Is being bald at 26 killing my dating game?

I started losing my hair at 18, and by 26, I’m fully bald. I’m starting to think my baldness is seriously holding me back in dating, especially online. IRL hasn’t been much better.

From 18 to 22, when I still had hair, I got plenty of quality matches on Hinge. Then I took a two-year break from dating apps. When I returned at 24 with updated, fully-bald photos, things tanked. In the last two years, I’ve barely managed 10 quality matches, if that. I’d hoped baldness wouldn’t hit this hard, I figured I’d lose maybe 50% of my matches, not 99.99% of them.

I ran some experiments on Photofeeler to see how my photos scored. Average shots with hats pull a solid 7.5/10, while quality and thought out hatless ones drop to 6/10 on average. The real eye-opener was a mirror selfie test: same clothes, same smile, same pose, same lighting—only the hat changed. The hatless pic scored 4.5/10; the hat pic hit 7.6/10. That’s a 3.1 point gap! This means that the difference between being attractive or being below average is a hat.

I’m pretty confident being bald, and I can’t do much about it anyway. But if it’s dragging me down this much, I’m worried about my dating life. I feel like I’ve leveled up everywhere else compared to a few years ago. That mirror selfie test feels like proof baldness is the weak link.

What Now?

• Do I just hatfish in all my photos?

• Am I stuck waiting five years until I’m “old enough” for women to find baldness attractive?

• Do I need to go overboard with my pictures to compensate? I’m not even sure how to compensate at this point.

I know some don’t struggle in their dating life being bald but I have not been so lucky. I don’t know what else it could be. If baldness is tanking my chances this badly, I’m genuinely concerned about my dating future.