‘If you lose your hair, it’s sh*t and there are hard times, but it shouldn’t stop you from being you and doing what you want to’
Dublin model and actor Amber Jean Rowan has been wearing wigs and hairpieces since she developed alopecia as a teenager. She tells Lynn Enright how losing her hair almost ended her career and why we need to challenge the perception that to be hair-free is to be hopelessly tragic
Amber Jean Rowan is one of those people who has had a good lockdown. When we chat, I find her in a sunny corner of her flat in Hoxton, East London. Her smile is wide and her teeth are dazzlingly white. Her skin is clear and glowy. Her four-month-old puppy reclines nearby and the mood in the room (well, on the Zoom) is good.
The dog, a ridgeback called Reggie, was initially a challenge, she admits. “The first month with the pooch was so difficult, so tiring — it was hard. We were sleep-deprived and anxious.” Today, though, he is impeccably well-behaved, and Rowan and her co-living entrepreneur boyfriend Ben have become “the dog parents we swore we’d never be — we’re obsessed”.
The Dublin-born 28-year-old has spent the last 13 months in a state of domesticated bliss. As well as training the dog, she has learnt how to cook. Before lockdown, her family teased her for surviving on a diet of Ryvita and restaurant meals; now, she’s whipping up curries, stir-fries and tacos (she eats a mainly vegan diet). When the weather is good, she makes sure to start the day with some outdoor exercise: she is a trained yoga teacher and also enjoys HIIT workouts. She picks up an oat-milk latte on the way home.
In the afternoon, she might head back outside for a walk and she has, she tells me, taken great delight in noticing the changing seasons around her over the last year. Evenings are spent watching TV with Ben; they’ve finished The Sopranos and are currently obsessed with Your Honor.
“Being able to watch TV and have some dinner and a chat in the evenings is quite fun,” she says. “We were too busy to do that before lockdown.”
I wouldn’t want to give the impression that it’s been all play, however — because Rowan has been working hard on her latest project, too, and this month will launch Amber Jean, an “online space” selling wigs and hairpieces.
It’s a passion project — Rowan has been wearing wigs and hairpieces since her teens, when she lost her hair due to alopecia areata — and it’s also her first foray into business after more than a decade working as a model and actor.
“It’s all very new,” she says of her entrepreneurial venture. “I’ve been the most insecure and the most confident I’ve ever been in my life — at the same time. You have all these challenges and you’re getting your head around the business terminology and when you get it, you feel very proud of yourself. As a model and an actor, you’re in the hands of someone else. And it’s always been a dream of mine to be in control of something myself. Now, I have built this brand from scratch.”
Alopecia is the general term for hair loss, and people may experience it for a variety of reasons, such as chemotherapy, hormonal changes or an autoimmune disorder. What unites people with alopecia, Rowan says, is the disempowering and bleak experience of buying a wig, online or in store. In the Black and Orthodox Jewish communities, women are used to buying wigs and hairpieces — but lots of white Irish women experiencing hair loss for the first time have no idea how to proceed.
“If you were to google ‘wigs Ireland’, you wouldn’t know where to start, there’s no one there to guide you through the process. But this process doesn’t have to be dark. I want to make this process easier and maybe even enjoyable; maybe you could have fun buying a hairpiece.”
Rowan was 15 when her hair began to fall out — and initially, it wasn’t a hindrance to her burgeoning modelling career. Around that same time, she was featured on the RTÉ show The Model Agent, and began to pick up work in Dublin and in London over the next few years. Throughout her last years at school, she spent all her holidays in London; at 5’8” she was considered too much of a “short arse” for the catwalk, but found success shooting editorials for magazines like Elle and campaigns for brands including River Island.
“The whole first part of my career, I was wearing blonde hairpieces,” she explains. “That was my look: I had my bushy brows and this really beautiful blonde hair.”
