Miami – It used to take Howard Brauner half an hour, a special comb and two hairsprays every morning to carefully plaster a sheet of hair from one side of his head over his bald dome.
“I did it for 12 years,” he recalls. “I couldn’t walk in the wind; I couldn’t wear a hat in the winter.”
Until one ultra-humid day in South Florida in 1993, when the comb-over drowned in a sea of sweat and Brauner’s patience went along with it.
“I went to the barber and said, ‘Cut it off,”‘ he said. “Who am I fooling? I’m a bald guy, and I’m going to be proud of it.”
Pride doesn’t begin to describe Brauner’s passion for his Friar Tuck tonsure. It is his mission in life to restore self-esteem, rather than hair, to the hairless.
His year-old New Jersey- based company, Bald Guyz, markets a line of products designed especially for the hairless. There’s a shampoo, a 30 SPF sunscreen, head wipes, a moisturizer, a shaving gel and a cleanser/ conditioner.
Brauner, whose title is “head bald guy,” developed the products himself over a dozen years and talked to hundreds of shiny- pated counterparts.
“The people speaking to bald guys are Hair Club for Men, Rogaine, hair transplants. They’re all saying it’s not cool to be bald,” he says. “It’s a market no one’s speaking to.”
About 35 million U.S. men are in some stage of male pattern baldness, ranging from about 20 percent in their 20s to about 65 percent in their 60s, according to Brauner’s research.
Hair restoration is a $1.7 billion-a-year business.
But in recent years, it has become more hip to be hairless, especially among the young.
“Shaving your head is a lot sexier than a bald patch,” says Tyler Smith, the 29-year-old founder of slybaldguys.com.
