Part 32: The $4300 Haircut

Kristina Crystal
Jun 16
4 min read

Updated: 6 days ago

June 16, 2025

I realized something the other day... I’ve think I've finally surrendered.

My brain has stopped forcing me to walk into that bathroom and scan the mirror every morning for some miraculous hair regrowth. For over a year, it was my first waking thought — checking, inspecting, silently pleading for signs of life on this smooth, stubborn scalp.

But last week, I noticed that the impulse to look in the mirror had just… stopped. No fanfare. No conscious decision. Just gone.

And while that’s objectively a little sad, it gives me some strange, unexpected relief — like my subconscious finally stepped in, shut the whole thing down, and said: “Enough. We’ve got better things to do.”

And it's not defeat. It's freedom. The freedom in simply forgetting about something. The kind of freedom that comes when something that once consumed you just… lets go.

Quiet. Powerful. Almost magical.

This led me to wonder how many other things in my life I just stopped doing or thinking about, that I've never even realized. It’s like remembering you used to love a food, but since you haven't bought it in a while, you just totally forget you like it, and so the cycle continues.

Cottage cheese, for example, is one of those foods for me. It’s never on my grocery list. But maybe once a year I walk past the dairy section and see a sale on cottage cheese and I’m like “oh yeah, I like that” and buy a container.

Speaking of Cottage Cheese...

It’s officially Florida summer: five straight months of 90 degrees and steam-bath level humidity. I dropped "a few" hundred dollars on hurricane prep supplies this morning because why just sweat when you can also prepare for catastrophic weather events?

Thankfully, my lanai is finally all rebuilt after Hurricane Milton decided to personally dismantle it last year. I'm aggressively logging as many pool days as possible to justify the small fortune it took to fix it. In fact, I’m out here on my lanai writing this as we speak, post-pool day.

Wearing a wig in this swampy heat? About as fun as you’d expect. My $10 Temu wig is currently hosting a full-scale rebellion on my scalp. And while sweating through a bargain wig doesn’t sting quite as much as sweating through my $2000 "real" wig, it's still an Olympic-level endurance test.

[Side note: I’m outside right now, sipping some neon-pink electrolyte powder-enhanced water, wondering how I made it this far in life before discovering these little packets of magic.

Apparently, everyone else has been quietly hydrating like professional athletes while I’ve just been out here raw-dogging Florida summers with plain water. Those little packets of goodness? Total game changer.]

Diving In

Speaking of spending money on stuff you never wanted to spend money on, my Polo Match Friend texted me about a fabulous new wig she just bought. This wasn’t your basic grab-and-go situation; it was custom-fitted, cut, and styled to perfection.

🔸

Price tag: $4300.

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Four thousand, three hundred beautiful little dollars.

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Or 1/58th of my dream car.

For perspective, if I still had my natural hair and got a $50 haircut every two months, it would take me 14.5 years to spend that much. Which leads me to why I came out here to write this blog today. Insurance companies will cover wigs (or, as they so delicately call them, cranial prostheses) for people undergoing chemo. And they absolutely should. Temporary hair loss from cancer treatment is traumatic and deserving of coverage.

But for those of us living with long-term or permanent hair loss like Alopecia? We’re told, essentially: "Oh sweetheart, you’re not dying. You’re just bald. Vanity problem. Move along."

But it isn’t vanity. It's about being able to walk through the world without feeling like a sideshow attraction. It’s about not having strangers glance up at your missing eyebrows and then quickly pretend they didn’t. It’s about quality of life. And for that, we get to pony up four grand for the privilege. So, while my lanai might finally be fixed, the structural integrity of my faith in the insurance system is a little wobbly.

Lest I Forget - A Look On The Bright Side

So, what's my life like here in June of 2025? The water temperature of my pool is perfect, my scalp hasn’t gotten burned once yet this summer, I'm nicely hydrated, and cottage cheese still occasionally makes a surprise appearance in my cart.

Even better? I'm not counting hairs every day. Because even the hard stuff eventually fades into the background, too. Not worrying about whether my eyelashes are growing in makes room to notice even more of the good stuff — the pool days, the sunshine, my dog getting the zoomies.

Here’s to enjoying the dog days of summer just a little bit more this year. And to finally "forgetting" about the crap that just doesn't serve you anymore.

Much love,

Kristina 💖

kristina@unexpectedlybald.com

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