Hair

I'm obsessing about the hair on my head..

I used to have an amazing head of hair. Full. Curly. Crazy. Frizzy.

With each child it actually got fuller.

With each decade it did get a little duller.

I tried dying my hair. Then COVID hit and you had to go grey or try to dye the hair yourself. (Which did not go well at all.) So I have COVID mousy brown hair with a little hint of grey.

But I had hair on the top of my head.

Then sometime in my 60s I started losing the hair on my head.

My dermatologist took a sample and it came back I have female pattern baldness.

She also told me I also needed to learn to destress. Sure with 2 high functioning autistic sons and a husband who works at a high pressure job, destressing was not going to happen.

So exercise then.

I do not like yoga. I am not a meditation kinda person. Pilates is good. Peloton is my jam. Crosstrainer, for different kinds of cardio, light weights and the ab machine help alot, too. They say exercise is good to create endorphins in the brain. Ok. I like to exercise. It does make me feel better. I think I look better (well not better than I did at 25, but better for how I would look right now), and my arthritis doesn’t act up (but that could also be because its in combination with an anti- inflammatory diet).

So my next step in trying to get the hair on my head to grow back, was to take biotin vitamins. The wisdom was that it would take 6 months for my hair to gain strength and rejuvenate.

All I got was a mustache.

Ok, truth be told, I had always had facial hair growing up. I would use depilatories to remove it from the time I was a young teen.

And yes, I tried electrolysis and it worked on some of the hair. But what they conveniently don’t tell you is that you need to go back several times for each hair to get rid of it. So it does get quite expensive. It’s not like 1 zap and done.

There, of course, are the over the counter self-electrolysis gadgets that have worked from some. But my facial hair hung on like it was fighting for dear life. Which, I guess was exactly what was happening.

Then I found waxing. Yes, it hurts like the devil. (Not sure how the devil hurts. But it’s one of those self-explanatory idioms. It does bring up visions of hell and suffering. Which if you have ever gotten waxed you know what I mean.)

And for those history buffs out there, waxing is not new. They have tablets dating from the time of Sumer that have recipes for hair removal wax. It seems that removing hair was a major aspect of life in the ancient world, not the least of which is probably to avoid lice, since you couldn’t really pop in to CVS or Walgreens for a lice removal kit.

Truth be told, the only time you saw facial hair on a woman in the ancient world (we do have drawings) was when Nefreteri put on a fake beard. I don’t think Cleopatra wore one though. I suppose some kind of line was drawn between the original Egyptian rulers and the Ptolemys afterall (the Ptolemys embraced most everything else about the ancient Egyptian Pharaohs including the incest).

Now the hair on my head is still thinning by the way. Most of the hair on my legs is also gone. Biotin be damned. And yes, I keep taking it just in case. But in gummy form. It’s my little nod to childhood. I can pretend I am eating jelly beans (which during the height of Easter time is when I get my fill.)

So my next attempt is different shampoos. I have tried treatments, which did nothing as well. Now I have found a botanical shampoo which says again, in 6 months, I may see a growth or strengthening of the hair on my head. It’s been 3 months and nothing really. Except my hair does look nice.

I have also purchased their smootzy stuff which you put on after the shampoo, conditioner and rinse. It is for volume and smoothing my curls. At least if I can get the curls to pop then they will cover the bald spots.

In truth, of all the things that I thought I would need as I aged, I never thought I would need to figure out a comb over.