1 in three women over 25 are believed to be suffering from hair loss, as the strains of modern life and the pressures to look good take their toll on their locks.
A new survey, commissioned by the vitamin supplement manufacturers Vitabiotics WellWomen Tricologic, has discovered that 37% of women in the UK have noticed hair loss to some extent, with 4.7 million women reporting serious hair thinning to be a problem. The researchers claimed that as most women think thinning hair is a problem that occurs in older women, the stress from the loss of hair itself was adding significantly to the problem, making the hair loss worse.
Of the 3,000 women who took part in the survey, the majority admitted that they would be ashamed to say if they were losing their hair. A third of the women said their hair loss made them depressed, while a quarter said the problem was affecting their personal lives.
In an article in the Daily Mail, they suggested that the hair loss might be a result of women feeling pressure to stay thin, meaning that they weren’t getting the right nutrients for their hair. They quoted a trichologist, Sara Allison, as saying that women simply ‘don’t eat enough to get all the nutrients”.
While some hair loss can be stress related, other conditions are purely medical, such as alopecia areata. Most experts agree this is an auto-immune disease, which can be genetic or possibly triggered by a severe physical trauma. The Mail decided to illustrate their piece with a picture of Gail Porter who lost all her hair due to this condition, a fairly misleading choice as her condition is certainly medical rather than related to poor diet.
They also published the story of Paula Smith, implying that her hair loss was diet-related, despite the fact that she had given birth 7 months ago. Women who have just finished a pregnancy are at higher risk of losing their hair.
While the article does well to raise the issue of hair loss in women, it’s a shame that it didn’t seem to be especially well researched and that they didn’t make a clearer differentiation between medical hair loss and stress-related problems. The fair number of distressed alopecia sufferers writing messages on the comment board also showed that those with medical hair loss were justifiably upset their problem had been trivialised.