5 Tips to Care for Thinning Hair

People lose hair for various reasons. Illness and medication (like chemotherapy to treat cancer) can cause hair loss. Hair loss can also be inherited from a parent. Often, hair thins because it is fine-textured or because too many harsh chemicals have been used on it so it breaks easily.

These are hair-care tips to help protect hair, prevent further hair loss, and add volume to your existing hair.

1. Try Coloring

If you inherited a tendency for hair loss, you likely have very healthy hair overall. Therefore, your hair can benefit from permanent or semi-permanent color to give body and volume to hair.

Medications can weaken hair, causing it to break or fall out. Semi-permanent color is good in this case, too, because it does not contain ammonia or peroxide. It will not damage hair, but will give it body and volume.

If your hair is fine-textured, semi-permanent or permanent color is fine, as long as it is professionally applied. Colored hair can easily get over-processed, which damages it, causing further hair loss.

2. Use Volumizing Products

Many volume-building hair products contain paraffin, which is beeswax. That’s not good for hair, because it builds up and can make hair break.

However, volumizing products sold in salons do help. They won’t weigh hair down, and they won’t damage it. Mousse, for example, can be applied at the root area for support. Then, begin blow-drying the root area, applying tension with a brush to build volume. Use a light finishing spray to hold it.

3. Shampoo and Condition Your Hair When Dirty

To protect hair, the best practice is to shampoo only when hair is dirty. Because fine hair gets dirty faster, people with fine-textured hair need to shampoo more frequently even though fine hair breaks more easily.

For that reason, fine-textured hair benefits from a good shampoo and volume-building conditioner.

4. Find a Style That Suits Fine Hair

Blow dryers should not be a problem, even if you have fine hair. However, be very careful about putting high heat directly onto hair. Flat irons and curling irons can cause damage and breakage.

Because they contain very strong chemicals, curl-relaxing products are a no-no for fine hair.

5. Get a Permanent Wave

Permanents can help give volume to fine-textured hair but hair must be healthy, not dry or brittle. Only a gentle body wave is advised, because tighter waves can damage the hair. Because chemicals in permanents are harsh, a permanent should be only a last resort for fine-haired people.

Again, make sure a professional stylist gives you your permanent, so that hair is not damaged.

More information at Todo en Medicamentos.

Understanding Hair Loss – the Basics

What Is Hair Loss?

Hair grows everywhere on the human body except on the palms of our hands and the soles of our feet, but many hairs are so fine they’re virtually invisible. Hair is made up of a protein called keratin (the same protein in nails) produced in hair follicles in the outer layer of skin; as follicles produce new hair cells, old cells are being pushed out through the surface of the skin at the rate of about six inches a year. The hair you can see is actually a string of dead keratin cells. The average adult head has about 100,000 to 150,000 hairs and loses up to 100 of them a day; so finding a few stray hairs on your hairbrush is not necessarily cause for alarm.

At any one time, about 90% of the hair on a person’s scalp is growing. Each follicle has its own life cycle that can be influenced by age, disease, and a wide variety of other factors. This life cycle is divided into three phases:

• Anagen: active hair growth. Lasts between two to six years.
• Catagen: transitional. Lasts two to three weeks.
• Telogen: resting phase. At the end of the resting phase (two to three months) the hair is shed and a new hair replaces it and the growing cycle starts again.

As people age, their rate of hair growth slows.

There are many types of hair loss, also called alopecia:

Gradual thinning of hair with age is a natural condition known as involutional alopecia. More and more hair follicles go into a telogen, or resting, phase, and the remaining hairs become shorter and fewer in number.

Androgenic alopecia is another form of hair loss. It’s a genetically predisposed condition that can affect both men and women. Men with this condition can begin suffering hair loss as early as their teens or early 20s, while most women don’t experience noticeable thinning until their 40s or later.

In men, the condition is also called male pattern baldness. It’s characterized by a receding hairline and gradual disappearance of hair from the crown. In women, androgenic alopecia is referred to as female pattern baldness. Women with the condition experience a general thinning over the entire scalp, with the most extensive hair loss at the crown.

Patchy hair loss in children and young adults, often sudden in onset, is known as alopecia areata. This condition may result in complete baldness, but in about 90% of cases the hair returns, usually within a few years.

With alopecia universalis, all body hair falls out.

Tearing out one’s own hair, a psychological disorder known as trichotillomania, is seen most frequently in children.

Telogen effluvium is hair thinning over the scalp or other parts of the body that occurs because of changes in the growth cycle of hair. A large number of hairs enter the resting phase at the same time, causing shedding and subsequent thinning.

What Causes It?

Doctors do not know why certain hair follicles are programmed to have a shorter growth period than others. Although a person’s level of androgens male hormones normally produced by both men and women is believed to be a factor, hair loss has nothing to do with virility. For that matter, the presence or absence of dandruff has no effect on balding either. An individual’s genes, however from both male and female parents unquestionably influence that person’s predisposition to male or female pattern baldness.

Telogen effluvium is temporary hair loss that can occur within a few months after a high fever, a severe illness, thyroid diseases, iron deficiency, medications, hormonal imbalance, or extreme stress, and in women following childbirth.

Drugs that can cause temporary hair loss include chemotherapeutic agents used in cancer treatment, anticoagulants, retinoids used to treat acne and skin problems, beta-adrenergic blockers used to control blood pressure, and oral contraceptives.

Hair loss can also be caused by burns, X-rays, scalp injuries, and exposure to certain chemicals including those used to purify swimming pools and to bleach, dye and perm hair. In such cases, normal hair growth usually returns once the cause is eliminated. Ringworm can also cause hair loss.

The causes of alopecia areata, a disease that often strikes children or teenagers, remain unexplained. It is thought to be an autoimmune disease, meaning that the immune system revs up for unknown reasons and destroys the hair follicles. In most cases the hair grows back, although it may be very fine and possibly a different color before normal coloration and thickness return.

Although too-frequent washing, permanent waves, bleaching, and dyeing hair do not cause baldness, they can contribute to overall thinning by making hair weak and brittle. Tight braiding and using rollers or hot curlers can damage and break hair, and running hair picks through tight curls can scar hair follicles. In most instances hair grows back normally if the source of stress is removed, but severe damage to the hair or scalp sometimes causes permanent bald patches.

More information at Todo en Medicamentos.