Men Reveal Why They Held On To Their Combover For So Long — And Then What Changed

“My dad had a combover for years,” Conor Sellers said. “As I got older, as a family, we would drop hints.” Hints that it was time to get rid of it. None of them worked.

Conor was 15 when a barber he and his father both used told him something he did not expect. She had been gently trying to talk his dad out of it but got nowhere.

“So, I told her to push harder,” Conor said.

At the next appointment, she did. “She convinced him to get rid of it, and he looked like a completely different person, and younger,” Conor said. His father, Tim Sellers, is 82 this month. “He’s never gone back, and I thank him for that.”

Conor’s father is far from alone, and the years of silence around his combover follow a pattern.

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Keeping a combover means never sleeping over at a partner’s house. It means staying away from pools and carefully avoiding the rain. It means constantly worrying about whether other people see you the way you want to be seen.

– Jordan Conrad, psychotherapist

Sue McGarvie, a sex and relationship counselor for 33 years, thinks the hair itself rarely matters to the man wearing it. “I don’t think it’s about hair at all,” McGarvie said. “It’s about ‘am I enough?’ and hair just happens to be where a lot of men park that fear.”

That fear is also what keeps everyone around him quiet, McGarvie said, which is roughly what happened in Conor’s family with hints that never landed. “Saying something feels like confirming his worst fear, that he’s less attractive, less young, less wanted,” McGarvie said. “People go silent to protect him, not realizing the silence is actually confirming it, too.”

While families stay quiet to spare the man sporting the combover, the hiding is already doing the damage they are trying to avoid, according to psychotherapist Jordan Conrad. “Keeping a combover means never sleeping over at a partner’s house,” Conrad said. “It means staying away from pools and carefully avoiding the rain. It means constantly worrying about whether other people see you the way you want to be seen.”

Dr. Ken Anderson, a facial plastic surgeon and hair restoration surgeon, has spent years studying the psychological effects of hair loss. “A phrase I use at the medical meetings where I talk about these issues is, ‘hair loss hurts,’” he said. “It can be devastating for some. Interestingly, studies have found no correlation between the objective amount of hair loss and the psychological impact of that hair loss.” Someone with a very small amount of hair loss can be deeply affected by it.

Patients develop specific ways to disguise it, he said. Among younger men losing hair at the front, he now sees the comb-forward doing the combover’s old job. The people around them usually notice anyway, and still say nothing. “It feels too personal, too awkward, or potentially hurtful,” Anderson said.

Somebody eventually has to break that silence, and for Conor’s father it was a barber. Aaron Chan, co-founder of the Kings Domain barbershop chain, has the same conversation often enough to have a script. “I’m always honest, but you’ve got to approach it the right way,” Chan said. “I’ll usually say, ‘Mate, I think we’re at the point where trying to cover it is actually drawing more attention to it.’”

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I don’t think it’s about hair at all. It’s about ‘am I enough?’ and hair just happens to be where a lot of men park that fear.

– Sue McGarvie, a sex and relationship counselor

What changes once a client lets it go, he said, is immediate: “Confidence, straight away. A good, short cut or shaved head looks intentional. Instead of the hair loss being the first thing you notice, you notice the man.” The instinct to grow it out instead, he said, often backfires. “Guys think more hair means more coverage, but quite often it does the opposite. The longer pieces separate and you actually see more scalp.”

Not every man waits for someone else to say something. Daniel Preston gave up his own combover after he started noticing himself in photographs. “There was not one dramatic moment,” Preston said. “From my perspective in the mirror, it could look fine, but photographs were much less forgiving.” Wind was worse. “One gust could move the carefully arranged hair and expose exactly what I was trying to conceal.”

Eventually the maintenance stopped being worth it. “I realized I was putting more effort into hiding the hair loss than I would have put into simply accepting it,” Preston said. He went for a much shorter cut. “It felt strange initially because there was nothing left to hide behind, but quite quickly I preferred it. I also stopped thinking about wind, photographs, or whether somebody could see through the combover. Looking back, the irony is that the thing I was using to make my hair loss less noticeable was probably making me more conscious of it.”

Letting go tends to bring relief. “When men stop concealing their hair loss, it is often a huge relief,” Conrad said. Once a man stops, he no longer has to “fake it.”

“They are free to live without thinking about how they look and how they are perceived,” he said.

How someone raises it is important, McGarvie said. “It has to be about connection, not correction,” she said. “‘I want to see your face’ lands. ‘You should really do something about that’ does not.” The men who change are not reacting to being told they look bad, she said. “They’re reacting to finally feeling safe enough to stop hiding.”

Her own husband went bald in his late teens. “I think it’s incredibly sexy,” McGarvie said. “As a sex therapist, I’ve never once had a client complain their partner was bald.”

Conor’s father, Tim, kept his combover for a long time. “Oh, God,” he said, when asked how long. “Must have been at least 20 years.” He didn’t care about what others thought. “Honestly, I just didn’t give a damn,” he said. The family’s hints had no impact either. “They said things, but again, I didn’t give a damn.”

It was the barber Conor had asked to push harder who finally got through. “She sat me down in the barber chair and asked me if I wanted to do anything different,” Tim said. “And I said, ‘Hell, I don’t give a damn.’”

The combover was gone.

“That was the best part,” Tim said. “Everyone told me I looked cool.”