When Tony Snesko’s wife offered to style his hair, he didn’t realize she had other plans. Instead of strategically positioning the strands he’d been using to camouflage his bald spot, she scraped at his head with a razor. When she finished, Snesko was stunned to find the remnants of his hair scattered on the floor.

Snesko, calls that incident, which happened almost 20 years ago, a saving moment of his life. “I hate looking at pictures of me with those scraggly things hanging on my head,” he says. The photos reveal a truth Snesko, now 63, didn’t want to confront: that the comb-over did nothing to hide his baldness. “It’s so stinking obvious,” he says.

Snesko, who started balding at age 22, was so grateful for his wife’s comb-over intervention that he started a Web site, Bald R Us (baldrus.com), to encourage other bald men to accept their hairless heads.

“You realize there’s millions of men in the same position,” Snesko says. “It becomes a personality disorder when you get so attached to your hair.”

Most men will experience some degree of hair loss by age 50, whether it’s receding along the hairline or the crown, or it’s thinning all over, says Dr. Melissa Piliang, a dermatologist at the Cleveland Clinic. Men can start losing their hair as early as high school, and some will pay big bucks to avoid that day of reckoning. While many hope that transplant surgeries, hair thickeners, growth products or even wigs will preserve a certain idealized image, others learn to embrace their follicly challenged hairstyles. They get help from stylists and barbers who have adopted strategic approaches for dealing with clients who have fewer hairs to snip.

Olga Ginzvurg, who’s been styling hair for 16 years at Reamir Barber Shop in New York City, thinks men are just as emotional about their hair as women. They bring in photos of Brad Pitt and George Clooney to show her how they want to look — even if they have only a little bit of hair.

“You don’t have enough hair,” Ginzvurg tells these clients and then redirects them to what they can do.

Maybe she should show them photos of actor Bruce Willis. He’s had his famous squeaky-clean head shaved by Giovanni Falco at Astor Place Hairstylist, an unpretentious barbershop that’s been owned by the Vezza family for three generations.

Giovanni Falco, a barber at Astor Place Hairstylist in New York City, gives Antonio Mongiovi, a real estate agent, a short cut. (Photo by Daniel Woolfolk/CNS)

“I give him what he wants,” says Falco, who has shaved heads and styled men’s hair in the same chair at Astor Place since 1984. “He’s a really nice guy.”

For whatever reasons, balding men like Willis are opting to shave off receding hair more now than when another Astor stylist, Sal Covero, started in the business in 1978. “People used to cover it up,” Covero says.

Stylists at the Awilda Salon in Beverly Hills, Calif., are especially gentle with clients who have both a receding hairline and receding crown. (The crown sits at the back of the head on the top, where a bald patch can grow in a circular pattern.)

“That’s the double whammy, with both going on at the same time,” says owner Awilda Salzman. “You’re going to lose all of it. It’s a race.” Salzman finds that men are sensitive about their hair but may not express it verbally in the same way women do.

George Falcon, a stylist at the upscale Atelier Emmanuel salon in San Francisco, takes a bolder approach with his balding clients based on his personal experience with hair loss. Falcon, who’s 41, started shaving his head at age 28, when he noticed his hairline receding.

“Before it left me, I got rid of it,” he says. “I shaved my head before it was too noticeable.”

Falcon brings a contagious confidence to his hair-challenged clients. “I can bluntly tell them it’s time to let go and cut the cord. It’s over,” he says. He recommends different lengths — from all off to very short — depending on the client’s occupation and lifestyle.

Still, Falcon admits that most men don’t want to confront their hair loss. “Telling a man he’s going bald is like telling a woman she’s getting fat,” he says.

Even significant others don’t want to touch the issue. A woman once called Falcon in advance of her boyfriend’s coming in for a haircut. “She begged me to talk to her boyfriend about his thinning hair,” Falcon says. She thought her boyfriend would get too upset if she brought it up. The boyfriend mentioned his hair loss, which made it easy for Falcon to discuss products and new styles.

With his Bald R Us Web site, Snesko’s worked hard to offer balding men a positive attitude. He’s compiled hair transplant horror stories, testimonials from men of all ages and do-it-yourself scalp shaving tips. “Just say ‘no!’ to rugs and plugs!” reads a scrolling banner on the site’s home page.

“Bald men are portrayed as unhappy, unattractive and impotent,” says Snesko. “Somebody needed to take them on.” While he has a sense of humor about balding, he says hair loss can be no laughing matter. Teenagers and young men have written him to say they’ve actually contemplated suicide after being teased at school about their hair loss. He hopes they will gain confidence from testimonials from other young men.

Eric Godfrey, 34, a 6-foot 3-inch restaurant manager in Hoboken, N.J., was only 19 when he noticed his thick, red curly hair receding. He accepted it as one of life’s inevitabilities, until he viewed his sister’s wedding video when he was in his late 20s. Godfrey was startled by how much hair he’d lost and hated how he looked. He immediately shaved off everything and has maintained the look ever since.

“It made me feel younger,” Godfrey says.

Maybe that’s what happened to Jessica Torre’s husband, who left her after 12 years of marriage. Torre, an Astor Place stylist, had been begging her balding spouse to shave his head. The day he finally did, she noticed a marked upswing in his confidence. “That was it,” she says. “Nobody looked at him before then.”