Jennifer Izatt will tell you she's vain, so she's not quite sure why having her hair fall out in huge clumps didn't bother her too much. Instead of fretting, the West Bountiful woman let her three children help her shave her head.

Then she went shopping for wigs and scarves in various colors and lengths. Her "look" is whatever she wants it to be, including bald.

Thea Chassin has no hair on her head, no eyebrows, no body hair. Her eyelashes "come and go."

She's not shy around cameras or strangers or pretty much anyone, either. She's made peace with the condition, called alopecia areata, which first appeared when she was in her 20s, in the form of a quarter-sized bald patch on the back of her head, surrounded by otherwise long, thick hair.

Chassin had a couple of bouts of partial balding before, but in 1997 her hair started thinning and disappearing entirely at the lower back of her head. Then the baldness worked its way up. "It was falling out all over the place, and I lost it all in the back," she remembers. It never grew back.

Alopecia is an immune disease that affects about 2 percent of the population. Some people have little round patches with no hair that regrow on their own schedule without treatment. Others, like Chassin and Izatt, lose most or all of their hair. That form affects men and women equally and can occur at any age, but often it affects children and young adults.

Izatt struggles a bit with her partial eyebrows and eyelashes. As for the hair on the rest of her body, she jokes, "good riddance." It's been easy, she admits, partly because her husband Daimian tells her she's beautiful. And she was familiar with the condition, which her little brother has had for seven years. He, too, copes well and talks readily about the condition.

"I teach special education and I've taught for years this is who we are and let's embrace what's different and learn to work with things that are difficult. Now I'm doing that," Izatt says.

Chassin says she was helped immeasurably when she met other women who had alopecia areata. "That was a turning point. It lifted my mood. I hadn't realized how alone with it I felt."

That feeling of solitude is something she's been trying to help other women overcome.

For five years, Chassin, who lives in New York, has been a support-group leader for alopecia areata, dealing with women, men and children of all ages. Getting people to attend isn't easy, so she has tried different situations. She found the most successful ones were those that were purely social, where people with the condition could mix and mingle. That was the birth of Bald Girls Do Lunch, a nonprofit support and education organization — a meet-and-greet she's taken to different cities nationwide. "It's been a huge hit."