The Hair Loss Resolution That Compounds: Start Now for Summer Results

If you want to address your hair goals in time for next summer, it’s important to understand the hair regrowth timeline. Boss Clinic’s Principal and Director, Debra Best, outlines expectations for popular hair treatments, and how delaying treatment only makes the process more difficult.

What happens when a patient comes to you in the spring and wants results in time for summer?

Many times there’s a special event, like a wedding, and a client decides that they would really like their hair to look nice, and unfortunately they’ve just left it too late.

Depending on which program and treatment plan you go with, if you’re younger, it takes about three to six months to regrow your hair. If you’re thinking about having some transplants, however, you really need to extend that to a 12-month timeline. Keep in mind that you’re probably going to be in a worse state in three months than if you’d done nothing, so you’ve got to give yourself a bit more time.

If you’re regrowing your own natural hair, you start seeing improvements pretty much from the get go. Whereas if you’re having transplants, the initial start is quite disruptive to the scalp, and you can expect quite a bit of shedding in those first few months. We call it the ‘ugly duckling’ phase, and then the hair starts to grow. You’re really looking at nine months before you’ll be quite impressed with the results, six months if you’re lucky. But the 9 to 12-month mark is the ideal timeline for anything surgical.

What should people understand about the hair regrowth timeline, from starting treatment to seeing results?

Losing hair usually starts off with not really believing that it’s happening. You’re seeing little telltales, maybe a bit of hair on the pillow, or you’re standing under a bright light in the bathroom thinking, “Oh, my hair’s not looking very good.” But you tend to make excuses.

Oh, it’s just the lighting.
It’s just the product that I used yesterday.
I need to shampoo my hair.

You kind of start off in denial; you don’t really think it’s happening to you. And then before you know it, more hair has gone. The situation is compounding. Then it kind of gets to a point where you know that it’s happening, but you’re a little bit confused about what options there are. The common thing people say is they feel like they’re the only ones suffering from hair loss, and why is it happening to them?

People will often go into a bit of research, because most people do want to know, “Why is this happening to me? What is the cause?” But in that timeframe, you’re losing more and more hair. You get busy with life and before you know it, it’s now compounded to a few years’ worth of hair loss.

And for women it’s actually worse, because women’s hair loss is a diffuse thinning. It’s slow over a long period of time, and then there are times in between where the hair loss pauses. It gives you more of a false sense of security where you think, “Oh, it’s not going to get any worse.” But then it does get worse, and you can’t see what’s happening under the skin. Once the hair has fallen out, it’s already completed that cycle.

You can have treatment finished in as little as three months, and then you haven’t had to go through the psychological component of when the hair does fall out, because hair loss is still a loss. It’s a loss that you’re suffering that is not in your control. If you can prevent going through that cycle, it will also prevent you going through the trauma of losing your hair and feeling your self-esteem lowering. You start to think about things like, “I don’t really want to go to that event because I can’t wear my baseball cap” or “People are going to think that I’m older than I really am.”

You only need a few comments to eat away at your self esteem and before you know it, you’re doing less and less of the fun things because you’re concerned about your hair and your image, and that’s not what you want. You can prevent all of that just by catching it early.

Is the compounding effect psychological or physical?

It’s both, because with most types of alopecia, the hair doesn’t just fall out; it will go through a miniaturization. The individual strand may come out, but a new one will grow back half the size of the previous one. When that happens, you just get thinner and thinner, and shorter and finer, and lighter-colored hair. It has that compound of a bigger area, a thinner strand, lighter color, and less body in the hair. You’re sort of going through these stages of hair loss and it’s just getting more difficult to try to hide it or make a nice hairstyle.

Most women end up wearing extensions or tying their hair back and trying to hide their hair. It starts to change the way they interact socially, just by having to change their hairstyle out of necessity, not by choice.

What happens if you delay hair loss treatment?

People who start treatment sooner than later actually grow a lot more hair. The hair quality is a lot better, the stability in the hair is a lot greater, and the maintenance is easier. Everything is better.

For somebody who delays treatment, the follicle becomes so miniaturized that even when I regrow their hair, the hair quality is a small, fine, lifeless hair… more like a fluffy body hair. Whereas catching it early, you get more like the original type of hair that you had before you started losing it.

No matter where you are on that timeline, try to take action as soon as you know. Even with transplants, you’ll have more donor area to extract grafts from. If you catch it early, you may even be able to do a combination-type treatment where you do a little bit of regrowing your own natural hair and finish off with some transplants. But overall, catching it early always works better.

Ready to kick off your hair regrowth journey? Book a free consultation at Boss Clinic.