The weather from where both Amber Jean Rowan and I speak – the 28-year old Irish-born model in her London apartment and I, here in Hong Kong – is dark and dreary. But even over the medium of Zoom, Rowan’s radiant energy overshadows the dullness, casting a warm brightness on our respective screens. It’s her bubbly and fun-loving personality that one would notice upon meeting her for the first time. And strikingly so, because rather visibly Rowan has alopecia, an auto-immune condition that’s left her bald since she was sixteen.

“I look a little different from the world,” Rowan says, bringing to the fore the obvious almost immediately. Though it dawns on me that she likely precedes most conversations this way, Rowan remains patient with the fact that in parts her appearance will make the bulk of our discussion. Alongside acting, Rowan has had a decade-long modeling career working with brands such as SuperDry and designer Roland Mouret. But her catapult into wider recognition is a recent affair sparked by Rowan’s honest vulnerability about her alopecia. On Hair Free, the Instagram page that first lent Rowan the confidence to bare her scalp online in 2018, the model has garnered a growing community of fellow hair loss survivors (the page now sits at just over 6,000 followers), all eager to receive beauty tips and life advice pertaining to hair loss.

Ask anyone who has suffered from alopecia – hair loss brought on by the body immune system’s attack on hair follicles – and they will attest that the experience is far more convoluted than a deviating appearance. “Every autoimmune disease is so personal,” Rowan explains on Hair Free. “My own alopecia theory has to do with trauma and not properly confronting it. It’s a common thread that I’ve noticed in the people [with alopecia] I meet.” Thirteen years into her hair loss, the model admits that only recently has she begun to reexamine the roots of her hair loss and the emotions around it. Presently, she is positive and relentlessly optimistic, but for a time – mostly when she shielded her ‘egghead’ from the world, the model also suffered from intense anxiety, pushed and neglected for years as well as bouts of panic attacks that would sometimes last months on end.

Growing up as a gymnast and briefly, a stunt girl who begged her mother for acting classes, Rowan would set her sights on modeling as her one true passion – though she is by admission, a musical theatre geek who feels safest in the drama studio. She was a restless child, but a happy one at that. Only retrospectively does a young girl constantly operating on flight or flight come up in the picture. “It was this high-intensity level of being alert at all times. I was physically drained. It didn’t help that I was also very underweight.”

Come time the alopecia set in, Rowan had become a teenager instinctually hypervigilant reaching the height of self-consciousness (as most find themselves at that age). She was fifteen when one of her girlfriends while checking her blond highlights – a perennial trend in her hometown of Dublin, spotted a bald patch at the back of her head. “I was like, ‘Oh you must be joking!” Rowan explains. “Anyways, we went to the doctors and they said it was something called alopecia. We had never heard of that before.