Prince Harry, a British Commonwealth youth ambassador, met with youth ministers from across the network of nations on Thursday, but there was something else beyond his political capacity that got royal enthusiasts riled up.
The joint Instagram account of new parents Prince Harry and Meghan Markle has shared a photo from the Commonwealth Youth roundtable at Marlborough House in London, in which Prince Harry is seen hugging Irene Kendi, youth advisor for Kenya.
The photo, which captured the 34-year-old prince from the back, exposed his ever-increasing bald crown.
“RIP Harry’s hair :( ,” one commenter wrote, per the Daily Star, while another wrote: “It is devastating to find out that prince harry is also bald.”
Another said: “I just realised that Prince Harry started balding”.
A hair transplant surgeon has claimed that Prince Harry has the same balding pattern as his elder brother, Prince William, and his grandfather, Prince Philip, and that his stressful fatherhood had aggravated the situation.
"Fatherhood has definitely not been kind to Prince Harry's hair,” Dr. Asim Shahmalak from Manchester's Crown Clinic told The Sun in May.
"Stress is a factor in hair loss so the struggles of combining his royal duties with marriage and becoming a father for the first time maybe a reason why his hair is thinning noticeably across the top of his scalp."
However, he said, genetics was the most important factor to blame: "A much more significant factor, though, is the strong baldness gene running through the whole Windsor family."
UK tabloids reported in spring that the prince, who had a baby boy together with Meghan Markle in May, is going to splash out £50,000 ($62,000) on a hair transplant later in the year.