Bald And Beautiful

Sometimes, losing your hair is the hardest part. To regain control, women fight back with a razor and a wig.

Lori Baur, a 33-year-old music therapist and medical transcriber in New York City, stared at herself in the mirror as her fiance, Fredi Meli, cut off her hair. She held her long, wavy golden brown locks in her hand, felt their texture, noted their color, then let them fall unceremoniously to the floor. She watched until it became unbearable to see her familiar self, with every snip of the scissors, slip away. When Meli finished cutting and began shaving, Baur turned away from the mirror and reminded herself that chemotherapy fights breast cancer by killing rapidly dividing cells, which meant her hair, eyebrows, eyelashes—every hair on her body—might fall out anyway. She had just begun chemotherapy after undergoing a lumpectomy in her right breast. Shaving her head, she had decided, was one way she could exercise power over a process that otherwise had her firmly in its grip.

Once the job was done, Baur draped a towel over her head and faced the mirror again. Little by little, she inched back her cover, finally pulling it off completely. "I cried, but it didn't hit me until a few days later, when I really broke down," she recalls. "You try to take as much control as you can, but still, it hurts. Now I'm feeling much stronger. I know my hair will grow back, and maybe it will be even more beautiful when it does. And I get to do something I think many people secretly want to try: shaving off their hair."

In the meantime, when Baur dons her wig, she finds ways to embrace the possibility of what she sees. "I tell myself this is what I've always wanted—straight hair," she says. "It looks just like my sister's hair, and I love her hair."

Baur wears her wig when she's working or in social situations. "I don't want to attract attention," she says. On her own time, she prefers to sport a hat (often a Yankees baseball cap) or brightly colored bandanna. "I think the wig looks a little fake," she says. But for now, moving through the world bareheaded is out of the question. To Baur, that would be like being naked in public.

Hair is our power and our protection, a veil framing the most expressive part of us: our face. most expressive part of us: our face. We curl it, trim it, color it, straighten it. Why all the fuss? Because more than a simple vanity, our hair is a marker of identity, a signature more personal than even our clothing or our perfume.

It is no surprise, then, that doctors say hair loss can be more devastating for some women battling cancer than the loss of a breast—even though it's usually temporary, lasting as long as the chemo treatment itself. "It's perceived as yet another assault," says Mary Jane Massie, M.D., attending psychiatrist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering's Evelyn H. Lauder Breast Center in New York City. "They think, I have a life-threatening illness, I had surgery, and now...my appearance."

Indeed, shortly after Patti Sablesek, 42, began her chemotherapy, she could barely conceal her terror of what was to come. "I'd already confronted dying, but this was worse. Me? Bald? No way," she says. "I love my hair. It's my hair! It's part of me, like a limb, and I couldn't fathom losing it." But when she would run her hand lightly through her hair, strands the color of spun gold dangled from her fingertips.

When Sablesek, a nurse and divorced mother of two from Syosset, New York, entered a New York City shop called Underneath It All to buy a wig, she murmured "This is a night-mare" over and over. Before long, shop owner Carol Art Keane's gentle touch turned her around. Sablesek dropped her guard and started having fun: "That's poodle hair!" she joked, rejecting a light blonde wig. The next one didn't work either. "I definitely don't have that pouf going on." In the end she decided on a wig that's close to her natural color and shape, but not before seriously considering something altogether different. Admiring herself in an auburn shag, she said, "That's an interesting look. Now, if I had those full lips," she added, pointing to a mannequin, "it would be a whole different story."

"Me? Bald? No way! I love my hair. It's my hair! It's a part of me, and I can't fathom losing it."