and he didn't get alarmed but now he panicked and asked me to check regularly. I tried to reassure him and to tell him that balding was natural and that it didn't make men ugly, sometimes it's quite the contrary and other times it's just indifferent. I was 21 at the time and I had a boyfriend who was older, in his late 20ies, and he was also balding and I didn't love him less for it, but my brother wouldn't listen to me. He developed a small bald spot a few months later which gradually expanded. Today he's 23 and he's only got left a crown of hair around his head and a patch of hair in front but which is unrelated to the sides. He cuts the crown short and lets the patch grow long and combs it backwards, of course it doesn't cover his bald scalp but it's a thing he hangs on to, but it grows weaker too and it will probably be gone soon. I noticed that his gf can't stop caressing his head and in the beginning it annoyed him but now he lets her do it, so I asked him and he said that she loved his bald head. Maybe we women should more often tell them that they're beautiful bald.

It's not about beautiful or ugly but about young and old. Without hair you look older than you are. I'm 27 and I've been bald for a couple of years now and I look exactly like my 14 year older brother. This is especially hard when you get bald young. I mean everybody expects you to loose your hair when you're around 35-40 and more and more men are already bald at that age so I don't say that you look like 60 when you're bald at 40, you just look like 40, but when you loose it in your late 10s-early 20ies as I did you look double your age. I've counted that I know 72 boys approximately my age (counting only those that I personally know not those that I meet occasionally). Out of these 72, 8 are bald and 14 more are clearly balding with a bald spot on top or a very noticeably receding hairline and they all look older. On the other hand only 3 have still all their hair, all the others have more or less pronounced bald temples as is normal after puberty. Again, it's not beauty and it's not acceptance by the girlfriend. Mine doesn't care one way or the other. But she was surprised when she learned my age. We met 3 years ago and I had only a triangle of hair left in front of my head and even that was thinning and she thought I was in my mid-30ies when I was in reality 24 and she didn't even want to date me for that reason. I noticed the same thing with my brother. Unlike me he started losing his hair "only" when he was 26 but the process of it impressed me and in my eyes at his 30th anniversary he looked like our father.

That's why I preferred to shave completely and I believe a lot of us do: it looks kind of cool and ageless. I started to get bald when I was 19 and when my hair became thin on top to the point you saw the skin I shaved it all. My friends knew why of course but since to them my hairloss had not been dramatic yet they considered it simply as a new look and I actually liked the fact that I was standing out with my shaved head. I noticed of course that hairloss progressed but not even at what pace and when I turned 22 I decided to stop shaving for some time and I was very surprised to see that I was completely bald on the top and back of my head and my front hairline had much receded too. I stayed like that for a couple of month because it was also kind of cool to be, amongst my friends, the one who was the first to be truly bald. (Only one other boy I knew was losing his hair seriously and he had only a thinning vertex by then.) After that period I turned back to shaving all of it. Today I'm 28 and I only need to shave a crown which diminishes too and which at the back of my head is only 2'' wide. My father has only a small crown of hair which starts behind his ears and 1 of my cousins (the 1 who is older than me) has very little hair left, a band on each side behind his ears with practically nothing on the back of his head like a very old man, so that's probably where I am heading at/

Don't worry, be bald and proud and be happy for being young. My father is bald, my brother is balding, my friend is balding, at work two young colleagues are balding. It's a bald world so what. My friend tried to hide his bald spot when we met and he was very insecure about it but I made him feel at ease, caressed him there, kissed. Initially he felt ill at ease when I touched his hair but then he let me do it and now 2 years later and a lot of hair less it's no big deal anymore for him. He cannot hide his bald spot anyway it's grown far too big for that. So yes he's young (we're 25) but so what. Eventually he would have lost it anyway for which man doesn't.

I've read that 16% experience hairloss by age 29 and 5% by age 19 and I wonder what these figures mean. If it's hairloss on the temples they can't be right for I'd say 1 boy out of 4 or 5 has that and if it's hairloss on top it can't be right either for I see that only very very rarely. I've got temples and a receding hairline but so far nothing on top but I've lost like 3 cm of hairline and I know there's a pattern of hairloss which starts like that and even my sister's got that so I believe I'll be bald some time from now.

I believe it's real hairloss but they count those in where you don't notice it already. It's 5 or 6 % losing hair at age 19 which becomes visible only years later. I'm prematurely balding myself so I naturally pay attention to it in other men. I counted that at university out of the 150 or so I'm with 18 are balding (I don't mean the temples for that's common once puberty is over and nearly everyone has it). We're 22/23 years old and that's already 12%. Out of these 18, 2 lose their hair from the front and have a very high bald forehead, 11 have thinning hair and you can see through on top, 3 have a bald spot and 2 a large bald spot. I also noticed that 9 out of the 11 with thinning hair have a V-shaped frontline whereas 2 out of the 3 with a bald spot and the 2 with a large bald spot have a U-shaped frontline. I'm 22, I have a V-shaped frontline and thinning hair in a area the size of my hand/