Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you would know that Will Smith slapped Chris Rock for joking about his wife Jada Smith’s bald look. Her bald look is the result of an autoimmune disease called Alopecia Areata that Jada Smith suffers from, and has always been very open about it. Here’s everything you need to know about Alopecia and Jada Smith’s journey with it.
Alopecia Areata is a health condition that leads to hair loss. Jada Pinkett Smith has been suffering from this autoimmune disease and revealed it in 2018 in her Red Table Talk series.
She shared the video last year, and captioned it, “Mama’s gonna have to take it down to the scalp so nobody thinks she got brain surgery or something. Me and this alopecia are going to be friends… period!”
Alopecia Areata is a common condition that starts with hair loss in small patches. In some cases, the hair fall is extreme and rapid. Some people can see complete hair loss on the scalp whereas in some extreme cases hair fall is seen throughout the body. Most people with the disease are healthy and have no other symptoms.
In Alopecia, the immune system mistakenly attacks hair follicles, causing inflammation. Researchers do not fully understand what causes the immune system attack on hair follicles, but they believe that both genetic and non-genetic (like environment) factors play a role.
Types of Alopecia Areata
There are three types of Alopecia, as categorized by experts – patchy, totails, and universalis.
Patchy or Areata is the most common type of Alopecia. In this, hair loss happens in one or more coin-sized patches on the scalp or other parts of the body.
People suffering from Totalis Alopecia, lose all or nearly all of the hair on their scalp.
Universalis is an extremely rare type of Alopecia wherein the person faces the complete or nearly complete loss of hair on the scalp, face, and rest of the body.
While we are not condoning what Will Smith did, dealing with unwelcome remarks and being the butt of jokes is sadly an all too real part of suffering from Alopecia. Hopefully, this article would help in spreading awareness so that we don’t add to the distress already faced by people.