Unfiltered bald joy in the most uplifting corner of the internet
R/bald, a community that offers solidarity and encouragement to men losing their hair, is a bright spot in the increasingly dark online ecosystem of looksmaxxers.
Illustration: Tim Alexander for Yahoo News
Imagine with me, if you can, a place on the internet that’s really nice. People talk about their problems, and others who have been through it offer simple solutions. Men long beleaguered by social norms, intensifying beauty standards and creeping fear of aging release themselves from those shackles and celebrate by posting selfies with huge smiles (or deliberate smizes), electrified by their newfound freedom. Women with conditions like alopecia are welcomed all the same. This is r/bald, a subreddit that encourages its users to “lose your hair, not your head.”
Sam is 25 and, by his own description, “as bald as an egg.” He noticed his hair was thinning when he was 16, and during the COVID pandemic, he embraced full baldness. Sam had a little help from the subreddit, where a community has rallied together to “embrace bald and strive to make the world a more bald-friendly place.”
Two-thirds of men experience noticeable hair loss by age 35, according to the American Hair Loss Association. By the age of 50, approximately 85% of men have significantly thinning hair. Balding is inevitable for most men, but going fully bald by choice takes a bit of bravery.
“There’s a massive — it’s even bigger than a stigma, it’s like a phobia — among men of losing their hair,” Sam tells Yahoo. “Just shave it, man. It’s not that deep. … It’s better to be bald than balding.”
On r/bald, Redditors discuss baldness in pop culture, encourage men with thinning hair to go fully bald and hype up those who have recently taken the plunge. It’s relentlessly upbeat and stands in sharp contrast to the looksmaxxing corners of the internet, where men discuss the extreme methods they turn to in pursuit of youth and beauty and curse the world for putting certain people at a disadvantage. There are no shady medication recommendations, no advocacy for surgery and no proliferation of victimhood here. Just unfiltered bald joy.
GeekBro27, 40, has been shaving his head for about 20 years. He always had short hair, but around age 21, he learned to love his baldness.
“There was definitely some stress and frustration with it … my other friends had full heads of hair,” he told me. People poked fun at him, but he embraced his identity as “the bald guy of the group.”
Now, GeekBro27 is the ringleader of a whole forum of bald guys. He moderates the r/bald subreddit, which he created almost 15 years ago (GeekBro27 only wanted to be identified by his Reddit username to keep the focus on the forum’s philosophy rather than self-promotion).
At first, he would share a “Bald Guy of the Week” and post about a celebrity, athlete or other hot bald icon — Jason Statham, Terry Crews and Dwayne Johnson were among them — who wasn’t defined by their hairlessness. The forum really blew up in 2024 when it was covered by CNN. Back then, it had 140,000 subscribers. Now, they’re at 360,000, according to GeekBro27, with 1.3 million weekly visitors.
“People are getting joy out of this, and that makes it the best place we could have ever asked for,” GeekBro27 says. In the last 30 days, the mod team has responded to about 1,700 messages. He has no estimate of how much time it takes to moderate the community — it’s an important but natural part of his day.
“The fact that what we envisioned came true and stayed true has been remarkable, because there are so many negative spaces online, and it’s promising that a place like this can still exist in the world,” GeekBro27 says.
No bald-bashing
One of the most popular kinds of posts on r/bald is a batch of photos of someone who’s discernibly losing their hair, paired with the caption “Is it time?” It’s always time. Responses are kind but stern, like “Buddy, I’m excited for your upcoming sense of freedom” or “Join our barber free community!” There’s a meme of a bald man putting his hand on another man’s shoulder that’s come to serve as a motif for the community — shorthand for, “yes, it’s time.”
GeekBro27 thinks the before-and-after photos are particularly uplifting. “You see a weight lifted off of people’s shoulders,” he says. “Their smiles are bigger. They look like [they took a] big sigh of relief.”
The subreddit maintains its signature kindness because of its rules, GeekBro27 says, including no bald-bashing and no advocating of hair-restoration methods, but also ”treat[ing] the hair-headed ones with kindness too.”
Those commandments very clearly capture the ethos of the community, which is geared toward a kind of radical self-love and acceptance that’s rare on the internet. There’s no trying to combat baldness and/or lamenting one’s bald state allowed. You can do that somewhere else.
GeekBro27 and another moderator crafted the rules 10 years ago, only weeks ago adding a sixth that limits self-promotion for monetary gain. While other internet forums let users run rampant in the interest of free speech, these guardrails ensure that they’re accomplishing exactly what they set out to do: Helping people take pride in what most men will experience at some point. “Its power lies in normalizing something that really ought to be normal,” Sam says of the subreddit. “Everyone is going bald. Pretty much every man will lose their hair at some point.”
‘Everyone is going bald’
But if losing hair is natural and happens to almost all men, why is it still frowned upon? Male beauty standards can be intense — young men today feel pressure to be as buff as a Marvel superhero with the chiseled face of a 20-something internet boyfriend, to achieve the perfect balance of lean and hunky, and to grow hair in all the right places. Many are going to great lengths to meet those standards, whether it’s the infamous “trip to Turkey” for hair plugs or injecting dangerous steroids.
“Hair is a symbol of virility, youth, strength and health … it’s very apparent that balding is the opposite of that,” Sam says.
To go fully bald, though, is an act of defiance — and, in a way, it achieves what looksmaxxers are also after, but without all the toxic self-punishment. People who shave their heads genuinely look better after. “It’s better to be bald than balding” is a common refrain.
Dave, a 39-year-old man, is bald — though he was not balding. Over a year ago, he shaved his strawberry blonde locks in solidarity with his 13-year-old nephew, who had just started chemotherapy. “He was so afraid that people would judge him and make fun of him for not having any hair,” he says. “I told him that I would shave my head so he wouldn’t be alone.”
Since then, he’s found community in r/bald. It’s a reminder that the struggles people are going through when they lose their hair might be so much bigger than just a new look.
“There is a whole community out there that stands together and loves each other and reminds me why I did this in the first place,” he says.
OMG i LOVE the bald subreddit its so positive in there
As a hair historian, with a shitload of my own hair, r/bald is my absolute favourite place on the internet