Shaving your head: deciding, doing it, and living with it

Who it suits: skull shape, scars and how thin the hair really is

Men usually put off the decision to shave their head for years and then wish they had done it sooner. The core argument is simple: thinning hair ages you faster than no hair does. Once the recession is obvious and the daily camouflage takes longer than the haircut itself, shaving hands control of your appearance back to you. Before you pick up a blade, be honest about three things. First, the shape of your skull: oval and round heads look good almost without exception, a long head wants a beard or stubble for balance, and pronounced angles at the back only stand out for the first few weeks until your eye adjusts. Second, the scars and dents you may have forgotten about since childhood; they are not going anywhere, but they almost always turn out less dramatic in the mirror than in your imagination. Third, the tone of the skin underneath, which has not seen sun in years and will stay paler than your face for about a month. The smartest way to test all of this is to run clippers over your head with no guard and live with it for a week before going anywhere near a razor. It also helps not to jump straight to the blade but to walk down in steps: a number two, then a one a week later, then a zero. That way you see both the shape of your head and the skin tone appear gradually, and the people around you adjust without the shock of a sudden change. A barber can tell you along the way how your hairline sits and whether to keep some stubble at the temples.

The first shave: from clipper to blade, step by step

Technically, shaving a head is harder than shaving a face for one reason only: half the work happens where you cannot see. The order goes like this. Clippers with no guard take the length off first, otherwise the blade clogs within three strokes. Then hot water or a towel for three or four minutes to soften the hair, and a proper lather applied with a brush rather than gel from a can. Shave in three passes: with the grain, then across it, then against it if you need to, relathering every time. The top of the head is easy to do yourself; the back and the area behind the ears are exactly where the cuts happen, which is why the first one is worth doing in a barbershop. Stretch the skin with your free hand, keep the blade at a shallow angle and use no pressure at all, because pressure does not buy smoothness, it buys irritation and ingrown hairs. Change blades more often than you would for your face, since the area is much larger and a dull edge announces itself immediately. Finish with cold water and an alcohol-free balm. Shave in the evening or straight after a shower rather than in a rush before you leave: warmed skin gives far less irritation, and if you do catch yourself with the blade you have a few hours to let it settle. The other reason to do the first one in a barbershop is that the barber will show you which way the growth runs at the back of your head, and from then on you work from memory.

Looking after bare scalp once the hair is gone

Then comes the part nobody warns you about: bare scalp behaves like facial skin, except the sun also burns it. Through a Kyiv summer, SPF 30 to 50 on the crown is not optional even on overcast days, because the top of the head takes the most ultraviolet of any surface on your body, and a burn there is painful and peels in sheets. Winter brings the opposite problem: a hat, dry indoor air and sharp temperature swings cause flaking, so you want a light moisturiser daily and a scrub once a week to clear dead cells and keep ingrown hairs down. You can wash every day, but with something mild, because the oil glands have not gone anywhere and are still working. Frequency is your call: every two or three days keeps the clean-shaved look, once a week gives you neat stubble, and both read as well-kept as long as the outline is sharp. Plenty of men eventually settle on clippers with a zero guard as the compromise between the effect and the time. One more thing from the chair: after the switch, a beard or stubble almost always becomes a permanent part of the look. One detail you only notice later: a shaved head gets cold far faster than you expect, because the hair was working as a layer of insulation. In winter a hat stops being a style question and becomes a necessity, ideally cotton-lined so it does not provoke flaking. In summer the same principle runs the other way, and a cap or a bucket hat protects you from the sun as well as any cream does.