topper and wig: How to handle vacations with family or friends

Are you about to go on holiday with family and friends and are you wearing a hair hair topper or wig? 😱😱😱

If they don't know and you are planning to live together for a few days or weeks, this can be a great source of stress for you and it is completely understandable. I receive messages from women who have to deal with this delicate situation very regularly. You will find in this article all my advice to face the situation calmly 😊

First scenario: You REALLY don't want to talk about it!

If you have your own room, which I recommend if you don't want to discuss the subject with your family, you can simply remove the product when you go to bed and put it back on when you wake up in the morning. If people are polite, they should not enter your room unannounced while you are sleeping. And even if they did, I don't think they would be analysing your hair at that time. I would still advise storing the product in a drawer just in case, because if the person comes face to face with the beast, they might figure it out very quickly (as well as being scared by the sight of the fox 🦊😉 ).

If you don't have your own room, I would advise you to sleep with the product. It won't be the most comfortable thing because of the clips that you will feel a little bit, but it is still possible to sleep with a hair topper or a wig. I've done it myself on unexpected naps and it works fine.

Then, for the rest of the day, you can go to the pool or the beach with your hair topper or wig. However, I would advise against putting your head under water. It's best to avoid this, as the structure might show a little more when the hair is wet.

Case 2: You are reluctant to talk about it.

If you are going on vacation with friends or family, in theory they are people who are close to you and who love you. In this case I can only advise you to discuss the subject of topper or the wig with them before you leave. If the people you are going on vacation with are ready to criticize you if you expose one of your vulnerabilities, I can only advise you not to go on vacation with this type of person.

However, I'm not so binary and I fully understand that you may not always be that close to the people you go on holiday with (in-laws, spouse's friends etc.). But these people, with whom you are close enough to accept to live in proximity for several days, can know who you really are. It's not up to you to hide, or to put yourself under 24-hour duress in order to be accepted or to avoid a possible negative judgement.

I know that it is not necessarily obvious and that it takes time to be ready for it. Because of my work, my family-in-law and my partner's friends have learned that I wear a hair topper, even though I wouldn't necessarily have told them spontaneously. So I sometimes found myself in situations where people not so close to me knew about my problem when I would have preferred to avoid it. But I quickly realised that this was actually liberating for me.

So maybe the fact that I'm wearing a hair topper has been commented on. I'm pretty sure they did. Maybe the remarks were negative, maybe not, I'll never know. But that's not the point. The important thing is that I feel free to wear the topper or not, when I want to or not.

At the very beginning, I also forced myself to wear my hair topper in front of my family. Even though they all knew I was wearing one. But then I was afraid to take it off a few weeks later, when I was invited to a dinner party or something, and to shock their eyes if from time to time I allowed myself to come "without hair", or rather with 3 times less hair. However, my family has seen me with my alopecia for 30 years, so I don't think they would have been so shocked after all.

But after a while, I realised that I didn't have to decide whether or not to wear the hair topper based on other people's opinions. I wear it primarily for myself, when I want to feel more beautiful. And if sometimes I don't feel like wearing it, I'm happy to avoid this constraint. And it doesn't matter if people notice it, say that my alopecia is shocking etc.

It's how we feel about ourselves that matters, not how others look at us. Believe me, people don't think about us in the morning when they do their hair, so why should we?

The hair topper should not lock you up, but free you!

A hair topper or wig should not be a product that locks you in, that makes you hide and that puts you under duress.

There are women who, when they go to topper, don't dare to go out without it. I'm sure that many of us go through this phase at the beginning. I know that what we want to avoid in these cases is that people notice that there are times when we wear a topper or a wig.

First of all, people won't know the difference. I know it sounds unbelievable, but having lived it every day, I can assure you! But let's say a very observant person notices that you have less hair at the weekend than during the week. What you have to try to tell yourself, and it takes time, is that it's okay.

The person notices that you have a hair topper or a wig, so what? You lose your hair, you wear a hair supplement. Like thousands of women in France and elsewhere! You should not live your life and put constraints on yourself depending on how others look at you. The hair topper or the wig is when YOU want it. When you want to feel more beautiful. You do it for yourself, not for others.

This is all easy to say, I know. It takes time to get into this frame of mind. It may take a few months or even a year or two before you feel ready to live more freely with your complement hair and your alopecia. But the sooner you get there, the better you'll feel.

You will also find that as you come into contact with the product in your daily life, you will find it less and less shameful and taboo. And it is when you have completely accepted the product that you will feel ready to live more freely with it. Only when you have understood that there is no shame in wearing this wonderful solution, will you feel ready to talk about it, or to stop wearing it in front of your family.

Be proud of who you are!

Women who wear extensions are not ashamed to wear them. The reason women with alopecia may feel ashamed to wear an hair add-on and talk about it is because they subconsciously integrate that they are trying to hide something. But if you tell people openly that you are losing your hair and therefore wearing a product that helps you feel better, there is no more shame and judgment.

Because you assume what you are: a pragmatic woman who finds a solution to her problem! You are not a woman who hides or is ashamed. You are a woman who moves forward, who dares to go towards solutions that are not necessarily the most obvious because of a possible judgement from society. You should be proud of what you are, of the step you have managed to take, even though it is still a fairly taboo product.

If you don't feel ready to talk about it now, that's okay. You have to be gentle with yourself and not force things. Don't talk about it until you really feel ready to do so. You have to want to and it has to come from you. But keep in mind that if the people around you are your friends, they will accept you as you are.

Feel like a topper before your vacations? This is the place to be:

https://commeundiademe.com/store/

If you would like more information on toppers capillaries, wigs and the different solutions available to us to deal with alopecia, it is here:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgFJ9SejriuuyUGDZ6GT9kA/videos?app=desktop