Jada Pinkett Smith Says She Struggles With How Her Alopecia ‘Comes and Goes’
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Jada Pinkett Smith shared details of her alopecia journey on a new episode of Red Table Talk.
“It comes and goes,” she admitted. “You’re going through a spout of something and you have to shave your head, because [the hair is] falling out.”
The entire episode was dedicated to raising awareness for the hair loss condition.
Jada Pinkett Smith has learned to find the positives in her hair loss due to alopecia—from pledging to turn her bald spots into “a crown” with rhinestones, to using Chris Rock’s upsetting Oscars joke as an opportunity to raise awareness for the autoimmune condition. In the latest episode of her Facebook Watch show, Red Table Talk, the actress went into more detail about her alopecia journey.
Although Rock’s joke, and her husband Will’s response to it, spawned a spiral of Hollywood drama, Jada pointed out that it also inspired others with alopecia to share their stories. “Considering what I’ve been through with my own health and what happened at the Oscars, thousands have reached out to me,” she said. “I’m using this moment to give our alopecia family an opportunity to talk about what it’s like to have this condition, and to inform people about what alopecia actually is.”
In fact, she dedicated the Red Table Talk episode to the subject and spoke to other people with the condition, as well as doctors who specialize in it. “One of the reasons I thought this show was really important was because I had so much outreach from people who suffer from alopecia, have children who suffer from alopecia, and they don’t talk about it because there’s so much shame around it," Jada said. “There [are] so many people walking around that have alopecia that we don’t even know.”
In fact, according to the National Alopecia Areata Foundation (NAAF), it affects over 6 million people nationwide. Alopecia areata is a common autoimmune skin disease, causing hair loss on the scalp, face, and sometimes other areas of the body, per the NAAF. For Jada specifically, one of the most difficult parts about living with hair loss is how it changes over time, unexpectedly.
“It’s so much shame around alopecia and when you go bald, and you don’t have a choice,” she said. “I think the part that makes it the most difficult for me is that it comes and goes. You’re going through a spout of something and you have to shave your head because it’s falling out.”
Jada’s mom, Adrienne Banfield-Norris, who has witnessed her daughter’s alopecia evolution first-hand added that her hair loss “is always so spotty.” It’s almost as if the experience would be easier if the hair fell out and didn’t grow back. “Yeah,” Jada added. “It’s stressful because a patch grows and then another patch comes out, and that gives me a lot of anxiety. ‘Oh, what’s my hair going to look like today?’”
Despite the valleys alopecia brings, Jada is glad that the condition has brought so many people together. “I feel like I’m part of such a beautiful tribe,” she said. “The alopecia community is such a beautiful, amazing tribe.”
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