Care For Your Crowning Glory

Every day, humans shed about 100 hairs from our head, but women can lose even more than that. Here’s why and how you can get it shinier and healthier

- Elizabeth Liew

Your scalp has around 100,000 hair follicles, and every three years each of those follicles goes through a cycle of hair growth, with the hair resting and falling out, followed by growth of new hair.

Sometimes that pattern is disturbed, and either the hair doesn’t grow or it becomes finer, so women get thinning hair, hair loss and patches of baldness. Just over half of women suffer some hair loss and thinning as they age. In most cases it’s not noticeable, but for about 20 per cent of women the loss is more obvious and distressing.

“About 50 per cent of women in their 40s suffer some thinning. And now women are experiencing this problem in their 20s and 30s,” says trichologist David Salinger.

From sugar to diabetes and crash dieting, we look at six reasons behind female hair loss and thinning and what can help.

THE SUGAR EFFECT

“The amount of sugar in our diet is having an effect on our hair, and hidden sugars are part of the problem,” says David. Sugar causes inflammation and leads to white blood cells attacking the cells that produce hair. “When a woman has a normal level of insulin, it facilitates the conversion of testosterone back to estrogen,” says trichologist Anthony Pearce. Female hormones promote hair growth while male hormones, like testosterone, can aggravate hair loss.

Reduce sugar intake by reading food labels carefully, and if sugar is one of the first three ingredients listed, choose an alternative product, as the sugar content will be too high. Choose products with 15 g of sugar or less per 100 g.