Ricki Lake goes public with hair loss 'hell,' debuts shaved head
Ricki Lake is starting off 2020 with a very different look — and the decision was not made lightly.
The Hairspray actress, 51, revealed that after a nearly 30-year struggle with hair loss, she decided to shave her head. She debuted her new look on New Year’s Day and talked about what led her there, including some really dark days.
Declaring herself “liberated and free,” Lake wrote, “First things first. I am not sick. (THANK GOD.) I am not having a mid-life crisis ... nor am I having a mental breakdown, though I have been suffering. Suffering mostly in silence off and on for almost 30 years. AND I am finally ready to share my secret.”
Lake went on to say that she had been “struggling with hair loss for most of my adult life,” which she described as “debilitating, embarrassing, painful, scary, depressing [and] lonely.” She admitted “there have been a few times where I have even felt suicidal over it” and that she never fully confided in anyone, including her therapist, about the “level of deep pain and trauma” it caused.
Lake linked her hair loss back to when she appeared in Hairspray in 1988, saying that her hair was “triple-processed and teased ... every 2 weeks during filming” and it was “never the same.” However, she said other factors came into play, including “yo-yo dieting, hormonal birth control, radical weight fluctuations over the years, my pregnancies, genetics, stress and hair dyes and extensions.”
She said she tried pretty much everything through the years to improve her hair health: steroid shots in her head, supplements, extensions of all varieties and wigs. While sometimes her hair would start to improve, it would then just shed again, which she said was “maddening.”
After another recent weight loss led her hair to fall out again, she decided to make a change and free herself from the constant upkeep, which saw her having her hair “tightened (sometimes painfully)” and gray hair colored every 10 to 12 days, leaving her “a slave to this maintenance schedule” and unable to travel far from home. So she buzzed her hair off and “it feels so good.”
“It is a new year and new decade and a new me,” Lake wrote. And now, “I am liberated. I am free. I am releasing and letting go. I am brave. I am beautiful. I am love. For 2020 and beyond, I want to be real.”
Lake, who noted that she will “on occasion choose to wear hair” in the future, said she was sharing her story in hopes of “striking a chord with so so many women and men. I am not alone in this and my goal is to help others while at the same time unshackle myself from this quiet hell I have been living in.”
Lake was applauded in the comments of her posts, which have been shared thousands of times.
Lake is not the first female celebrity to speak publicly about her hair loss. Rosie O’Donnell has shared her own struggles with her social media followers, showing off her bald spots, which she — like Lake — was applauded for.
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