My hair has experienced some big changes since the onset of motherhood. I started life with limp, weak locks, and this carried on throughout my school days. It wouldn’t grow longer than my shoulders, my split ends were devastating under neon lighting, and it was so fine my ears would poke through it like Cate Blanchette’s character from Lord of the Rings. This earned me the nickname “Weasel Ears” which didn’t set well with this angst-ridden teen. No amount of Aussie 3 Minute Miracle would thicken it up, and I never quite mastered how to blow-dry for volume.
Yet when I got pregnant with Dexie, I was suddenly sporting the thick and full mane I’d always wanted. I finally invested in GHDs and beachy waves would actually last half a day before succumbing to gravity. I think it was the only thing I really enjoyed about pregnancy. The rest of it was one long big list of Nos: no cigarettes, no hair dye, no cycling and no alcohol (and no one should ever have to meet me sober).
Yet I was repeatedly told by anyone and everyone that it wouldn’t last. I’d give birth then find clumps of my beloved hair on my pillow. It would clog up the drain in the shower and end up more limp and pathetic than ever before. Breastfeeding might delay the inevitable, but my good hair days were numbered - so they said.
Yet miraculously this didn’t happen. Maybe it’s because I didn’t torture my hair with appliances in my twenties, or scrape it into various up-dos (seriously, my ears are horrible), or maybe it was like some sort of divine pardon for time served with lacklustre locks. Whatever the reason, my pregnancy tresses stayed. In fact, we’re now 5 years on, with another pregnancy in-between, and my hair is still long, healthy, and voluminous.
In short, I got lucky when so many don’t.
In fact postpartum hair loss has been a bit of thing among my friends, and one (who shall remain nameless) was utterly tortured by it. She’d pop round brandishing some new miracle product and plonk herself down on the floor in-between my legs for me to massage it into her scalp. It put all my moaning into perspective as clumps of what precious little she had left came away in my fingers. Of course I’d discreetly chuck this over my shoulder, but she always knew. We’d Google image search other women suffering from hair loss but nothing seems quite as severe as your own journey with it - and I watched my gorgeous friend age before my eyes in the green glow of my iMac.
Yet this is normal right?
Well yes. The average non-pregnant woman loses some 100 hairs per day; sounds a lot, but it’s not enough to notice. During pregnancy, an elevated estrogen level prolongs the life cycle of your hair, meaning fewer fall out. After you give birth, however, your estrogen level plummets and all those hairs that stuck around for 9 months, fall out and are replaced by new growth that is subject to your hair’s pre-pregnancy life cycle.
But what if you lose too much?
Like my friend, you mean?
Well to cut a long story short, she was eventually diagnosed with postpartum thyroiditis - an uncommon condition in which a previously normal-functioning thyroid gland becomes inflamed. Left untreated, as thyroid cells become impaired, mild signs and symptoms of underactive thyroid (hypothyroidism) can develop, one of which is (…you guessed it…) hair loss.
A few years on and her hair is thickening up, yet the affected scalp never did yield a new crop meaning far less strands to play with. An FUE hair transplant could be a good solution, but she’s better with styling than me, and still looks 10 out of 10 on a night out. Not even hair loss could dull my girl, and she’s as sassy as ever when she hits the Prosecco.
But it has got me thinking about how our hair is so often taken for granted. Whether we grey prematurely, recede in our twenties, or too casually diagnose ourselves with some sort of temporary blip to our hormones when we wake up a few hundred strands lighter, just when should we bite the bullet and go and see a doctor?
So I decided to write this post; to lay out two very different postpartum hair stories, so pregnant women can see beyond the pages of What to Expect When You’re Expecting, and learn to listen to their bodies again. It’s not something any of us parent bloggers are readily shouting about either, and we should be. Continued severe hair loss well after pregnancy is worth talking about. If my friend had not spoken to a professional about her hair, she might not have been diagnosed, and she might have lost more than just her hair. Our bodies have funny ways of telling us things, and thankfully so does our hair.
