I was born with hereditarily thin and fine hair, combined with hair loss from stress and anemia as a child, I was ‘doomed’ with terrible hair. As a young adult, I went through the same ineffective cycle that some of you are going through: chemical process…damage…cut…never able to achieve the thick, healthy, feminine hair that I really wanted. My hair grows quickly and can get quite long, there’s just not enough of it to get the look that I wanted; the longer it got, the more straggly and broken off it got. My solution used to be to wear Hair Extensions to lengthen and thicken it up.
A lot has changed in the last 5 years with my hair. A LOT of day to day stress has been alleviated in my life. I’m a firm believer that stress has a lot to do with hair health, and your health in general. I had also been taking a pharmaceutical for high blood pressure and got off of it, as it was taken off the market for terrible side effects.
The photo of me is from January 2019 with mostly natural hair, meaning no chemical highlights, and no hair extensions. I haven’t colored it in several years now because the Florida sun lightens it enough for me to be happy. On the day of the photo sitting, I was really wishing I had some extra hair in, but I didn’t have time. Seeing that photo proved to me that my own natural hair was finally acceptable again, but not optimal.
August 2021: My husband and I got ‘COVID’. We were blessed to not be hospitalized, but we were very ill from whatever it is. Six to eight weeks later we both lost about half of our hair. It was coming out so fast and so bad that there was little I could wear except a full wig, which I chose not to do, due to the Florida heat that time of year. See those photos and captions below.
August 2022: A year later, it’s finally growing back in. I have a bit of silvery white coming in, which makes me very happy! I’m also going to be 60 in a few years, and don’t want to look inappropriate. I’ve taken a much more natural approach to how I look lately. I also wear my hair up the majority of the time, because I like how I look and it’s cooler in this intense heat. I still like to have some extra hair in or a topper, it helps up-dos look better also.
Right now, I’m incredibly relieved that my hair is just even growing back after losing so much. I have clients whose hair has NOT grown back at all after loss from covid or ‘shots’. I feel comfortable now that my hair is back on the mend, and I can apply something for volume, or wear a topper for some height. Wearing additional hair allows me to have ‘normal looking’ hair even if I chose to do very little to it, and the more effort and styling that I put into it, the better it looks.
