I'm standing outside my shower and I don't want to go in.
I'm not tired or in a hurry, I'm just avoiding calculating how much hair I'll lose this time. This fear has been my constant companion since I soaped, rinsed, and watched handfuls of dirty blonde strands circulate down the drain three weeks ago. It wasn't the normal 100 to 150 strands that everyone loses daily; They were thick lumps of something I never imagined I could lose.
I comb the conditioner gently and come out with more. And more. I feel fragile, afraid to lift my hair. Even laying my head on the pillow seems like a risk to me. “This can't be happening,” I lament, my hands shaking as I feel the unprecedented thinness of my ponytail. My mind searches for answers: Is it creatine? Estrogen cream? The trendy Erewhon hair vitamins I've been gobbling down religiously?
Turns out I'm not alone. More than 85% of men and 33% of women experience hair loss. in their lives, but I never thought I would be one of them. Between aging, stress, and increased GLP-1 (aka Ozempic), hair loss has never been more common. “I've seen more clients experiencing hair loss and thinning in recent years,” says Liz Jung, a Los Angeles-based hair colorist. “It used to come up once in a while, but now it's part of almost every consultation. I've seen confident, radiant women start hiding under hats because they don't feel like themselves anymore.” Yes, that was me.
My panic began with ChatGPT, where I diagnosed myself with everything from hormonal imbalances and thyroid problems to iron deficiency. I then spent hours scrolling through Instagram studying posts from hair-obsessed influencers like @hairlossgirlboss, @Sofiahairsalud and @AbbeyYung. I doubled my intake of biotin, pumpkin seed oil supplements prepared by Amazon and applied them surgically. Epres Bond repair treatment three times a week. When the handfuls of hair persisted, I scoured Los Angeles looking for someone, anyone, who could tell me why this was happening and how to stop it.
I visited three doctors in five days. Each of them came highly recommended, but their recipes couldn't have been more different. The first prescribed me an oral pharmaceutical mixture with minoxidil, the gold standard for hair growth, which I would need to take for life. The second advocated three sessions of a non-invasive treatment that uses a handheld device to send waves of ultrasound and air pressure to stimulate dormant follicles. The third swore by the big guns: injections of PRP (platelet-rich plasma) combined with exosomes: small vesicles derived from stem cells that deliver growth factors directly to the roots, essentially telling them to wake up and grow. Desperate for a solution, I was drawn to the aggressive approach, but chose the third doctor for a more telling reason. He was the only one who required my blood work first.
The chosen one, Dr. Jonathan Shalom, a board-certified doctor and hair transplant surgeon based in Beverly Hills, also known as Dr. Hair 90210, was very serious as he withheld a diagnosis until I was in his chair with his trichoscope in hand—think a high-powered magnifying glass for your scalp. Unlike genetic or hormone-induced loss, I had a classic case of telogen effluvium, or stress shedding. Sigh.
“Good news,” Shalom said when he finished his exam. “Your hair isn't dying, it's just sleeping. We can wake it up, but we have to be aggressive.” Obviously, telogen effluvium occurs when the body suffers an emotional, physical or hormonal shock and pushes more hairs than usual into the resting phase. What I didn't realize is that hair loss isn't because of what happened yesterday, but because of what happened three months ago (a markedly stressful time in my life), which is why the massive loss took me completely by surprise. It can last three to six months, but the positive side is that telogen effluvium can be reversed.
“Just know that reversing hair loss is a long process,” Shalom said. “We're talking about six months at least.” Oh, hell no was my visceral reaction. After a litany of stressful events, I couldn't handle any more handfuls of hair. If I could speed this up with some modern medicine, I'd be all for it.
Since my hair was “stuck” in a resting phase, my treatment was designed to reset the scalp environment and stimulate the follicles to grow again. I leaned back in the exam chair while Shalom separated my hair into sections and cleaned the area with an antiseptic liquid. The first step was injecting my scalp (many times) with PRP created from my own blood, which contains growth factors that the body uses to heal itself. Shalom relies on its dual-chamber, dual-spin PRP system, which he says produces a cleaner, higher-concentration product. There was a little blood on my scalp, but thanks to a few doses of lidocaine, the injections were relatively painless. But we warn that the temple area can be a bit spicy.
Next came stamping my scalp from hairline to crown with a medical-grade microneedling device, creating microchannels (or mini tears) to stimulate collagen and blood flow while increasing absorption of the hero ingredient: patented exosomes. Shalom rubbed the liquid, stored in a small bottle, into my scalp with the pads of his gloved fingers. Once the treatment was complete, my hair looked wet with a slight blood red tone and felt a little sticky, but it was nothing a baseball cap couldn't hide. The aftercare instructions were simple: do not wash for 24 hours and follow with the ketoconazole shampoo, which she had already been using three times a week to prevent further thinning. “PRP and exosomes are one of the most advanced regenerative combinations we have in hair restoration right now,” Shalom said. “It is minimally invasive, biologically natural and designed to help the scalp function optimally.”
But exosomes come with some caveats. They are not approved by the FDA for hair loss.and the research consists mainly of small studies involving only a few patients. The problem is not security, but uncertainty. Experts do not fully understand what is in exosomes or what causes their effects. With the treatments costing more than $1,500 per session (which is what I paid), some critics consider it an expensive gamble. Still, frantic and fearful, taking action outweighed the risk. He was willing to try anything.
So did it work? Nothing happens overnight in hair restoration, so all I could do was wait. A week later, the molt was reduced by half. Two weeks later, my hair felt stronger, and so did I. For the first time in months, I wasn't afraid to pull my hair back or run my fingers through it without counting what came out. At my month-long follow-up, Shalom pointed to the screen of his trichoscope. Baby hairs. Many of them break out all over my scalp. The hair was coming back. And with it, the confidence I thought I had lost.
