Mum with Hair Loss Writes Children's Book About Baldness

A blog-writing mother of two from Bedford who lost her hair to an extreme form of the autoimmune disorder Alopecia Areata at the age of 16 has turned her creative hand to a book about a young girl with hair loss.

Rebecca Dawe, 39, describes herself as “totally bald”, and says that she has a severe and rare form of Alopecia named Alopecia Universalis, which causes total hair loss all over the head and body. “What surprises people is that I am totally fine about it,” she writes on her Hair Necessity blog, which is also the name of the wig and hair-extension making enterprise that Rebecca set up after finding existing options to be uncomfortable and disappointing.

Shunned because she looks different

According to Bedford Today, who picked up on the story about Rebecca’s latest venture, her book Hairless Harri is based on a seven-year-old girl who is shunned by fellow students because she looks different. Naturally and without giving too much away Harri wins them over by the end. The newspaper writes that Rebecca intends to donate proceeds from sales of her book to cancer charities.

“At school it can be really brutal because children are scared of things that are different,” Rebecca told Bedford Today. “I wanted to write a book that helped children to celebrate differences rather than fear them.”

Hairless Harri is available to buy on Amazon.

Rebecca’s blog is fun, upbeat and honest and features such posts as "7 Sexy Things About My Hair Loss" (her assortment of wigs, she says, means her husband “can have a different woman every night”) and “How To Find a Man When You Have Alopecia”. The story about her own hair loss journey on the blog is likely to be comforting to anyone else who is currently losing hair to Alopecia Areata.

Seek expert help

Alopecia Areata can be difficult to treat in severe cases, and has an especially poor outlook in cases of Alopecia Totalis and Alopecia Universalis. When it begins as a small patch of hair loss as it very often does the sensible thing to do is to seek out dedicated expert help as quickly as possible, as a personalised alopecia areata treatment course can often help in mild to moderate instances of this condition.

Great strides are being taken if rather slowly in the field of treatment for alopecia areata in all its forms, particularly for the more severe and currently untreatable forms, with some very promising early test results seen by doctors who have used drugs known as JAK inhibitors on patients. While these are not yet commercially available for general use on people with hair loss, several medical teams are committed to further, more wide-reaching tests in the hope that the drugs which were actually developed to treat cancers and rheumatoid arthritis can safely be modified for use on people with autoimmune alopecia.