It might sound trivial, but for many female cancer sufferers, losing their hair is one of the most traumatic things about the whole experience. I don’t think you can really understand the impetus of losing your hair until it happens to you; I certainly can’t imagine how I’d feel. I almost think, how bad could it be? But of course that’s because I’ve never had to deal with it.
Even if you’re not the kind of gal that sits in front of the mirror for 45 minutes giving yourself the perfect blow-dry and swooshing around perfecting a sexy hair flick, being bald is embarrassing and alienating for women. Mums talk about their kids not recognising them or being scared of them, young women admit that their lovers were freaked out, while for teenage girls the embarrassment of being different to their friends in such an obvious way is excruciating.
Of course wigs are available, but unless you have the money to splash on a high quality one, they tend to be a little, well, wig-gy. Superstar hairdresser Trevor Sorbie OBE found himself faced with a crappy nylon wig when his sister in law lost her hair through cancer treatment. She asked him to style it for her to make it a little more realistic and, voila, an idea was born.
Trevor launched My New Hair shortly after, a brilliant charity dedicated to giving women back their confidence and making them feel like themselves again by providing realistic wigs and training hairdressers not just in the art of dressing wigs but in the emotional process of fitting them and maintaining them. It sounds like a small thing but the breathtaking impact it’s had on cancer sufferers and other patients who’ve lost their hair for various reasons is incredible.
I attended a party with Trevor on last week, celebrating the official charity status that My New Hair has recently received. It was an enormously emotional evening with women who he’d helped giving personal accounts of how losing their hair had affected them. Two in particular stick out; a twelve year old girl who cried every day before school because her wig was so godawful and fake looking and a woman with awesome spiralling ringlets who hadn’t been able to find a wig that didn’t make her look like she was going to a renaissance fayre.
Trevor had helped both of them find wigs that not only looked real but that also looked like their own hair, pre-treatment. He taught them how to style them, maintain them and make them look totally natural. I don’t think there was a dry eye in the house when they talked about how their new wigs had changed their lives.
Trevor donates his time for free for this service and trains groups of hairdressers in small classes of 15 once a month with the support of L’Oreal and trained Macmillan cancer staff. Groups are kept small owing to the highly emotional nature of the subject and the sensitivity with which the clients have to be treated. Since launching, Trevor has trained over 300 hairdressers including fellow big name hairdressers like Charles Worthington and Andrew Collinge.
L’Oreal have promised him that once he reaches 400, they will help him launch the service internationally, which will be absolutely incredible. Trevor also talked on Thursday about how he wants to open up specialist My New Hair salons. He pointed out that although most salons have private areas or at least discrete hairdressing stations, for a woman to sit in the waiting area with a headscarf on or to remove her hat and reveal a bald head in the middle of the salon is an incredibly difficult thing, no matter how prepared the staff and salon are.
It might sound like a small thing, perhaps even vain, but I’ve now seen for myself the real impact that losing your hair can have on a woman. My New Hair is an absolutely brilliant idea and it’s crazy that no-one thought of this service before now. I urge anyone out there who is a hairdresser or knows someone that is to read more about now and if possible, to get trained. Once the planned 400 salons are trained, Trevor explained that no woman will ever be more than half an hour’s drive from a hairdresser who knows exactly how to give them the service they need.
My New Hair; it’s the only thing that’s made this stone-hearted hack weep openly in a long time and the people that get behind it the better.