Prince William proved he lost his hair — but not his sense of humor — while discussing his Earthshot Prize initiative.
The Prince of Wales, 41, teamed up with U.K. YouTubers Sorted Food (Ben Ebbrell, Mike Huttlestone, Jamie Spafford and Barry James Taylor) to surprise fans with plant-based burgers — various aspects of which were created by three of the 2022 Earthshot Prize winners, like vegetables that were grown in a greenhouse-in-a-box.
“I don’t know if you guys have heard about the Earthshot Prize, but it’s an initiative I started about two years ago now, but it’s been about four years in the making,” William told the Sorted Food hosts in a YouTube video posted to the channel on Sunday, July 30, deadpanning: “I had hair when it started.”
William’s quip about his coif — or lack thereof — is far from the first time he’s acknowledged his hair loss in public.
After Prince George’s birth in 2013, William made an observation about his firstborn’s features to reporters. (In addition to George, now 10, William and Princess Kate are also the proud parents of daughter Princess Charlotte, 8, and son Prince Louis, 5.)
“He’s got way more [hair] than me, thank God,” William quipped at the time.
One year later, Kate, 41, even ribbed her husband about his thinning hair during a visit to Sydney Royal Easter Show in Australia. After the couple were shown a tuft of alpaca wool, “the Princess said he should put it on his head,” exhibitor Lyn Crejan recalled at the time. “She said, ‘You need it more than me,’ and pointed to his head and he laughed.”
Prince Harry — who has been at odds with his brother since he and Meghan Markle stepped down from their duties as senior royals in 2020 — even remarked on William’s hair in his tell-all memoir, Spare. Unlike William and Kate’s comments, however, Harry’s were not made in jest.
Recalling a charged moment where he “looked at [William], maybe for the first time since we were boys,” Harry took notice of his older brother’s “alarming baldness,” he wrote in the book, which was released in January. He also observed that his resemblance to their late mother, Princess Diana, was fading.
“In some ways he was my mirror, in some ways he was my opposite,” Harry, 38, penned. “My beloved brother, my archnemesis, how had that happened?”
As William continues to contend with his baldness — and tumultuous relationship with Harry — he is “very much looking forward to his trip across the pond” in September for the Earthshot Prize Summit and “several other engagements and meetings while he is in New York for just over two days,” a source exclusively told Us Weekly last month.
As he explained on the Sorted Food YouTube Channel, William founded Earthshot as an “environmental prize [to those] tackling the world’s greatest environmental problems.” Explaining that the concept was “born out of” late President John F. Kennedy’s “Moonshoot” initiative to send man to the moon, the Earthshot Prize is “about saving the planet, not taking us to the moon.”
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“There’s plenty of people out there who want us to move to the next planet already,” William quipped. “And I’m like, ‘Hang on, let’s not give up on this planet yet.’”