LOSING YOUR HAIR? How to help it grow stronger
If the answer’s yes, you’re not alone. For Victoria Woodhall, a year-long, multifaceted approach helped her hair grow stronger. She shares what she has learned that could help you…
Four years ago, I had lunch with Meghan Markle. It was in the pre-harry days when writers like me could still get up close to ‘the actress from Suits’. Now, if I ever whip out the photo of the two of us together, people say, rather obviously, ‘Wow, that’s you with Meghan!’ But what’s going through my head is: ‘Wow, that’s me, with HAIR!’
When you suffer from hair thinning or loss as I do (along with 41% of UK women, according to hair supplement manufacturer Viviscal), you start to benchmark everything and everyone in follicular terms.
‘Hair is so emotive for women, signifying health, femininity and fertility,’ says dermatologist Dr Justine Hextall. ‘And they think, “If my hair is thinning now, am I going to end up with no hair?” There’s acute fear and embarrassment about it.’
By the time they visit
Dr Hextall’s clinic in Arundel,
Hair is so emotive for women, signalling health, femininity and fertility
West Sussex, many women are convinced that nothing can be done. ‘But there are myriad causes of hair loss,’ says Dr Hextall. ‘It might be a medical condition, it could be a period of stress or a change in hormones. Genetics and even pollution can affect the health of the follicle, too. And there are things we can do to optimise the hair and stem the flow of loss.’
Before I saw Dr Hextall, I put the sparseness of my hair down to stress: I’d lost my mother very suddenly 18 months previously and, as the family breadwinner, had to plough on with a demanding job. I was also convinced that genes played a part, as I remember both my mum and grandmother obsessively combing their thinning hair over the basin to check how much they were losing. On top of that, I was in my late 40s and well entrenched in that perimenopausal hormone shift.
Through Dr Hextall, I discovered that healthy hair is about marginal gains. She couldn’t bring it all back, but she could make the hair I had even thicker. Just as there wasn’t one single cause of my hair loss, there wasn’t one single solution so, over the course of a year, we took a multi-pronged approach. And it worked.
She explained that if my hair loss was solely down to inherited female pattern baldness, I’d have probably noticed it at a younger age, but that stress, especially my stress-induced lack of sleep, was undoubtedly a factor. ‘Everything regenerates when we sleep,’ she says. I now meditate twice daily, which helps me take my stress in my stride, and I try to get to bed by 11pm.
A blood test indicated low ferritin, the protein that stores iron in the body, which is essential for hair growth, so I needed iron supplements. Dr Hextall suggested I take hair supplement Viviscal (3), £38.99 for 60 tablets, viviscal.co.uk, and the collagen-promoting antioxidant
Colladeen Derma Plus, £19.95, lambertshealthcare.co.uk, to boost the supply of nutrients to hair follicles. After a couple of months, new baby hair began to sprout around my hairline. But I needed it to grow faster, so I stopped heat styling, embraced my natural curls and refrained from pulling it to fill the gaps (traction alopecia, hair loss caused by obsessive pulling, is a thing!). I also switched to hairdresser Michael Van Clarke’s 3’’’ More Inches range (2), from £9, vanclarke.com, which does what it says on the bottle, and I used a jade
scalp comb (1), £38, hayoumethod.com, to improve blood supply to my follicles.
Six months on, I was ready for the big guns. Platelet-rich plasma (PRP) is a regenerating injectable made from your own blood. Dr Hextall believes the studies supporting its effectiveness are compelling and gave me two sessions, six weeks apart, which involved plasma being injected in about 20 places around my hairline. It was painful, but there’s been a real improvement in my hair: it’s thicker and it breaks less often (from £500, justinehextall.co.uk).
I still don’t have that Markle-era thick fringe, but I don’t feel as though I’m on an inexorable slide to baldness. While there’s no magic bullet, there are strategies that, when used collectively, make a major difference. Here’s what else I have learned…
There are things we can do to stem the flow of hair loss