LOIC VENANCE / AFP
Edouard Philippe, here photographed on November 3 in Saint-Malo before the start of the Route du Rhum, suffers from alopecia.
HEALTH – ” We’re not going to spend the night there », evacuates Edouard Philippe. Because as with every interview he now grants to the press, the former prime minister must talk about his beard that the French have seen turn white during confinement and his hair that falls. In Pointthis Thursday, January 12, the mayor of Le Havre repeats that he ” live well with this autoimmune disease he first spoke about in 2022.
” alopecia is not serious, dangerous, contagious or painful. (…) The eyebrows have fallen, they will not come back. The hair is falling out, I’m not sure it will grow back. The beard will eventually fall out,” describes Édouard Philippe who says he is still capable at 52 “to line up a few straight lines and a few well-felt lefts in a ring”.
According to the website Doctissimoalopecia, the most common form of which is baldness, is caused by the action of certain hormones in men: “When testosterone is transformed into dihydrotestosterone (DHT) by an enzyme, (…) DHT will pack the cycle of hair growth and after 25 cycles, the follicle is exhausted. Result: the hair becomes thinner and thinner then the follicle dies and disappears. »
At the end of a cycle, the hair falls and then grows back in the same follicle. The 25 cycles are meant to last a lifetime. In cases of alopecia, they are exhausted in a few years. Édouard Philippe did not specify what his affection was due to. Alopecia can be caused by many factors (skin problems, dietary deficiencies, stress, etc.). In cases of baldness, alopecia is hereditary and therefore linked to a genetic factor.
The same disease as Jada Pinkett Smith
Alopecia also affects women, including actress Jada Pinkett Smith, the wife of Will Smith. If she initially wore turbans to hide her hair, she decided in early 2021 to completely shave her head. ” Now I can only laugh about it. You all know I struggle with alopecia”, she recalls in a video posted in December 2021 on her Instagram account. Smiling, she clarifies that she wanted to talk about this fight: “I thought I should just share it with you so you don’t ask questions. »
If the actress also seems to have accepted it today, she admits to having been “terrified when it started. » In 2018, she spoke publicly about her alopecia for the first time, on the set of her own television show, Red Table Talk. “I was in the shower one day and just had handfuls of hair in my hands. I thought to myself that I was going bald. It was the first time in my life that I literally shook with fear”she says.
She also relativized, still on her show: “People have cancer, have sick children… A force beyond us takes things away from people every day, and if it wants to take my hair, I don’t think it’s a lot. »
His illness is also the cause of the famous slap of will smith, given to Chris Rock at the last Oscar ceremony. The latter had made fun of the alopecia of Jada Pinkett Smith, provoking the anger and the reaction of her husband. A gesture that earned the actor a ban on participating in the Oscars and any event related to the Academy for 10 years.
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After eyebrows, Édouard Philippe’s alopecia causes him to lose his hair