Prince William cracks joke about baldness

William, Prince of Wales, has joked that he wishes he had more hair to a woman he met on a walkabout.

As the prince greeted locals outside the West Midlands Aspray Arena on Tuesday, he was surprised to see one well-wisher with thick, bright red locks.

"Look at your hair! It's fantastic," he quipped. "I wish I had hair like that. Amazing!"

The royal was visiting an FA Referee Training Course at Aspray, which is the home of Sporting Khalsa FC in Willenhall. The visit was part of the prince's duties as patron of the Football Association to highlight its Reflective and Representative campaign to recruit more people of colour as referees.

He has a reputation for being jovial about his disappearing hairline, which started receeding from a relatively young age, saying in the past that he "has the Charles."

The Prince of Wales is the eldest son of King Charles III and his late ex-wife, Lady Diana Spencer.

In his Spare memoir, his brother Prince Harry made a pointed dig at his sibling's hairline, writing about his "alarming baldness" and noting that his resemblance to his mother, Diana, was "fading with time".

"In some ways he was my mirror, in some ways he was my opposite," Harry wrote in the book published in January 2023.

"My beloved brother, my archnemesis, how had that happened?"