I cried in a Torrid changing room once. Not because something didn’t fit. Because I caught a glimpse of the back of my head in that brutal three-way mirror and just… stood there. Didn’t move. Held my breath like if I stayed still enough the reflection would change. It didn’t.
That was over ten years ago now. I hadn’t told anyone what was happening with my hair at that point. Not properly. My hair stylist had started making comments, little observations I wasn’t sure how to respond to, the kind that land somewhere between concern and observation and just make you want to cancel your next appointment and never go back. I mentioned it to my mom once, properly said the words out loud, and she came back a week later with some Avon Biotin her friends at Bingo swore by. I went to the doctor. He told me to just relax more. Stress, he said. As if I wasn’t stressed because of the hair. And I really, really needed someone to take me seriously.
Hair loss is talked about a lot in terms of what you can do about it. Products, treatments, toppers, wigs, regimens. I’ve written about all of that myself. But what I don’t see talked about nearly enough is the bit that happens before any of that. The bit that happens in a Torrid changing room with a three-way mirror that shows you everything. The bit that happens at 11pm when you’re sat on the bathroom floor with a clump of hair on your hand wondering if you’re being dramatic or if something is genuinely, actually wrong.
You’re not being dramatic. I promise.
It hits different when it’s your hair
Hair is so loaded. I know that sounds obvious but I don’t think we fully reckon with how much identity, femininity, confidence and control we’ve tied up in it until it starts going. And then it’s like, oh. Oh, this is what that was doing.
I remember thinking I wasn’t allowed to be as upset as I was. Like I’d be upset and then immediately follow it up with some internal voice going it’s just hair, people have actual problems. Which, yes, technically. But also that voice is not helpful and you’re allowed to tell it to shut up.
Because here’s the thing. It’s not just hair. It’s the way you move through the world. It’s the version of yourself you’ve always seen in photos. It’s the thing you’ve been able to rely on even on a bad face day. Losing it, or watching it thin, or finding it in the shower drain in quantities that make your stomach drop, that’s a grief. An actual grief. And you’re allowed to treat it like one.
The anxiety spiral that nobody tells you about
There’s a particular kind of anxiety that comes with hair loss that I haven’t seen described that well anywhere. It’s not just being sad about it. It’s the constant surveillance of your own head. The obsessive checking. Standing in natural light and pulling your hair back to look at your parting. Photographing the same spot from the same angle every few days to compare. Googling the same things at midnight and convincing yourself of seventeen different diagnoses before you close the tab.
I did all of it. All of it.
And the exhausting part is that this anxiety actually makes things worse. Stress and cortisol are genuinely not great for hair loss (understatement of the year), and yet the hair loss is causing the stress, so you’re just sort of… stuck in this loop where your head is working against you in both directions simultaneously.
I remember a period where I’d check my hair so many times a day that I could barely think about anything else. It was intrusive. It was constant. And I felt genuinely crazy, because how do you explain to someone that you’ve spent forty minutes assessing your own hairline when you’re supposed to be doing literally anything else?
If that sounds familiar, I want you to know it’s more common than you think. And it’s not vanity. It’s anxiety, and it makes complete sense given what you’re going through.
The isolating bit
I kept it secret for a long time. That was its own particular kind of awful.
You’re in a group of people and someone mentions a bad hair day and you’re internally going I would give anything for a bad hair day. You decline invitations because you can’t face being somewhere with bad lighting or rain or wind or any situation where you might lose control of how your hair looks. You develop a whole architecture of avoidance that nobody around you can see.
And you don’t tell anyone because you’re worried they’ll think you’re vain, or overreacting, or that they’ll say something well-meaning that lands completely wrong. (My personal nemesis: “but it’s not even noticeable!” said by someone who loves me very much and genuinely thought that was comforting. It was not comforting.)
The loneliness of it is real. Carrying something that nobody can see, that affects you every single day, while keeping up the pretence that everything’s fine. That’s a weight.
What actually helped me (mentally, not just physically)
Okay. Here’s the slightly more practical bit, because I promised.
Finding community. This one changed things for me more than almost anything else. There are women in Facebook groups and Reddit threads and comment sections who are going through exactly what you’re going through, who get it on a level that the people who love you might not be able to. And Instagram. The hair loss community on Instagram is something else entirely. I’ve found some of my most genuine friendships and the most real, honest support there, women who just get it without you having to explain yourself from the beginning every single time. Finding those spaces and realising I wasn’t alone, that other people had cried in changing rooms and checked their hairlines obsessively and felt completely unhinged by something everyone else seemed to be treating as a minor inconvenience, that was huge. I can’t overstate it.
Actually talking to someone. I’m not going to tell you what to do here because it’s your life. But I will say that when I finally talked to someone properly, not in a “haha yeah my hair’s a bit shit at the moment” way but actually talked about how much it was affecting me, I felt about forty pounds lighter. I didn’t go to a therapist myself, but I’ve heard from so many others that talking to a professional about the anxiety and the grief of it all genuinely helped them in ways that nothing else did. Whether that’s a therapist, a GP, a friend who you trust to not be weird about it, a partner, whoever. Saying it out loud changes something.
Giving myself permission to grieve it. This sounds small but it wasn’t. I spent so long telling myself I was being silly that I never actually processed any of it. The moment I let myself properly sit with the grief, I stopped fighting it, and that weirdly made it easier to move forward. You don’t have to be fine with it. You’re allowed to be not fine with it.
Getting information (carefully). I say carefully because the internet is an absolute minefield when it comes to hair loss. But getting an actual diagnosis from a dermatologist, understanding what I was dealing with, having a plan even if the plan was imperfect, that gave me something to hold onto. Feeling like I had some agency back helped enormously. Not because I fixed it. But because I wasn’t just falling anymore.
Resources worth knowing about: Alopecia UK is brilliant if you want peer support and community, and their resources around the emotional side of hair loss are genuinely good. And honestly, the hair loss subreddits and Facebook groups (search female hair loss or androgenic alopecia) are full of real people who will make you feel so much less alone at 11pm when you need it most.
You’re not vain. You’re human.
I want to say that one more time because I think a lot of us need to hear it.
Caring about your hair doesn’t make you shallow. Being devastated by losing it doesn’t make you vain. Hair is tied to how we feel about ourselves in ways that go really deep, and when it changes, it makes sense that we feel it. Profoundly.
The world is fairly shit at acknowledging that. It treats female hair loss as either a minor cosmetic inconvenience or something to be fixed clinically, and doesn’t leave much room for the emotional reality in between. Which is that it’s a lot. It’s genuinely a lot.
If you’re in the thick of it right now, I see you. And I really hope you’re being a bit kinder to yourself than I was.
