I do hair for a living and mine is coming out in the shower

Started 7 August 2025 · 8 replies · 404 hearts · read 4.9k times

WinnieCarlisle, UK · 7 August 2025

11 months ago

Carlisle. Hairdresser, twenty-two years behind a chair, and extremely aware of hair shedding is what I put on my profile in a jokey way last summer before any of this happened to me.

It started in June. I noticed it in the shower first — not a few strands, a proper amount, wound round my fingers. Then on the pillow. Then, and this is the one that finished me, on the floor of my own salon, and I know exactly whose hair is whose on that floor because it is my job.

I have thinned at the temples and along the parting. I can see the difference in the mirror I have stood in front of every working day since 2003. I have started wearing it differently, which is the oldest trick in my trade and the first time I have ever needed it.

Here is the part I am struggling to write. I have spent twenty-two years telling women that hair grows back, that shedding after a baby or an illness is temporary, that it will be fine, and I have meant it every time and it has almost always been true. And I have got no comfort whatsoever from any of it. I sat in my own chair on Tuesday after the last client had gone and cried about it, and then felt ridiculous, because it is only hair and I have a lot of things to be glad about this year.

It is not only hair though. Is it. Twenty-two years of other people’s faces in that mirror when I turn the chair round have taught me exactly what it is.

I am not going to stop the medicine over it. My knees are better than they have been in a decade and my blood pressure has come down. But I am grieving and I do not want anybody to tell me it is a small price to pay.

135

DillyNewport, UK

Hairdresser number two, Newport, and we have compared notes plenty of times but never about this.

Winnie, I am not going to tell you it is a small price. I will tell you what happened to me, because I went through it in the spring of last year and I know the exact floor you mean.

Mine started about three months after a change, thinned along the parting, and it was worst for about ten weeks. It stopped. I did not do anything clever to make it stop. Regrowth was slow and infuriating and it came back in the way it does after a baby — short bits standing up at the front, which I have spent my whole career styling around for other people and could not manage on myself for about six months.

It is fine now. Not identical. Fine. And the crying in your own chair is the most normal thing in this thread.

58me too 14

AdaFacilitatorManchester, UK

Winnie. I have read this three times and I am going to do very little with it, because you have told us exactly what you need and what you do not.

You do not need it put in proportion. You have already done the proportion yourself, in the last paragraph, better than any of us could — the knees, the blood pressure, and the grief, all held at once and none of it cancelling the rest.

What I will say is that hair carries a great deal in this culture and it is not vanity to mind about it. Twenty-two years of turning that chair round has taught you what happens in people’s faces, and now it is your face. That is a hard thing and it is allowed to be a hard thing on its own terms.

I would gently ask the room not to arrive with products.

56me too 9

RenFacilitatorBristol, UK

One practical note and then I will get out of the way, offered because Winnie has said she is not stopping and I would rather she had it than not.

The pattern most people report — a lot of shedding starting two to four months after a significant change, worst for a couple of months, then regrowth — is what dermatologists call telogen effluvium, and it is a response to the change rather than damage to the hair. It is well described after illness, after childbirth, after surgery, after any rapid change in intake.

The two things worth raising with a clinician rather than a forum: whether it is worth checking iron and thyroid, since both cause shedding and both are ordinary things to have going on at the same time, and whether you are actually getting enough protein in, since that is the one part of it that is in anybody’s hands. What is known is written up here, including the honest gaps.

47me too 8

MinnieDoncaster, UK

Doncaster. Thyroid, then this, two sets of bloods, and I am the person Ren is describing. My shedding turned out to be mostly my thyroid drifting rather than the medicine, and it took a blood test to know that.

Winnie, I am not suggesting that is your situation. I am saying the test is worth having so that in six months you know which thing you were grieving.

42me too 7

TabbyMargate, UK

Margate. Mine went in February and I have never told anybody outside this site. My husband does not know, which is faintly absurd since he lives with me.

Reading somebody say out loud that they cried about it has done something for me today. It is not only hair. You are right.

51me too 16

HettieLancaster, UK

Quilter, Lancaster. Sits still, thinks a lot. Mine shed heavily for about three months last winter and I hated every day of it, and the thing that helped was not any product but deciding to have it cut properly short rather than watching it thin.

That is not advice, because for some people short is the last thing they want. For me taking the decision back off it was the whole difference.

44me too 9

TarnKeswick, UK

Keswick. Walking myself back to strength. The thing nobody says is that it is worse in the shower than anywhere else and the shower is where you are alone with it.

I started brushing before rather than after, which does not reduce anything but means I am not standing there holding it in my hand. Small, and it got me through a bad spring.

46me too 12

WinnieCarlisle, UK

I have had to close the salon door and sit down again, but a different sort of sitting down.

Dilly, the short bits standing up at the front. I have styled that for other women hundreds of times and I did not once think about what the six months before it had been like for them. Twenty-two years. That is the thing I keep coming back to.

Bloods booked for the twenty-first, since two of you said it. Not stopping. Grieving on the days I am grieving, and going to work, and both.

60me too 10

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