Lots of the world’s media has picked up on the analysis by Crown Clinic’s hair transplant surgeon Asim Shahmalak about Prince Harry’s accelerating hair loss.
You may have seen stories such as this one on Mail Online indicating that Harry’s hair loss is now as rapid as his older brother William’s – and that Harry’s bald patch on his crown has doubled in the last few years.
You can see the speed of his hair loss in the two pictures on this page. There are three possible reason for this accelerated hair loss.
1 Genes – whenever we talk about male pattern baldness, family history is always the primary cause. However, ths inherited baldness can neverthess progress at different speeds amongst siblings.
Prince William – two years older than Harry at 36 – clearly inherited an extremely aggressive strain of his family baldness’s gene.
William started going bald in his early 20s and has now lost most of the hair on the top of his scalp. He is even more bald than his father, Prince Charles, and his grandfather, Prince Philip.
Sadly, there is little Prince William can do to cure his baldness. He is far too late for hair transplantation treatment.
Put simply, the balding area is too big to be covered up by the donor hair which would be harvested from the back or sides of Prince William’s scalp.
Prince William could keep hold of a little more of his natural hair by taking a drug such as Finasteride or Minoxidil. These are clinically proven and should stop or severly slow down male pattern baldness in the vast majority of cases.
Both drugs won’t help Prince William to grow any new hair but they will help him to severely stall the aggressive hair loss he has suffered for more than a decade.
Prince Harry’s hair loss progressed more more slowly than his big brother’s.
It is only in the last three years that the bald patch on his crown has started to be noticeable and he still has a largely full head of hair towards the front of his hairline, though there are the early signs of thinning here, too.
It not uncommon for siblings to both suffer from inherited baldness but at different levels of rapidity. Harry is lucky that his baldness gene is not as aggressive as his brother’s but it is still there.
2 Stress – this is another factor that could have caused Harry’s hair loss to accelerate. Both physical and emotional stress can be reasons for male pattern baldness.
Prince Harry got married last year to his American fiancee Meghan Markle – a joyous occasion, undoubtedly, but one laden with stress.There have been rumours of rifts within the royal family, and Harry’s wife Meghan has been involved in high profile difficulties with her father. All these factors may have sent Harry’s stress level skywards and contributed to his hair loss.
3 Medication – There is speculation that Harry may have taken Finasteride or Minoxidil to combat his hair loss. It is not advisable to take such treatments if you are trying for a family.
With Meghan due to give birth to their first child later this spring, Harry may have ceased this treatment more than a year ago.
The only long-term solution to Prince Harry’s hair loss is a hair transplant – either a Follicular Unit Extraction procedure, where the follicles are individually removed and then replanted, or the more traditional Follicular Unit Transplantation technique, where a strip of skin is surgically removed to obtain the donor hair. With both FUT and FUE, the donor hair is replanted in the same way.
At Crown Clinic, our surgeon Asim’s Shahmalak’s celebrity FUE patients include the Coronation Street star Jack P Shepherd, who plays David Platt, former footballer Didi Hamann, Homes Under The Hammer star Martin Roberts and Gogglebox star Chris Butland-Steed.
Dr Shahmalak has performed two FUT transplants on the TV doctor Christian Jessen.