For almost 30 years, she hid it. Then, on January 1, 2020, Ricki Lake posted a photo of her new buzz cut and told the world, in her own words, what she had been carrying in silence: she had struggled with hair loss for most of her adult life. New year. New decade. No more hiding.
This page tells transformation stories in the person’s own words, and Ricki Lake’s is hers from start to finish. In her New Year’s Day post she wrote that she had been “suffering mostly in silence off and on for almost 30 years” — three decades of managing, covering, and carrying something the public never saw, from a woman whose face had been famous since she was a teenager.
Where she says it started
Lake traced the loss partly to where her fame began: Hairspray (1988). Her “healthy virgin hair,” she said, was “triple-processed and teased… every 2 weeks during filming.” Read that slowly. The role that made her — the hair that was her character’s crown — was being processed and teased on a two-week cycle, and the damage followed her for the rest of her adult life.
She was honest about the rest of the list too, in her own accounting: yo-yo dieting, hormonal birth control, pregnancies, genetics, stress, and years of dyes and extensions. This page prints her list as her list — she named contributing factors, in her own words, and we won’t dress it up as a diagnosis she never claimed.
And she was clear about two things she was NOT: she stressed that she was not sick, and she was not having a breakdown. Because she knew exactly what the world assumes when a famous woman shaves her head — and she refused both assumptions in advance.
Liberating — her word
What she said the shaving felt like was liberating. Sit with the arc: nearly 30 years spent hiding a thing, an entire apparatus of concealment maintained for a public that never asked what it cost — and the end of it wasn’t a product, a procedure, or a comeback. It was a pair of clippers and a decision on New Year’s Day.
Every woman reading this page who has hidden thinning hair, a patch, a loss she couldn’t explain — Lake’s January 1 post was addressed to you more than to anyone. Thirty years of silence, ended by the woman herself, on her own feed, in her own words, on the first morning of a new decade. That’s how you take a story back.
Join the conversation
Did you see Ricki Lake’s New Year’s Day post in 2020 — and be honest, have YOU ever hidden a hair struggle in silence the way she did for almost 30 years? What would “liberating” look like for you? Tell us below.
Source note: Ricki Lake’s disclosure — her January 1, 2020 Instagram post revealing her buzz cut and stating she had struggled with hair loss “for most of my adult life” and had been “suffering mostly in silence off and on for almost 30 years”; her tracing it partly to Hairspray (1988), where her “healthy virgin hair” was “triple-processed and teased… every 2 weeks during filming,” along with yo-yo dieting, hormonal birth control, pregnancies, genetics, stress, and years of dyes and extensions; her stressing that she was not sick and not having a breakdown; and her describing shaving it off as liberating — is from Lake’s own Instagram post of January 1, 2020, as quoted by Refinery29 and People, and her January 3, 2020 Good Morning America appearance. She named contributing factors rather than a diagnosis, and this article follows her words.
Tell us in the comments below - we read every single one, and the best takes get featured.
