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December 2006

Baseball cap wigs put lid on hair loss


Battling cancer is one thing; dealing with the hair loss that can happen with chemotherapy is another.

Susie Lucas can't do anything about the former, but she has an answer for the latter -- her baseball cap wigs.

"There's such a need for them," said Lucas, the owner of Unique Hair Designs. "It's designed for everyone and anyone who has a need. It's not just patients, but for people who are having a bad hair day."

A licensed cosmetologist, Lucas recognized the need for people with hair loss to have access to a comfortable, stylish and simple hairpiece.

In the late 1980s, she came up with the idea of attaching a partial hairpiece around the rim of a baseball cap. The caps are an alternative to traditional wigs, which can be irritating to the scalp and uncomfortable to wear.

It took her six months to figure out how to assemble the caps and especially to get the hair to fit just right. Lucas buys the hats and strips of hair separately. She uses fitted caps and custom makes the bands of hair. The finished product, she said, "looks like real hair."

Long hair, short hair, straight hair or synthetic braids, baseball caps, slouch hats, sweater caps or dressy hats -- Lucas has developed a variety of looks that are stylish and comfortable, especially for cancer patients, priced at less than $100.

"People who have talked to me about them are surprised they're so reasonably priced," she said. "I want it so that everyone will be able to afford one. I truly believe people buy them and will want to sell them."

So committed was she to her product, Lucas obtained a patent in 1996. It was a process that reaffirmed her belief that they're needed and gave her confidence to go forward with her project.

"A friend told me about a patent attorney and when I told him what I had he told me to come in," Lucas said. "I remember him saying that he had called his wife to look at the caps and she had said she wished she had had one during the time she was going through chemo."

But even having a patent, the road to getting the caps into the hands of people who could use them has been a slow go.

Trained as a cosmetologist, Lucas at one point had her own shop, but closed it in 1996 because of health problems. She's been operating as a Hair Loss-based business and had manufactured about 75 caps.

She has them on display at Belleville Beauty Supply at 317 Industrial off Sumpter Road in Belleville and has even visited cancer support groups to demonstrate the caps. This summer, she donated 20 caps for cancer patients at Garden City Hospital.

Those caps are being given to women experiencing hair loss as a result of chemotherapy and conditions, such as alopecia areata, an autoimmune disease in which the immune system mistakenly attacks hair follicles.

"The caps improve self-esteem of patients," said Amy Hotycki, clinical coordinator at Garden City Hospital.

The effects were evident with Sandy Reinhardt, a patient at the hospital who received one of the first caps.

"It's great, really comfortable," Reinhardt said. "It's lifted my spirits 120 percent."

Lucas' dream is to open a shop where she is able to manufacture the caps and get them to market, and she has her husband and five grown children telling her to go for it.

"My husband tells me to go on, don't stop," she said. "I've put everything into these hats because I feel there's such a need for them. I wish I had the words to express how important they are to me."