10 Hollywood Celebrities Who Have Opened Up About Their Battle With Alopecia

Courtesy of the drama at this year’s Oscars, Alopecia has gone from being a relatively obscure word to one of the most searched on the planet, which is probably how you discovered this article. Yet, the condition is more common than we probably once thought.

According to Web MD, “Alopecia areata is an autoimmune disorder that causes your hair to come out, often in clumps the size and shape of a quarter.”There are more than 100,000 new cases per year in Nigeria and probably more in other parts of the world.

Jada Pinkett Smith might be the reason the topic is receiving a lot of attention right now, but you should know she’s not the only one who’s spoken up about living with the disorder before.

Here are 10 Hollywood celebrities who have opened up about their struggles with Alopecia. Hopefully, this will inspire more people suffering from it in silence to know they’re not alone.

Jada Pinkett Smith

Jada first admitted that she was diagnosed with the condition in a May 2018 episode of Red Table Talk, a chat show she cohosts with her daughter, Willow, and her mother, Adrienne Banfield-Norris. She opened up about how “terrifying” it was to find clumps of hair falling out in the shower. “I’ve been having issues with hair loss,” she said, before going on to talk about how she’s gone on to manage and accept living with it. She seemed excited about embracing the fresh look to start her 50s. “Willow made me do it because it was time to let go,” she wrote in the caption. “My 50’s are bout to be Divinely lit with this shed.”

Viola Davis

The How To Get Away With Murder star started experiencing hair loss at the shocking age of 28. “I woke up one day and it looked like I had a Mohawk. Big splash of bald on the top of my head. I was like, What is this?” she once recalled. After years of battling shame and a blow to her confidence, Viola has since gone on to experience peace and can now reveal her natural hair to the world

Kristin Davis

It might be difficult to believe the Sex and the City star struggled with hair loss caused by Alopecia, but she did.

“My hair just was not what it used to be. It was very fine like it had gone away, there just was hardly any hair there…

“I hadn’t been worrying about it – I have my daughter – but when I tried to do something or had to go somewhere I was like, ‘Where is my hair?'”

Keira Knightley

Having played so many roles that required intense makeover, it was only a matter of time before Keira Knightley began to notice her hair fall off.

‘It got so bad that my hair literally began to fall out of my head,’ she said in an interview with InStyle. ‘So for the past five years, I’ve used wigs, which is the greatest thing that’s ever happened to my hair.’

Tyra Banks

Former supermodel Tyra Banks once opened up about how stress on the job caused her hair to fall off.

She said she knew she wasn’t in a healthy space and saw the impact on her hair. “How can I say this without tearing up? I got a little alopecia from the stress,” she’s quoted as saying to a publication.

Selma Blair

Selma Bair’s hair loss was caused by hormonal changes postpartum.

“This is so not glamorous, but it’s true: I need to take longer showers so that I can collect the hair that falls out and throw it away so I don’t clog the drain. Why do actresses never talk about that?” she tells PEOPLE with a laugh at an interview a while after she’d put to bed in 2021.

Naomi Campbell

Some years back, supermodel Naomi Campbell opened up about how she dealt with hair loss after years of extensions, weaves and braids.

“I do take more care of my hair now, because I lost all of it with extensions,” she told the ES Magazine. “I am more careful and I do different things.”

Amy Schumer

Schumer revealed her decades-long struggle with trichotillomania, a hair-pulling disorder, on her new show.

It’s not alopecia, but, technically, it is hair loss so I’ll allow it.

Trichotillomania is a disorder that involves recurrent, irresistible urges to pull out body hair.

“I really don’t want to have a big secret anymore,” the comedian told The Hollywood Reporter in a recent interview. “I thought putting it in there would be good for me to alleviate some of my shame and maybe, hopefully, help others alleviate some of theirs, too.”

“It’s not that I used to have this problem, and now I don’t,” she explained. “It’s still something that I struggle with,” the comic further revealed.

Matt Lucas

At the age of four, Matt Lucas was hit by a car. He seemed to survive unscathed, but two years later Matt started to lose all of his hair. The doctors pronounced it a “delayed response to the shock of being knocked down”.

At only six years old he had to adjust from having a full head of thick brown hair to having none at all.

The actor said, “The doctors – and we saw an endless stream of them – concluded that it must have been a delayed response to the shock of being knocked down by the car in Portugal two years earlier. And so I was the first six-year-old in my class to learn the word alopecia.”

Gail Porter

The Scottish presenter has opened up, multiple times, about her struggles with alopecia, which saw her loss her job for refusing to wear makeup and wigs at a time when her career was at a really high point. The disorder seems to be recurring with her, but if her posts are any indication, this woman is a fighter and is definitely not backing down anytime soon.