Journalist Chris Schroder was looking forward to shocking his friends and business associates with his bold new look. For three decades, he was a bald man. When he re-emerged with his new head of hair, he was shocked to find the cause of his transformation stumped everyone.
“It was like I had fallen asleep for two years during the Pandemic and woke up a younger man,” he recalls. “When I went outside, everyone else had aged, but no one could figure out what happened to me. I felt like I was a spy or Rip Van Winkle with a clever disguise.”
Schroder recalls his best hair day was in 7th grade, but within a year, he began to notice his hair receding. His mother took him to a dermatologist, and the doctor introduced him to the three words that would linger atop his head like a lifelong thunderstorm: male pattern baldness. “My destiny was writ across my forehead for all to see,” he wrote in his new memoir, Headscape: How a bald guy replanted his hair and restarted his life.
In his late 20s, after becoming a marketing manager at a Greenville, South Carolina newspaper, he blushed whenever he walked into a management meeting, and the publisher would proclaim, “Herr Schroder,” mocking his German heritage and his thinning scalp. In his mid-30s, his wife rekindled her interest in old college friends – all of whom had thick long hair. She soon filed for divorce and married a new interest Schroder heard had “great hair.” When he began dating again, Schroder noticed the women most attracted to him had fathers who were as bald as he was.
“I wasn’t sure who I was becoming, but I knew I didn’t recognize that person who appeared before me in mirrors, storefronts, or photographs,” he said. “I thought I would eventually end up with no hair on my head, a future I was not looking forward to.”
His book chronicles his journey from his first haircut through unsuccessful comb-overs, numerous jobs in five towns, raising two children, to his eventual second marriage to a woman whose dad had hair. When he moved into the house of his new bride, Jan, he walked two blocks down the street to a barber who offered a life-changing alternative.
“You have such thick hair on the side of your head,” Kevin Serani told Schroder in the barber’s chair. “I know a famous doctor in Istanbul, Turkey, who can move 5,000 follicles from the side of your head to the top, and you will look 20 years younger. You will be so much happier.”
When Schroder told his children and Jan about the idea, they were initially skeptical. So were his friends – particularly those who were doctors and urged him not to proceed with the surgery. His children couldn’t remember him with hair, and Jan had never seen him with it. “It might be interesting,” she said after one of his trips to the barber in 2019.
So Serani flew with Schroder to Istanbul, whose doctors years before had perfected a new surgical procedure called FUE, follicular unit extraction, capitalizing on research showing the DNA in hair follicles on the side of the head did not interact with testosterone the same way as did hairs atop the head. Thanks to competition and advancements, costs in Turkey were one-tenth of the procedure of those in the U.S. Schroder’s research found that the results were often more successful.
Headscape is illustrated with photographs of the gradual return of his hair to the once-barren landscape. The March 2020 Pandemic delayed his re-introduction to society. When Schroder finally did emerge, visiting friends, bumping into classmates at the store, and joining professional colleagues at industry conferences, he encountered a puzzling pattern: people would look at him and say he looked great and much younger than they remembered, but they couldn’t detect what had changed. Some guessed he had eye surgery or a facelift. Others asked if he had lost weight.
“I couldn’t believe it,” Schroder said. “Here, I thought everyone had cataloged my number one trait as bald and that they would all immediately react with surprise. But it was just the opposite. My hair looked so natural, only one or two out of hundreds of people concluded it was my new head of hair.”
When they learned of his hair transplant surgery, most of the questions he received were about why he went to Istanbul for the procedure. So Schroder sat down to write a magazine article about his journey. As he began stitching together all the funny episodes from his life of losing his hair, he soon realized he had enough stories to publish a book.
“I also included a very unexpected twist in the narrative,” Schroder said. “I hated photographs of myself,” but because the doctor demanded daily photographs be sent to him to monitor his progress, Schroder started noticing a change in his skin. He sent the photographs to his general practitioner, who told him to go immediately to a dermatologist. Results on two biopsies discovered he had melanoma.
“In a strange twist of fate, had I not undertaken the unusual step of undergoing hair transplant surgery, I may not had detected the developing melanoma until it had spread to other parts of my body,” Schroder said. “So you could say that hair surgery saved my life.”
The experience also led him to write his first book, a goal he had harbored for decades, but he didn’t feel he had the proper story to begin. He had always wanted to be an author, and now that he’s written one book, he’s excited to pursue others.
Early reviews of his first book are excellent. Two dozen reviews on Amazon have all given it five stars. Suzanne Van Atten, the book reviewer of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution newspaper, called the book “charmingly funny” and said it was “a well-told story filled with self-deprecating humor and insight into how our physical attributes shape our identity and self-worth.”
“My goal now is to help other men – and women – who are self-conscious about their hair loss,” Schroder said. “I didn’t get hair transplant surgery until I was age 62. I would have done it much earlier if I had known at 52 or 42 how affordable and easy it was to change my appearance. Other people say I look great, but the main thing is I finally look like the man I thought I’d be at my age. I found myself not on an inward journey but on an outward one. It just turned out that it made me much happier and self-confident in the process,” he said.
3 Sayings to Keep Your Head Up(Opens in a new browser tab)
“Now I hope to encourage others to walk the same path and experience the same life-changing results.”
– Margaret Willard
Chris Schroder worked for six daily newspapers, serving first as a reporter, then editor, promotions director, creative director, and advertising director – winning awards in several states for his reporting and print advertisement design. He started and served as publisher of his Atlanta neighborhood newspapers in 1994 and was a founding member and publisher of dozens of newsletters and websites across the USA with his digital publishing firm, The 100 Companies.
You can purchase Headscape: how a bald guy replanted his hair and restarted his life at Amazon.com or at Headsape.me.
