Gift of hair from Valentin

BY CHRISTINA SANTUCCI

Thursday, April 5, 2007 4:12 PM EDT

Juana Torres was diagnosed with lung cancer last September and as so often happens with chemotherapy treatment her hair began falling out.

“When her hair fell out, it started in the middle of the treatment, and gradually she lost all of it,” her daughter, Solkira, said.

So when Solkira’s friend from work - Susan Weit of KPMG public accounting firm - saw a newspaper article about hairstylist Rodolfo Valentin’s monthly giveaway of a hair prosthesis, Weit immediately thought of her friend’s mother as a perfect candidate. Valentin thought so too, and selected the 81-year-old Flushing mother of five to come to his Madison Avenue salon for a free treatment on Friday, March 30.

Every month, Argentinean-born Valentin chooses between one and three cancer survivors to be fitted with his hair prosthesis - a $4,000 hairpiece, made of a polyurethane cranial cap bonded to the person’s scalp with fine bands of adhesive tape and hair matching the ethnicity of the client.

Although he has been making the prostheses for years, he founded his own charity, Sofia’s Hair 4 Health, in 2002 to offer the service in memory of his mother.

“I promised my mother [Sofia] that I would help everyone with this, and make the perfect piece for chemo patients,” Valentin said, explaining that his quest began some 42 years ago, when his own mother developed breast cancer.

“My mother was a beautiful girl, but when she lost her hair, she was very depressed,” Valentin said. “She told me, ‘They can reconstruct your breasts, but my depression is not the depression of my body. The mirror reminds me every morning when I wake up, when I go and see I have no hair.’ ”

Seeing his own mother’s despair from her hair loss, Valentin vowed to help cancer patients who could not pay - applicants must make less than $30,000 per year - and who had the desire to keep living.

“Some ladies don’t make enough money,” he said. “If they make $20,000, they don’t make enough money to pay for [the prosthesis].”

“Probably somebody else would choose somebody younger,” Valentin said, explaining why he chosen Torres. “But when you are 81-years-old, everybody should do the most possible to look the youngest … [Torres] was worried that her family was coming and they would see her without hair.”

Over the course of three hours, Torres was fitted with a silky, chin-length wig - caramel in color and much lighter than her former black locks.

“It’s really very smart looking, very stylish,” Solkira said, adding that her friend Weit who went with Torres and Solkira to the salon, raved about her new look.

And both mother and daughter were grateful to Valentin for outfitting Torres with the hairpiece, as she gets ready to undergo another round of chemotherapy to combat any remaining cancerous cells.

“[Valentin] He really has a kind heart that he chooses to do this for people that are going through this,” Solkira said. “He brings a gift to them to brighten up their day.”

In addition, Solkira saw an instantaneous transformation in her mother’s self-confidence.

“It makes a huge difference in how you feel overall. It is not vanity; it has to do with just how you feel. [Having hair] it makes you feel good, so you feel like your old self again,” she said.