It has often been said that Queen Elizabeth
became bald at the age of thirty, but in fact there are references to her
having her own hair well into her sixties. In the 1580's she gave a lock
of her now graying hair to Philip Sidney (which is still on display in
Wilton House, Wiltshire) and only a few years before she died, Robert
Devereux, Earl of Essex, burst into her bedchamber without permission and
saw the aging Queen with "her hair all about her ears". Elizabeth's high
forehead in her paintings may have been natural, may have been exaggerated
by the portrait painters who knew that the Elizabethans considered a high
forehead to mean intelligence, may have been due to that fact that the
Queen wore wigs and may have shaved the front of her hair to make them
sit more easily, or the Queen may well have had some hair loss due to the
lead in the "mask of youth" make-up that she wore on her face. But even
if she did lose some of her hair in this way, and it is by no means certain
that she did, the Queen was never bald.
See Elizabeth Jenkins'
passage on the legend of Elizabeth's baldness