Meet the Young Guys Wearing Toupées

Hair systems – toupées to the uninitiated – are undergoing a renaissance among younger men. For some, the humble hairpiece might hark back to slapstick scenes of hapless bozos losing their hair rug in the wind or a fight. The reality, as progressively more men are finding out, is there is a plethora of non-surgical, scarily legit-loooking hair units available from credible stylists and barbers.

If you're a man in your 20s or 30s who has maaaybe scoured TikTok for tips on how to stave off hair loss, you might have seen videos of bald or balding men undergoing miraculous before-and-after toupée transformations. There aren’t tonnes of stats out there, but multiple businesses in the UK and across the US told VICE there’s been a surge in interest from men in recent years.

Dina Kales, who’s been in the industry since 2004, has owned her salon in New York called The Top Shoppe since 2019. She says self-described “hair replacement specialist” Phil Ring (@phildoeshair), in particular, brought attention to an industry typically shrouded in secrecy on social media by showing the process from start to finish. Another person to do that is 23-year-old Em, in Bountiful, Utah, whose TikToks go viral with startling regularity – her latest one has 5.6 million views. 

Em’s worked for her mother at Argyle Hair Solutions since 2017. She says she’s been doing the social media videos for almost two years, and has noticed a “heavily steady” climb in mostly younger male customers in that time, with clients coming to her from across the country. 

She says a higher proportion of young men feel comfortable using cosmetics compared with older men. “There's still a tinge of internalised toxic masculinity, but way less [than the older generations]. They can talk through it in their heads logically and be like, ‘Does this really make sense for me to not do this, even though I want hair?’ And then they come in and do it because they want to.”

Forty-six-year-old Jay Patel, who owns Mens Hair 2 Go based in London, has also noticed an uptick in younger clients over the past five years. He puts the increase down to men taking care of themselves more, pressure from social media to look a certain way, and shows like Love Island. “Body dysmorphia is also hugely increasing in men,” Patel adds, pointing to figures that show 40 percent of men feel pressure to have a “perfect body” and other factors like “competition and expectations to feel accepted”. 

Patel says he’s used hair systems since his early 20s. The toupées have also improved massively, with polyurethane options in a multitude of hair densities and colours and super-thin laces to conceal the base of the hair system for a natural-looking hairline. According to salon owners like Kales, you can treat your toupée pretty much like normal hair – you can wash it, style it, use hair products and even go to the gym and swim while wearing a good-quality one. There’s also more “top-notch hair stylists and barbers getting involved”, meaning the cuts and styles are “elevated”, she adds. 

Getting a hair system applied, cut and styled, and the subsequent follow-ups, isn’t cheap. Patel says one at his business costs $690, or $746 for custom, and that maintenance visits cost around $81. Kales can do one for you in New York for about $940, which includes tax, styling and a haircut. If you go to Utah for Em, it’ll also set you back $1,000 for hair, application, cut and three follow-up appointments. Her clients have to reapply their toupée, either at home or in the salon, every two to four weeks and get a new one every two to three months.

According to those I spoke to, COVID and the Zoom era it ushered in was a huge turning point for a lot of men turning to toupées. Men saw themselves on camera, sure, but they were also seeing the transformation videos on TikTok and Instagram, and, with the lockdowns, they had an undetermined-yet-long period of time stretching out in front of them in which to work on themselves. 

The fact everyone was at home also meant they could grow their hair out discreetly, as you need an inch on the sides to blend with the hair piece.  “It also eliminated the awkwardness of suddenly showing up to work with a full head of hair and being scrutinized or having to explain to colleagues what’s different about them,” Kales says. 

All the businesses I spoke to warned of bad actors in the market doing shoddy work. The crap toupée places stay in business because the entire industry is “so hush-hush”, Em says. There’s also a generational divide; older people in the industry may prefer thicker, less legit-looking hair pieces because they’re sturdier and need to be changed less; she once went to a convention in Nashville where a significant number of older men were walking around with what looked like dead raccoons on their heads.

Em also owns the word “toupée”. Others I spoke to preferred “hair system” (“hair unit” is another option). Em describes these alternative terms as “things people have come up with to distract because ‘toupée’ is embarrassing,” she says. “But if toupée meant to people something that looks fake and something that looks bad, I can just change that by putting the word toupée behind a really good-looking toupée.”

The other options available to balding men bring their own issues. Minoxidil, the topical foam sold in the UK as Regaine, and in the US as Rogaine, may deliver results – but these aren’t guaranteed, and applying it twice a day is expensive and labour intensive. Propecia, the pill generically known as Finasteride, has shown good results, though its alleged side effects include impotence, physical, mental and neurological complaints. (Its manufacturers have denied these claims.) Not all men are good candidates for hair transplants for a number of reasons, including simply having lost too much hair to harvest.  Anyone getting transplants may still be asked to go on a course of Finasteride for life, anyway, to stem the continued loss of native hair.

Joe Melito is a 34-year-old from New York. He started losing his hair around his mid 20s and used Toppik, a brand of powdery microfibres you can apply to thinning areas that make hair look fuller. Eventually, the balding progressed to a point that Toppik wouldn’t cut it. “I wanted to do the fue hair transplant – I was planning to go to Turkey, but I’ve seen mixed results and reviews,” Melito says. “I started looking around trying to figure out another option. That’s when I found Dina [Kales].” 

“I’ve been doing it around eight months now and it’s the best option I could have ever done. I fucking love it,” he enthuses. “Losing your hair is like losing a part of yourself. I’m Italian [American] – it was killing me. The first time she put the system on and styled my hair, it was like she brought me back to being 22 years old again.”

“It brought my confidence back. It brought me back.” Kales says one of her clients got a notably better reception on Tinder with his new piece and, speaking from experience as a bald man, the drop-off in romantic interest was fairly stark. For some reason, it only really rebounds once you’re old enough to be a young father, presumably because, as the years go by, more and more of your peers lose their hair, making you less anomalous. That, and you learn that a cross-section of the dating pool fancies bald dads.

Going bald at any age, of course, can be depressing as fuck. The truth is I’d never even remotely considered a hair piece as an option, but I’m of the opinion that men should be allowed to do whatever they want with their hair – as women can – especially if it looks good. (Kales, to her credit, offered to bless me with a new hair system free of charge. Melito – what a guy – said he’d come down to watch for moral support.) 

“What I often hear after a new client installation is ‘I wish I didn’t wait so long’, or ‘I can’t believe how natural it looks,’ says Kales. “Even after 20 years at it, I’m still in awe at how amazing the results can be and how instantaneous their energy changes. It’s has been super rewarding to be a part of.”

Of course, it’s fine to be bald – for the record, I declined Kales’s offer of a hair system. But if it’s not for you personally, for whatever reason, it’s good to know your options – and it looks like the toupée might be as good as any.

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