Psychic Powers are a common occurrence throughout various media, fitting into many different genres. It gives a character awesome abilities, but seems to often come at a price: It would seem that much of this same media would infer that hair follicles inhibit the ability to properly access these powers, and so many psychics lack hair.note
Worth noting that bald telepaths are almost exclusively male, presumably because a bald woman is generally considered unattractive. It also goes along that if a woman is psychic and bald, it's generally a sign that her powers are having a terrible toll on her health.
Sub-Trope of Bald Mystic. May overlap with My Brain Is Big, Bald of Evil, and Prematurely Bald.
Examples:
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Comic Books
- In Buck Godot: Zap Gun for Hire, PSmIth is a whole collective of bald psychics.
- DC Comics:
- Superman's original concept was a villainous, bald telepath.
- The Tangent Comics version of The Superman, inspred by the above, is bald and has mental powers including telekinesis.
- The Martian Manhunter typically takes a bald form in his semi-human appearance (he can give himself hair if he wants to) and is a telepath.
- Henry King, Sr., the original Brainwave, was bald.
- Abe Sapien from Hellboy is bald and a telepath (and half fish) due to an arcane experiment.
- King Mob of The Invisibles, is a bald super spy with psychic powers.
- Marvel Comics:
- X-Men: Professor X is the most powerful telepath in the Marvel Universe. In fact, a flashback depicts his hair falling out at a young age when his powers first activated.
- The Incredible Hulk: The Leader is telepathic and sometimes bald.
- Fantastic Four: Uatu and his entire species, the Watchers.
- Guardians of the Galaxy: Moondragon is one of those rare bald female psychics.
- Before Xavier ever existed and Marvel comics was just an anthology series, one issue dealt with a psychic man being recruited by a gathering of other mutant psychics who plan to covertly help the world. One of them was bald and seemed to be the leader (sound familiar?).
Fan Works
- Empath in Empath: The Luckiest Smurf, as all male Smurfs are bald.
- Zigzagged on Rocketship Voyager. Tech Lieutenant TuV'k, their Tactical Psionics Officer, has a shaved head to fit the copper skullcap of an eloptic field amplifier, yet Captain Janeway and Nee'Lix both wear these skullcaps during a Mind Meld without issue despite having lots of hair, implying it's just for convenience. When Janeway is about to be assimilated by the Psiborg Collective, the first thing they do is shave off her hair in readiness for a similar skullcap. Afterwards she grouchily wonders if she might start a trend of bald spaceship captains.
Films — Live-Action
- Downplayed in Minority Report where the psychics used to foresee violent crimes have their hair cut short. This appears to be for pragmatic reasons, as long hair would make difficult to attach the nodes we see connected to their heads.
- X-Men Film Series: Hank recommends to Charles that he shaves his head in X-Men: First Class so that Cerebro will work more efficiently. It's strongly implied in the other films that Xavier is a more potent psychic when he's bald.
Literature
- All wits in the Monster Blood Tattoo series. By becoming a wit, you gain telepathic powers, the ability to cause pain with your mind, and other untapped feats of mental strength. In exchange, you lose your hair.
- The Trope Maker and probable Trope Codifier is the 1953 Fix Up Novel Mutant by C. L. Moore and Henry Kuttner, compiled five short stories about a race of post-nuclear mutated humans called "Baldies" who are telepathic and completely hairless.
- There are many bald humans in the early stories of Philip K. Dick with psi powers, mutants. They usually wear wigs. (One boy gets in trouble with his parents for coming to school without his wig.)
Live-Action TV
- Farscape: Regular character Zhaan is a Delvian (Space Elves) priest with psychic powers who has a completely bald head. Some Delvians seen in other episodes do have hair, so this isn't universal among the species.
- The OuterLimits episode "The Sixth Finger". After being being subjected to a device that advances him along the evolutionary scale, a man develops a bald head and advanced psychic abilities, including telepathy and telekinesis.
- Star Trek
- The Talosians in the original pilot, "The Cage".
- Expanded Universe materials regarding the Deltans, (Ilia from Star Trek: The Motion Picture is one of them) has them as telepaths. Ilia shows such ability when she stops someone's pain by touching them. All Deltans are also bald.
- Remans, from Star Trek: Nemesis, are telepathic and bald.
