How to deal with hair loss ?

The first thing almost everyone does when their hair starts coming out is buy something. It is the wrong first move, and it costs people months. What actually helps in the first few weeks is a lot less satisfying and a great deal more useful.

Is this even abnormal?

Most people who think they are losing too much hair are losing a normal amount and noticing it for the first time. A scalp holds somewhere around 100,000 hairs. Between 85 and 90% of them are actively growing at any moment, in a growth phase measured in years rather than months, and the rest are resting before they let go. Shedding is the visible end of a cycle that has been running quietly for years.

Season matters more than most articles admit. Kunz and colleagues followed 823 women over six years and found the proportion of resting hairs peaked in July and was at its lowest in early February. Randall and Ebling, following 14 men over eighteen months, found shedding highest in September, with losses around 60 hairs a day at the peak, more than double the rate during the preceding winter. So an autumn shed is a real phenomenon. The figure of 175 hairs a day that circulates online, including in the older version of this article, is not something I can find any source for.

What is not normal is losing well over a hundred hairs a day, consistently, for several weeks, or seeing your parting widen month on month. Those are worth investigating rather than treating.

The first fortnight: gather, do not guess

Stop counting daily and start comparing month to month. Daily counts vary enormously depending on when you last washed your hair, and watching the plughole every morning makes an anxious situation worse without producing information anyone can use.

What is genuinely useful is a photograph. Same light, same parting, same angle, once a month. Six weeks of photographs tells a GP more than six weeks of impressions, and it protects you from the opposite error of panicking over an ordinary September.

The other thing to do in this fortnight is look backwards. Shedding of the diffuse, all-over kind typically begins two to three months after its trigger, which is why the cause is almost never in the same month as the shed. Childbirth, surgery, a fever, a period of very low eating, a thyroid problem, a new medication, a bereavement. Whatever was happening in early summer is what you are seeing now.

The tests worth asking for

Iron stores and thyroid function are the two that change the answer most often, and both appear on the British Association of Dermatologists list of recognised triggers for diffuse shedding.

Vitamin D often gets added to this list, and it is frequently tested, but the evidence tying it to hair loss is less settled than the evidence for iron and thyroid. It is reasonable to ask about; it is not the thing to pin your hopes on. Whatever comes back, treat a confirmed deficiency rather than a suspected one, because taking supplements for a shortage you do not have achieves nothing.

What to change while you wait for results

Loosen everything. Traction alopecia comes from sustained pull on the follicle, from tight ponytails, buns, braids, extensions and adhesive-fixed pieces, and it is the one form of hair loss with an entirely mechanical cause. Caught early it is reversible. Left for years it causes inflammation, follicle miniaturisation and eventually scarring, at which point it does not come back. If your hairline is thinning where your hair is pulled tightest, that is not a coincidence.

Beyond that, the honest list of things you control is short. Wear hair down more often, or in looser versions of the same styles. Give the heat and the chemical straightening a rest while you are shedding. Eat properly, including iron-containing foods, without treating dinner as a treatment. If you smoke, stopping is worth doing for a hundred reasons and this is one of them.

Scalp massage and a few drops of cedarwood oil in a carrier during it are pleasant and relaxing, which has value on its own. I would not present them as a treatment. Essential oils should be kept away from children and avoided in pregnancy unless you have taken advice, and none of them belongs neat on the skin.

What a hair institute can and cannot tell you

A magnified scalp examination shows density and hair calibre, which is real information, but it cannot see a thyroid gland or an iron level. That is the limit worth understanding before you book a 45-minute assessment. Nothing about a scalp camera is dishonest; it simply answers a narrower question than the one you arrived with.

The NHS puts the order plainly: see a GP to get an idea of what is causing the loss before considering a commercial hair clinic. Do it in that order and a clinic visit becomes useful, because you arrive knowing what you are dealing with. Do it the other way round and you can spend a year and a considerable amount of money treating a deficiency nobody has looked for. Once you do know, the companion piece on which hair loss treatments have evidence behind them covers what is worth trying and what is not.

The short version

If your hair is falling more than usual: photograph it monthly rather than counting it daily, think back two to three months for a trigger, ask your GP about ferritin, thyroid function and a full blood count, and loosen every style you own in the meantime. That is not a glamorous plan and it will not sell you anything.

It is also, in my experience of standing behind a great many worried people in a makeup chair, the plan that gets them an answer fastest. Hair growing back after a diffuse shed usually takes six to twelve months from the point the cause is dealt with, which is slow enough to be genuinely upsetting and quick enough to be worth the wait.

Updated 13 August 2026. This is general health information and not a diagnosis or a personalised recommendation. Hair loss can be a sign of an underlying condition, so please see your GP rather than acting on a blog post.

Sources: NHS, hair loss guidance; British Association of Dermatologists patient information leaflet on telogen effluvium, produced in consensus with the British Hair and Nail Society; Kunz et al., Seasonality of hair shedding in healthy women complaining of hair loss, Dermatology, 2009; Randall and Ebling, seasonal changes in human hair growth.