In the News – Woman Living with Alopecia Totalis

Snippet from the article:

Prom night sends most teen girls on a dizzying quest for the perfect dress, accessories and hairstyle to make their ensemble complete. On her prom night, Jennifer DeFreece was harried by one simple detail: “I just wanted eyebrows for my prom pictures.”

When she was just a baby, DeFreece was diagnosed with alopecia totalis, an autoimmune disease that results in the total loss of scalp hair. By her 1st birthday, she’d lost all of her hair.

“I was like Charlie Brown,” says DeFreece, now 33 and living in Northridge, California.

Alopecia is nondiscriminatory. It can occur in men and women at any age and is a strictly physical disease, but sufferers say it’s also a disease of the spirit, exacting a devastating emotional toll in this world of silky shampoo commercials and Rapunzel fairy tales.

Read the rest at CNN — How it feels to be a bald woman