Hair loss: its causes, how to head it off and where to look for help when you can’t stop thinning hair
From eating the right foods, such as pulses and those high in iron and fats, to always eating breakfast, lowering your stress, styling hair less and washing it more, there are many ways to avoid hair loss, and to mitigate it
One of the easiest ways to change the way we look, and feel, is to change our hair, with a new colour, cut or a drastic restyle.
Hair reflects our health – emotional, physical, and even financial. It is one of the first things people notice about us: up there near our eyes, framing our complexions and our smiles. Little wonder we grow anxious when we start to lose it.
Is cutting your hair the only way to get rid of split ends?
A typical scalp has 100,000 hair follicles. In a person who is well, 80 per cent to 90 per cent of them are growing hair at any one time. Hair grows fast, an average of six inches a year, and the only part of the body to grow faster is bone marrow. Hair grows faster in men than women. We naturally lose hair, or shed, every day – between 80 and 125 strands. When we lose more than that, it is time to take action.
Svenson Hair Centre (there are centres globally, including several in Hong Kong) cites 46 reasons why we lose hair. While hair loss is sometimes the result of serious illness or infection – alopecia areata or autoimmune diseases like lupus – the most common factors include stress, diet, hormone and hereditary factors, too much styling, and too little washing.
Sustained pressure at work or at home, upheaval, surgery, even childbirth, can lead to a physiological response called telogen effluvium – by the far the most common cause of hair loss. Often referred to as symptomatic or reflective hair loss, it occurs when an increased proportion of hairs shift from the growing phase (anagen) to the shedding phase (telogen).