At home, she enjoyed drama classes and amateur theatre productions, training with the Betty Ann Norton Theatre School and the Irish Theatre Workshop. “I didn’t have time to think about my hair loss because I was just doing what I loved,” she remembers. “When people ask me what they should do to deal with the sadness their child is going through with alopecia, the only advice I can give is: try to find something that they have a true passion for. It means they have something to care about besides the hair loss.”
After school, she headed to London to give modelling her all and embrace it as a full-time career.
“But then my eyebrows started to fall out when I was 19 or so. My model agency at the time said, ‘This isn’t going to work for us. The hairpieces have worked well but we don’t think that clients will be able to accept the loss of your eyebrows, la la la.’ Literally just when I arrived in London to model full-time, that’s when they said, ‘See ya later.’”
It was, she says, an “absolute blow”. “I came back to Ireland and had a woe-is-me moment for a while.”
Rowan began the process of starting over. Growing up as the youngest of three in Clontarf (her older sister is a lawyer, based in London, and her older brother is an accountant in Dublin), she had always been able to rely on her parents for unending support and love. Her mother is a bereavement therapist and her father is a business consultant and she holds them both in the highest esteem.
“I grew up with the idea — and this is testament to my parents — that you can be whoever you want to be and don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t,” she says. “As long as you put the work in, you can.”
She began taking classes at The Bow Street Academy for Screen Acting (then known as The Factory) and soon enough had landed parts in mainstream TV shows such as Vikings and Ripper Street. She returned to London to focus on her acting career and recently, she has begun modelling again, too.
“In the last couple of years, I’ve started modelling without my hairpieces,” she explains. “Now I’m getting the jobs that I always wished I would get, back when I was wearing my hairpiece. The world’s a funny place and timing really is everything.”
She has worked with Superdry, Sweaty Betty, Roland Mouret and Schwarzkopf in recent years, and in 2020 appeared on the cover of Glamour magazine. “That was mad,” she says, smiling her wide, perfect smile.
The fashion industry is, she says, “a nicer place now”. “It’s more caring, and the brands I work with now are working to change the conversation and the image.”
She’s not naive, however: she knows that there is some way to go and despairs of the still-present pressure on models to stay a tiny size six to eight.
“I have model friends and colleagues who are still being told to lose weight. The sample sizes are still a small eight or a six. They’re bloody tiny. There is still a lot of work to do. Most women are not a size six, a 16-year-old is maybe. I don’t want to buy a coat based on an image of a teenage girl who looks like she needs a burger. The industry is shifting — but it’s not there yet.”
Even in the plus-size space, “models have to be a certain plus-size”, she says. “There are still so many rules and criteria to meet. There are brands out there who are pioneering and changing, but there is still a long way to go.”
Rowan says she is “really happy to be a part of showing something different”.
“When I was growing up, I never saw another bald woman in fashion — never, ever, ever.” The only hair-free woman who appeared in the mainstream in the 1990s and noughties was Gail Porter and “she was portrayed in a damaging way in the media, she was depicted as this sad woman”. Even now, the headlines that surround Porter are overwhelmingly negative. One recent newspaper headline contended that Porter “admits she’s ‘given up’ on finding love after losing her hair to alopecia”. Another read: “Gail Porter weeps with joy as she appears on TV with hair for first time in 10 years after alopecia battle”.
Rowan wants to challenge the perception that to experience hair loss is to be hopelessly sad or tragic. “That would have made such a difference to me when I was growing up, especially to see someone working in a glamorous field like modelling or acting. I’m really glad to be able to tell my story and I hope that inspires other people: if you lose your hair, it’s shit and there are hard times, but it shouldn’t stop you from being you and doing what you want to.”
Her preferred term is “hair-free”: “I love using the term because it’s lighter and it indicates that we are free from taboos. There’s a joyousness in freedom. Being bald, being hair-free, wearing a wig — throughout history, that has been something to hide or something to be ashamed of, but that’s changing now.”
All that said, sometimes even Rowan struggles with being hair-free in the world. “Two or three years ago, I wouldn’t go outside without my wig on, this is all still very new to me,” she admits.
