Alia had always said she would never do it.
“Not even for a role,” she told her stylist three years ago when he half-jokingly suggested a buzz for an intense character. She laughed, shook her glossy waves, and changed the subject.
But life has a way of rewriting lines you thought were final.
The call came on a Tuesday evening in early September. Her dermatologist’s voice was calm, almost too calm.
“Alopecia totalis. It’s progressing faster than the last scans suggested. The eyebrows are already patchy… the rest will most likely follow in the next few months.”
She sat on the marble floor of her bathroom for almost an hour after hanging up, staring at the girl in the mirror who still looked exactly like the posters downstairs. Full brows. Long lashes. The familiar curtain of dark hair that had been her signature since she was sixteen.
She didn’t cry.
She just felt very, very quiet.
Two weeks later she invited only three people to her apartment: her younger sister, her closest friend since school, and the barber she’d known since she was a child — the same man who used to give her father his monthly trim and still called her “beta” even after she started walking red carpets.
They didn’t make it dramatic. No cameras, no Instagram live, no inspirational soundtrack. Just a Tuesday night, a bottle of chilled white wine, low lights, and a single wooden chair dragged into the centre of the living room.
She wore an old black T-shirt and track pants. No makeup. No jewellery. Just her.
The barber unfolded his cape like it was any other client.
“You sure, beta?” he asked once. Only once.
She nodded. “I’d rather choose the day than let the disease pick it for me.”
He started with a number 4 guard — not because she asked for it to be gentle, but because he couldn’t bring himself to go straight to zero on the first pass. The clippers hummed. The first long lock fell in slow motion, landing across her thigh like a dark ribbon.
Her sister inhaled sharply. Her friend squeezed Alia’s hand so hard it hurt.
She didn’t flinch.
When he switched to the bare blade — no guard — the sound changed. Sharper. Final.
The back of her head was cool almost instantly. Then the sides. When he tilted her chin down so he could clean the nape, she closed her eyes and let herself feel it: the strange nakedness of skin that had never known air like this.
He finished with a hot towel and a few careful strokes of the straight razor along the hairline to make it crisp. No sideburns. No baby hairs. Just smooth, even scalp under the living-room lights.
When he finally spun the chair around to face the mirror she’d asked him to bring, the room was completely silent.
She looked… different.
Not worse.
Not better.
Just startlingly honest.
Her eyes seemed larger. Her cheekbones sharper. The little scar above her left eyebrow from a childhood fall was suddenly visible again after fifteen years. She touched the crown of her head — slowly, like she was greeting a stranger — and gave the smallest, crooked smile.
“Feels like I just took off a really heavy wig,” she said.
Her sister started crying then — not sad crying, just the kind that happens when something big finishes and you don’t know what comes next. Her friend laughed through tears and said, “You look like a badass space warrior.”
The barber packed his tools quietly. Before he left he pressed his palms together, bowed his head slightly and said, “You’re still the prettiest one in the room, beta. Always were.”
She didn’t post anything that night.
Or the next.
Or the one after.
But three weeks later, when the first outdoor magazine cover of the year dropped, there she was: black turtleneck, single diamond stud, completely bald, looking straight into the lens like she was daring the world to blink first.
The caption read only two words:
**My turn.**
(End)