Sexy Was Never About My Hair

Photos by Marilyn Scavo
4 days ago
5 min read

September is Alopecia Awareness Month, and this year I wanted to show up a little differently. Bald, feminine, sensual, strong, and completely at home in my own skin.

I’ve lived with alopecia and hair loss for over a decade. I wear wigs, I love my wigs, and they’ve become a fun part of how I express myself. But somewhere along the way, I realized something important: my hair was never what made me feminine, and it certainly wasn’t what made me sexy.

Femininity has never required hair.
Sexy was never in my hair.
This is 50. This is alopecia. This is me.

So for Alopecia Awareness Month, I decided to step in front of the camera without it.

This time, though, I wasn’t behind my own camera. My friend and fellow boudoir photographer Adrienne, at Demi Girl Photography in Tampa photographed this series for me. There’s something especially vulnerable about being a photographer and handing that control over to someone else, but there’s also something incredibly freeing about trusting another photographer to see you the way you spend your career seeing other women.

And yes, I edited these photographs myself. I’m a photographer, of course I did. 😉 But I made a very conscious decision not to edit away every stretch mark, every bit of texture, or every little reminder that this body has actually been lived in.

This body carried my child. It has held my grandchildren. It has changed, stretched, aged, healed, and carried me through 50 years of life. I don’t need to erase all of that in order to create a beautiful photograph.

Perfection was never the point.
The things we call flaws are often just evidence that we’ve lived.
Confidence looks different when you stop asking permission to feel beautiful.

Perfection was never the point.

Alopecia is only one version of something almost every woman understands. We all have something. Maybe it’s scars or stretch marks. Maybe it’s wrinkles, loose skin, cellulite, hair loss, or simply a body that looks different than it did ten or twenty years ago. We can become so focused on the things we wish were different that we forget those things are only tiny pieces of the whole woman.

None of them determine whether we are beautiful, and they sure as hell don’t determine whether we are sexy.

Sexy was never a hairstyle. It was never flawless skin, a certain dress size, a perfectly flat stomach, or a body untouched by age or life. Sexy is so much harder to define than that. It’s an attitude. It’s confidence, presence, sensuality, and the way you carry yourself. It’s being comfortable enough in your own skin to stop asking the things you consider flaws for permission to feel desirable.

I may have lost my hair, but I never lost my femininity. I never lost my sensuality, and I certainly never lost my sexy.

You don’t have to become someone else to deserve beautiful photographs.
I lost my hair. I never lost my femininity.
Sexy is an attitude. And that belongs entirely to you.

What Boudoir Photography Has Taught Me About Women

Maybe this is also why I feel so strongly about the way I photograph women.

Over the years, I’ve had so many women walk into my studio and immediately tell me what they don’t like about themselves. Before I’ve even taken the first photograph, I hear about the stomach they want hidden, the stretch marks they hate, the arms they don’t want photographed, the scar they’re self-conscious about, the weight they’ve gained, the weight they’ve lost, or the parts of their bodies that simply don’t look the way they used to.

And I understand it because I’m a woman standing on the other side of that camera with my own list.

But I think sometimes we misunderstand what luxury boudoir is supposed to be.

To me, luxury boudoir isn’t about taking a woman and digitally creating some flawless version of her. The luxury is in giving a woman the experience of being celebrated exactly as she is. It’s being taken care of, beautifully styled, expertly posed, photographed in gorgeous light, and given the space to see herself differently for a few hours.

Of course I know how to pose a body beautifully. I know how to use lighting to flatter it, how to choose the right angles, and how to retouch a photograph professionally. Those things are part of my craft. But I never want to retouch a woman so much that the woman disappears.

I want you to recognize yourself.

Maybe it’s a version of yourself you haven’t seen in a while. Maybe it’s a woman you didn’t even realize was still there. But it’s still you.

There’s a moment I get to witness again and again when a client sees her photographs and looks at me almost incredulously and says, “That’s me?”

Yes. That’s you.

I didn’t put that woman there. She walked into the studio with you.

Stop Waiting for the Perfect Version of Yourself

There will always be a reason to wait. Maybe you want to lose ten pounds first. Maybe you want to get in better shape, grow your hair, fix something, tighten something, or wait until you feel more confident.

But confidence doesn’t always come before you do the thing. Sometimes doing the thing is what reminds you that the confidence was still in there.

At 50, I’m not interested in waiting for some imaginary flawless version of myself before I allow myself to feel beautiful. I have stretch marks. I have signs of aging. I have alopecia. I also have a body that created life, a daughter and grandchildren I adore, a career I love, decades of experiences written all over me, and a whole lot of life left to live.

All of those things can exist together.

I can wear a beautiful wig one day and love being bald the next. I can retouch a photograph and leave my stretch marks. I can acknowledge that there are things about my body I might change if someone handed me a magic wand and still look at these photographs and think I look sexy as hell.

Self-acceptance doesn’t require pretending we love every single thing about ourselves. Sometimes it’s simply deciding that the things we don’t love no longer get to overshadow everything we do.

That’s what these photographs mean to me.

They’re not really about being bald.

They’re about being seen.

So take the photograph. Wear the lingerie. Book the boudoir shoot. Get in front of the camera with the body you have today instead of waiting for the one you think you’re supposed to have.

Your scars tell a story. Your stretch marks tell a story. Your wrinkles tell a story. Your hair loss tells a story. They are evidence of a life being lived, not evidence that you are somehow less beautiful because of it.

This is 50. This is alopecia. This is me.

And if there’s one thing I know now that I wish more women knew sooner, it’s this:

Sexy was never about my hair. And yours isn’t hiding inside some perfect version of you either.