She credits the hair-free community she has met online with helping her to accept her hair-free look, but says that her confidence can waver depending on the situation and the environment.
“My personal life and my professional life are two separate things. For a good few years now, I have been more than happy to model hair-free in a professional, controlled setting, with professional makeup artists and designer clothes — but walking down Oxford Street is a completely different thing. I am able to manage my emotions in a work environment — and I am much more comfortable with that than going to my local corner shop. Still now, I worry about what people think. It gets less and less and less of a worry — but there are still moments. I’m nearly there, I’m in the best place I ever have been, but it’s a journey and I’m still learning from other people in the hair-free community.”
When she talks about the emotional impact of hair, I’m reminded of the speech delivered by Phoebe Waller-Bridge in the second series of Fleabag after the Claire character gets a shockingly bad haircut: “Hair is everything. We wish it wasn’t, so we could actually think about something else occasionally, but it is. It’s the difference between a good day and a bad day.”
“Every woman has a story about their hair,” Rowan points out. “Every woman has come out of a hair salon and cried at one point in their lives. We are so attached to our hair; it’s so often a way for women to express themselves. That’s why when you lose it, that can be really tricky.”
Up to half of all women will experience some hair loss at some stage in their lives and the wigs and hairpieces at Amber Jean will be aimed at a broad range of people, from those who want to add thickness to thinning hair, to those experiencing alopecia totalis. The hair comes from Chennai in India, and is ethically sourced. “The hair is expensive, but we know exactly where it’s coming from and we know it’s good quality.”
Rowan acknowledges that at £700 to £1,200 (around €810-€1,400), the hairpieces are “bloody expensive”, so Amber Jean is partnering with Klarna to allow people to pay in instalments.
“My hairpieces were a way to enter society again,” she says. “I was lucky enough to have a family who supported me in that space, but that was expensive; we had a hair account!”
Eventually, maybe some of those who buy the hairpieces will decide to go hair-free. “Maybe you’ll feel more comfortable wearing a beautiful hairpiece and that will make you feel confident. And who knows, maybe in a few years, you might feel comfortable wearing a headscarf; and a few years down the line from that, you might think, you know what, feck the headscarf, I want to go hair-free. Everyone is on their own journey.”
Rowan is a sunny, positive person but she knows, better than anyone, that hair loss can have a significant impact on a person’s confidence and mental wellbeing. The story doesn’t have to be constantly downbeat — and that’s the problem with the Porter headlines — but for most people, there will be an element of sadness or even trauma associated with hair loss. As well as selling hairpieces, there will be a psychologically supportive community aspect to Amber Jean, with “beautiful videos that empower and inspire people and show that this process doesn’t have to be dark”. Rowan and her mother are also working on a “counselling service integrated into the membership, with a cognitive behavioural therapy programme that supports people through the experience of hair loss”.
Amber Jean Rowan with her dog, Reggie the ridgeback
Finding a partner she loves and feels supported by has helped Rowan with her confidence and outlook. She met Ben, who she describes as “a good egg; a good boy, through and through” on a night out in East London when she was 24.
“I was walking into a bar in Shoreditch with two girlfriends and I was making a daft joke, and Ben turned around and he made a joke back. And he was so confident. I was with these two beautiful models, Amazonian goddesses, and Ben just came up to us and started chatting confidently to us. And I thought, ‘Who is this guy?’ And four years on, we are still together.
“I am so lucky to be with a partner who loves me inside and out,” she says. “Having that safe, beautiful person I can go to when I am having hard days, when I am not feeling confident, that has made me blossom more and more over the last four years, into the woman I always wanted to be. He is there to tell me it’s OK to not be OK. I feel blessed every day.”
And with that, Amber Jean Rowan is off for another afternoon walk with her ridgeback Reggie, to soak in the spring sunshine and eye up the green leaves as they return to the trees.
Amber Jean’s purpose is to enable women to discover and live their hair dreams. See www.amberjeanshop.com or @amberjeanshop for more information
