My Hair Has Gotten Thicker Since Menopause
By: Bebe Nicholson
Tags: Menopause, Health, Self, Hair, Aging

My Hair Has Gotten Thicker Since Menopause

Photo by Clarissa Watson on Unsplash

Pictures of me as a toddler show a chubby-faced kid with sparse tufts of lank, brown hair. When I got older, my hair was so fine that I tried perms, heat curlers, and a spray-in dry shampoo that was supposed to “lift hair from the roots” and make it magically thicker.

I envied my friends with long, thick tresses since I had to keep mine short to retain any body at all.

At some point during high school, I even bought a “fall,” which was a hairpiece secured with headbands and bobby pins. I wore it until a boy who had a crush on me almost wrenched it loose, leading to a failed romance and an end to the hairpiece.

Major Hair Fall Out Was My Normal

One problem was that my hair fell out in copious amounts; hair in the sink, hair clogging the shower, hair on the floor. There never seemed to be an end to how much hair I was always shedding.

At times, I wondered if I was destined to go completely bald.

I even told the doctor about it when I was in my twenties. “Why does my hair fall out so much?” I complained, hoping he would come up with a magic formula for keeping hair on my head.

“Everybody loses a certain amount of hair each day. Hair follicles go through a life cycle, and then the hair falls out,” he said.

Gee, thanks.

The only time my hair was thick and luxurious was when I was pregnant. During each of my three pregnancies, the tremendous fallout ceased, at least for a few months, and I was left with the hair I had always dreamed of.

Little did I realize my head was just “saving up” for the huge hair loss that would take place after my babies were born. Then the shedding got so bad that I began to scrutinize my head for bald patches.

The “Let’s Hope I Have Some Hair left” Phase

I discovered this post-pregnancy hair loss was normal. The body experiences soaring estrogen and progesterone levels during pregnancy, which causes the hair to remain in a growth stage, each strand remaining thicker and more lustrous.

But as soon as you have the baby and those pregnancy hormones diminish, hair enters a new stage: I call it the “Let’s hope I have some left when this all over” phase.

I never associated my lifelong hair loss with wacky hormones, but the fact that hair and hormones are so intertwined should have been a clue because my hormones have always been strange.

When other girls were getting their monthly periods, reliably and dependably, I was on some sort of weird menstrual roller coaster, never knowing if or when my periods would appear.

One time after going five months without one, I went to a gynecologist, who said, “I don’t find anything wrong, but you’ll probably have a problem getting pregnant.”

He was wrong about that one. Getting pregnant turned out to be easy, and three children later, I began having periods as regular as clockwork at the ripe old age of 31.

“Finally I’m regular and predictable!” I told my partner, who didn’t understand what all the excitement was about, since he operated under the assumption that I would never be predictable. But even though my hormones had calmed down, my hair loss didn’t.

I Noticed My Hair Was Getting Thicker

I endured another hormonal roller coaster ride through menopause, complete with hot flashes and night sweats that lasted for years and still return from time to time.

I wasn’t thinking much about my hair anymore. I had lived with the hair fallout for a lot of decades without going bald.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, I thought about my hair even less, because I stopped going for haircuts. But this is when I noticed something surprising. My hair was not only growing longer. It was growing thicker.

How could that be?

I had read all the stuff about menopause. In addition to adding spare tires to our waists and wrinkles to our faces, this transitional period of aging was supposed to make our hair thin out. I had been expecting it. But here my hair was, growing in better and thicker.

It wasn’t my imagination, either. The little bald patch that appeared at the back of my head when my hair wasn’t combed just right had disappeared.

I noticed the sink was no longer covered in hair when I used the blow dryer. Stray hairs weren’t everywhere in the bathroom, and people began to compliment me on how good my hair looked.

What gives? I wondered, perplexed. It wasn’t like I had started using Rogaine. There had to be a reason for my hair to be getting thicker at a stage in life when most people expected it to thin out.

I researched the internet to see if I could find any explanation for hair becoming thicker after menopause, and all I discovered was that hair thinned out as we get older. Nothing new there. But there had to be an answer!

A Supplement Could Be My Answer

I’ve always exercised, kept my weight down, and been a fairly healthy eater. Healthy living had never thickened my hair when I was younger, so it wasn’t likely to make my hair thicker now.

I decided to investigate the ingredients in my supplements, and that’s when I stumbled across a possible answer.

Several years ago, my sister started selling supplements. It wasn’t a money-maker and she has since moved on to a different career, but at the time, wanting to support her business venture, I ordered some.

I liked the supplements so much that I continued taking them after she got out of the business, even though they were fairly expensive.

Wanting to find out if there was some ingredient in the supplements that affected hair growth, I grabbed two bottles, wrote down all the ingredients, and started researching.

That’s when I made my big discovery.

One of the supplements contained tocotrienols, a form of unsaturated vitamin E. Tocotrienols are similar to tocopherols, both are antioxidants, but they have very different functions in the body. Tocopherols are more abundant in food, so it’s much easier for our bodies to miss out on tocotrienols.

I looked up several different articles, and as I read paragraph after paragraph of the benefits of tocotrienols, I came across the possible hair health connection.

In one study, researchers divided research participants with hair loss into two groups. One group received a tocotrienol supplement and one group received a placebo. At the end of 8 months, the tocotrienol group had a significant increase in hair growth. Hair had not been lost at the same rate.

Here is what I read:

“Tocotrienols belong to the vitamin E family and are known to be potent antioxidants. Hence, a study was conducted to investigate the effect of tocotrienol supplementation on hair growth in volunteers suffering from hair loss.

Twenty-one volunteers were randomly assigned to orally receive 100 mg of mixed tocotrienols daily while 17 volunteers were assigned to receive placebo capsules orally. The volunteers were monitored for the number of hairs in a pre-determined scalp area as well as the weight of 20 strands of 1 cm length hair clippings at 0 (before supplementation), 4, and 8 months.

The number of hairs of the volunteers in the tocotrienol supplementation group increased significantly as compared to the placebo group, with the former recording a 34.5% increase at the end of the 8-month supplementation as compared to a 0.1% decrease for the latter.” (Tropical Life Sciences Research, 2010 (Dec 21) 91–99, cited by PMC, US National Library of Medicine)