The Year of Bald

Just when it became normal to drop five figures on a thicker hairline, a new cultural vanguard rose up and said: “Fuck it, we bald.” In 2025, a full head of hair has never been more publicly coveted, or attainable, with science closing in on miracle follicle treatments and Hollywood’s leading men flaunting age-defying manes. And yet, as millions raced to the supplements aisle and secret Turkish clinics, the proudly tress-less remade the culture in their image. Now, bald is brave. Bald is sexy. Bald is life.

I first started paying attention in March, during the 2025 Academy Awards. The bald nominees seemed to be the only ones behaving; paragons of modesty, they showed reverence for the arts over themselves. Of the three Emilia Pérez winners for Best Original Song, only the hairless one refrained from bursting out into spontaneous warble. While a gum-tossing Adrien Brody yammered on in his Best Actor acceptance speech, his Brutalist colleague and Best Original Score recipient Daniel Blumberg succinctly thanked the “radical, hardworking musicians” who preceded him. This contrast did not go unnoticed. Online, Oscar viewers doted over Blumberg and Anora supporting actor Yura Borisov, and cried out when Gareth John, one of two bald sound engineers accepting the Best Sound Design award for Dune: Part Two, was unjustly silenced by music.

Since then, shiny-domed individuals have won everything from the Nobel Prize in Literature (Laszlo Krasznahorkai) to The Great British Baking Show (Jasmine Mitchell). Their presence has blessed Broadway (Oedipus’s Mark Strong) and indie biopics (The Smashing Machine’s Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson) but especially our timelines (Wicked’s Cynthia Erivo). Fans have embraced the movement. This summer, scores of young women swarmed Pitbull’s Party for Life tour wearing bald caps in homage to their surprised leader. “We have adult money, and this is what this generation is choosing to spend it on,” a 27-year-old fan wearing not one, not two, but three caps proudly informed the New York Times.

To shed further light on bald mania, I wrote to 26-year-old pop-culture oracle Alison Sivitz, who herself has shampoo-commercial-worthy tresses but worships at the altar of hairlessness. You might know her better as the online celebrity Bald Ann Dowd. Sivitz invented her viral online persona two years ago, while suffering from a bout of trichotillomania as her dad underwent cancer treatment. (Additionally, she elaborated in her email reply, “the word ‘bald’ is quite concise and percussive, which makes it a catchier and more captivating descriptor than, like, ‘Ann Dowd with a tooth gem.’”) The day before the Democratic primary for the New York City mayor’s race, she swapped her profile photo — Ann Bald photoshopped with an artificially smooth scalp — to a headshot of Zohran Mamdani given the same treatment. In a sign of how much the bald brand has appreciated, Mamdani’s campaign manager, Zara Rahim, replied, “I want to send a cease and desist but I also feel like we won an award.”

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As Sivitz wrote to me, bald is classic: “People were bald 200 years ago and they will be bald in another 500 years … It’s like a crisp button-down and a good pair of jeans for your head.” It is visually provocative. And it is a test of substance for conventionally attractive people: “When you remove your hair, the swag has to come from within.”

This helps explain why so many follically-endowed movie stars have debuted naked scalps for new roles. Bald means business, the willingness to sacrifice one’s image for greater glory. Austin Butler reached never-before-seen heights of baldness in Dune’s sequel last year, while Timothee Chalamet’s new buzz cut is rumored to be the star of Dune: Part Three. A stripped-down Jacob Elordi appears in the new Frankenstein looking like a human anatomy diagram. One of the most notable transformations occurs in Yorgos Lanthimos’ Bugonia: Emma Stone plays an abducted CEO whose kidnappers confuse her for an extraterrestrial and shave her head to stop her from communicating with alien kind. Stone, who actually committed to being bald, told Vogue that there is “no better feeling in the world”: “The first shower? … Oh my God, it’s amazing.” Following in her stead, freshly-sheared moviegoers packed promo screenings of the film.

In our ever-vain society, the balds are our prophets, and their luminous noggins are orbs in which we can see a more liberated future, one less burdened by beauty standards. The fear of hair loss has sent men clutching their toupees for ages, but their panic has only intensified with stricter gender norms and aggressive marketing of new treatments. In retaliation for guys nitpicking their appearances, many women have proved happy to judge. But let us not pretend hairlines determine happiness. Just look at bald The 1975 drummer George Daniel, who married party-girl icon and recovered commitmentphobe Charli xcx in the wedding of the year. Or Hot Ones’ Sean Evans, self-effacing celebrity interviewer whose crush, Keke Palmer, smooched him on camera in September. It is what is on the inside that matters: Substance over surface, full personalities over full scalps.