- Stranger Things: Eleven was bald in the first season (and presumably all her life at the lab), but that was because it was kept buzzed by the Government Conspiracy that was experimenting on her. She grows her hair out in later seasons, and it doesn't interfere with her powers.
Tabletop Games
- Champions adventure "V.O.I.C.E. of Doom". The villain Le Maistre is bald and has multiple psychic powers.
- One of the possible side effects of psyker training in Dark Heresy is described as "being exposed to the light of the Throne". It renders the psyker completely hairless over their entire body.
- Sykers in Deadlands: Hell on Earth are all bald. Something about their training regimen causes all the hair to fall out.
- Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition:
- Although the various illustrations in the sourcebooks show that psionic characters aren't necessarily bald, this is still quite common. The illustrations for the Telepath, Metamind (Expanded Psionics Handbook), Ardent, Divine Mind and Erudite (Complete Psionics) all have shaved heads.
- The Synads are a race of humanoid aberrations with a threefold mind making them psionically gifted. They can easily pass for humans, but are described as "typically hairless".
- Discussed and justified in GURPS Dungeon Fantasy. Hair interferes with certain psionic headgear and makes it harder to spot the Skull Fungus that psions sometimes get.
- Rifts;
- Psi-Stalkers are mutant humans who can sense supernatural creatures, as well as other psychic abilities. They are all white-skinned and hairless, even the women.
- Rifts also has Psy-X Aliens, another mutant human (though this time the result of experimentation) with powerful psychic abilities, who look like Grey aliens, right down to the bald egg shaped heads.
- Crazies (individuals with implanted brain-chips that give them a number of psychic powers and multiple other benefits in exchange for steadily-worsening insanity) are almost always shown as bald. In their case it's not made clear whether it's a consequence of the Mind Over Matter treatment, but since most have large metal bolts inserted into their skulls (originally this was just how M.O.M. worked; nowadays it's their trademark look), hair would be hard to maintain at best.
- Visionary in Sentinels of the Multiverse is bald and a powerful psychic. The powers are innate; the baldness is because she was subjected to experiments. Her alternate-timeline child self, the Dreamer, has black hair, which she keeps when she grows up into the superheroine Muse.
- Pretty much all psykers in Warhammer 40,000. Librarians are also bald, but that's because they're Space Marines first.
Video Games
- Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 and its expansion feature Yuri, whose similarity with Lenin includes the baldness. Of course, he uses Mind Control. In-game, Yuri clones are a standard unit, who are of course also bald and psychic.
- Mentor, in Freedom Force, is both a psychic and bald. As he's something of a combination of Professor Xavier from X-Men and the Martian Manhunter, it should be no surprise.
- Mass Effect 2: Jack, a career criminal and biotic powerhouse, sports a shaved head. She later admits that she originally picked up the hairstyle when she joined a cult, and liked it so much that her head remains shaved throughout the game even though she's no longer a cultist. She grows hair (quite a lot) for the third game.
- Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy, being a game about psychic powers, has a few characters like this, including Edgar Barret
◊ and the main character Nick Scryer who, while not bald, has a shaved head.
- Second Sight features this in its protagonist, John Vattic: during the segments of the game set in the present, he sports a close-shaved head as a result of being imprisoned and tortured by the Big Bad — along with a wide range of impressive psychic powers. Subverted later in the game, when his past self develops psychic powers and retains a full head of hair.
- Due to a bug, the first soldier that develops psi powers in XCOM: Enemy Unknown was originally shown coming out of the Psionic Chamber with no hair, creating the implication that developing psi powers makes you go bald. This was later fixed.
Webcomics
- In Rusty and Co., Zar the Psion is a supporting character with a Messenger From The Future role. He is gifted with Psychic Powers and has the typical bald head to go along.
Western Animation
- Avatar: The Last Airbender:
- Combustion Man can firebend with his mind alone (rather than needing to use his body). He's also bald.
- Guru Pathik is bald, and shows psychic-like abilities such as reading people (and creatures') chi which lets him feel people's emotions, or even their locations through the connections they have with one another. Though his abilities are not strictly psychic, they are used in a manner fairly similar to that of an empath.
- The Legend of Korra: Tenzin claims that the reason why the Air Nomads had their heads shaved was so that they could have a higher awareness of the air around them. This is later confirmed when Daw, one of the new airbenders, was able to feel a net coming out from behind him, allowing him to evade it in time.
