The first time Leia Batula, a 24-year-old creator and alopecia awareness advocate in California, noticed a bald spot, she was still in college. It was 2020, and Batula was getting a haircut when her hairdresser pointed out a few small areas of thinning on her scalp. For years, she tried topical medications, steroid injections and minoxidil, which seemed to keep the hair loss relatively under control. Then, in 2024, she lost around 70 per cent of her hair within four months. Eventually, she lost almost all of it. “I was devastated. As a young adult woman, having a physical part of me feel like it was being ripped away so quickly was one of the hardest things I have ever dealt with,” she says. “I know hair may seem superficial to some people, but losing my hair completely changed how I saw myself and how comfortable I felt going out in public.”

If there’s one thing Batula says her experience has taught her, it’s that alopecia can be incredibly unpredictable – what works for one person may not work for the next. But that’s not exactly how hair loss is spoken about online. In recent years, there’s been growing pressure, particularly on young women, to focus on scalp health. Naturally, there are plenty of “hair growth miracle” gummies or serums being sold to those who aren’t happy with what they see when filming a “scalp check” video. Young people seem to be talking about hair loss more, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re doing so with more empathy. On TikTok, some users post about their long, thick hair being an indicator of their good character, while others repeat the long-held belief that men who cheat go bald. So why do we treat “good hair” as a reflection of someone’s character?

There’s a viral phrase that often gets misattributed to the Bible: “Evil people’s hair doesn’t grow”. Shock horror: Jesus is not recorded as saying that, though he is often depicted with a particularly gorgeous full head of hair. Hair historian Rachael Gibson says the idea that outward appearance reflects inner character – and therefore having bad morals makes you “ugly” – has existed across cultures for centuries. Hair, in particular, has long carried meaning around religion, femininity and social status. In the West, long hair remained the norm for women well into the 20th century, while wearing it loose and uncovered could, in certain contexts, be read as sexually or morally improper.

The idea that “presentable” hair reflects an inner professionalism has also long been used as a means of control – forcing people to style their hair in ways deemed appropriate. This is especially true for Black people, who have faced centuries of systemic policing of their natural hair textures and protective styles. Ideas of “good hair” have also been deeply shaped by Eurocentric and white supremacist beauty standards, which have historically privileged straighter textures and other features associated with whiteness. Take hair colour, for example: Gibson points to the enduring image of the blonde Disney princess or fairytale queen, whose relative rarity has helped make her a potent cultural ideal. “She represents a vision of femininity and associated ideas of beauty, virtuosity and desire.” The fact that young people are talking about hair in such moralistic terms during the current conservative backslide is no coincidence, says Gibson.

Today, Gibson says long, thick hair is still associated with “health supremacy” – the idea that the condition of our hair reflects the health of the body beneath it. It’s not the first time beauty standards have been linked to dubious ideas about health: just look at how body hair has been deemed unhygienic for women but healthy for men. These long-held beliefs around purity and beauty are hard to shake. Recently, I’ve noticed people using the phrase “pure of heart” in the beauty world. They don’t wrinkle because they’re “pure of heart”; they won’t be impacted by the cyclosporiasis outbreak because they’re “pure of heart” – you get the idea. It’s also bled into how people are talking about hair, with users joking that you don’t need to worry about hair loss if you are “pure of heart”. Although often posted as a joke, or a way to show off your long hair online, the punchline still relies on a familiar assumption: good people don’t go bald.

“I think there’s a lot of nuance missing from hair loss conversations online, especially because hair loss is often treated as a joke or used as an insult. Hair loss is something that is out of people’s control – it can happen at any age, and it can happen to anyone”

The reality is that about 85 per cent of men and 33 per cent of women will experience hair loss in their lifetime. And for people like Batula, who says that seeing a specialist and starting Litfulo helped her eventually regain full coverage, it’s often an experience full of shame. So, coming across videos of people jabbing at their exes for “failing” in life because they’ve gone bald leaves a sour taste in her mouth. “I think there’s a lot of nuance missing from hair loss conversations online, especially because hair loss is often treated as a joke or used as an insult,” she says. “Hair loss is something that is out of people’s control – it can happen at any age, and it can happen to anyone.”

When clients of Julie Dickson, a fine-hair specialist and founder of Joon Drop, sit in her chair, she says they often arrive feeling as though they’re doing something “wrong”. “There’s a lot of bad information out there, like if you use horse shampoo or brush your hair a thousand times a day it’s going to grow,” she says. “Or that if you don’t wash your hair at all the oils will nourish your hair, which is such bullshit because it’s mostly genetics, sometimes stress, sometimes environment and sometimes illness.” But the idea that failing to participate in beauty culture will somehow punish you with “bad hair” keeps people spending. Some popular hair-loss treatments, like minoxidil, are relatively affordable, but chasing every trending product, treatment and extension quickly becomes expensive.

Hair is closely associated with youthfulness, so it’s little surprise that, in a culture obsessed with the pursuit of aesthetic immortality, so much attention is being paid to having long, thick hair. It comes at a time when beauty itself has become an increasingly pervasive shared value. This, says Professor Heather Widdows, a philosopher at the University of Warwick, reflects a fundamental shift in society. “Normally, when you get a fundamental change in value framework or belief system, you have things like wars and conflicts, but this has happened without us noticing,” she says. Widdows argues that, in a more text-based culture, being a “good” person was understood less through appearance. In today’s increasingly visual culture, however, “goodness” has taken on stronger visual connotations.

“What’s happened is we’ve collapsed the body to be the self, and goodness to be the person,” says Widdows. Modern society may be laser-focused on aesthetic perfection, but that doesn’t make it a particularly virtuous pursuit. Using spiritualised language to place yourself above others in relation to an impossible standard only turns vanity into something that looks like enlightenment – while feeding the dissatisfaction on which much of the beauty industry depends. As Widdows puts it: “The most dominant moral emotion that attaches to the body is shame”. By projecting that shame onto others, we only reinforce standards that will eventually come back to bite us all.