Menopause & Hair

My Husband Is A Dermatologist. He Couldn't Explain What Filled In My Part.

How a 55-year-old went from avoiding her wedding photo to looking like herself again.

My husband is a Korean dermatologist. Last month he asked me, very quietly, if I'd gone back on the minoxidil without telling him.

"I need the truth," he said at the kitchen table. "Did you go back on it? Did someone put you on finasteride?"

I said no. He looked more confused, not relieved.

"Then I can't explain it. In a woman your age, after menopause, that almost always means a prescription. And I'd know. I'm the one who writes them."

I didn't tell him the rest yet. Because what was filling in my part hadn't come from his prescription pad. It had been sitting on a shelf in his own mother's bathroom for years.

The Hair Loss My Own Husband Could Not Fix

Being married to a hair doctor while your own hair falls out is a strange kind of lonely. His patients get forty minutes with him. I got a prescription slid across the breakfast table.

And it was worse in his family.

Every woman on Daniel's side has thick hair. His mother is 91 and still wears a full bun. His grandmother braided hers every morning until she was 94. At every family photo, I was the one with the see-through part.

I'd look at those women and feel something ugly I'm not proud of. How do they all have hair like that, and I'm the one going bald?

In our wedding photo in the hallway, 31 years ago, my curls are pinned up with baby's breath. Daniel used to call them my best feature.

From 51 to 55, I lost more than half my hair. The sink looked like someone had gotten a haircut. I got afraid to wash it, because every wash meant another handful.

I wrapped my hair tie four times just to end up with a stringy little ponytail. I didn't even know how to style it anymore. Thirty years of knowing my own hair, and now nothing I did looked like me.

One Friday I booked an appointment to have it all chopped off. I sat in the car outside the salon and cried for twenty minutes. Then I drove home.

Then my niece posted a picture from our Fourth of July barbecue. A woman from behind, at the grill, the sun lighting up her whole crown.

I thought it was some older lady. Then I saw my blouse.

It was like living in a stranger's body. Like my own body had betrayed me, one handful at a time.

I started walking past our wedding photo without looking at it.

What He'd Been Telling Me For Years

Long before anything changed, Daniel had explained it.

When estrogen drops in menopause, a woman's testosterone doesn't drop with it. An enzyme right in the scalp turns some of it into DHT. DHT latches onto the follicle and squeezes it, a little tighter every cycle, until the hair that comes back is thinner, shorter, then barely there.

"That's why your labs are normal," he told me. "It isn't happening in your blood. It's happening at the root."

"I can name the problem exactly," he said. "I just can't take it down without pills you'd be on for the rest of your life."

The $4,300 We Spent Trying

We threw everything at it. Daniel paid for all of it.

• Oral minoxidil he prescribed himself (8 months). My shedding stopped. My eyebrows came back. Then I found half-inch fuzz on my lower back. I freaked out, stopped, and it all fell out again. Worse.
• Spironolactone ($40 a month for 6 months). Dry eyes. Dry mouth. My part kept widening.
• Three rounds of PRP at a colleague's clinic ($2,700). Painful. A little better for a few months, then back.
• Nutrafol, biotin, hair gummies, rosemary oil that ruined my pillowcases ($1,100). Nothing.

$4,300. My part stayed wide, dead still. His own prescriptions couldn't hold it.

And the night before Thanksgiving, standing at our bathroom mirror, I said something to Daniel I had never said out loud. He still brings it up.

What His Mother Showed Me

The next afternoon, I was helping my mother-in-law clean up. She took her pins out, and her hair fell past her shoulders. At 91.

I asked her, half joking, what she'd done that her son couldn't.

She laughed. "His medicine is for after," she said. "We always did it before. We fed the root."

She told me about the pot her mother boiled every Sunday in Daegu. Ginseng. A black mushroom called yeongji. Mulberry root. Worked into the scalp with the fingertips. Never the ends.

"I'm too old for the pot now," she said. She went to her bathroom and came back with a little green bar. "Same plants. My niece found it. I've used it for years."

It was the Korean Herbal Root Rescue Bar, from a company called Nutrion. It had been in her cabinet the whole time I'd been crying in mine.

I showed Daniel that night. He rolled his eyes.

"Mom's herbs," he said. "I spent eleven years in school so people wouldn't have to rub roots on their heads."

Then he said a sentence I wrote on a sticky note and stuck to my bathroom mirror. I'll tell you why.

But first, the reason he didn't argue longer. It was what I'd said to him the night before, at that same mirror:

"I don't recognize myself anymore, Daniel. I walk past our wedding picture and I don't know who that woman is. I'm not asking to look 30. I just want to look like me again."

He'd held me for a long time and didn't say anything. He's a doctor. He didn't have a prescription for that.

My 12-Week Log

I kept a careful log, because I knew who'd be reading it. Same bathroom light. Same photo angle. Every week.

And in week ten, something happened that I never wrote down in it.

Right above the log, on the sticky note, was what Daniel had said after "Mom's herbs":

"Although, yeongji is Ganoderma. There's lab research where it slowed the enzyme that makes DHT. And ginseng helped follicle cells keep growing with DHT added. If something did that right at the scalp, every wash, that's exactly what we'd see. I just don't believe a bar can."

14,653 reviews. 4.7 stars. I ordered one, mostly to prove him right.

Readers’ own before-and-after photos.

Week 1 to 2: Sixty seconds on my part and crown, every wash. My scalp tingled and felt clean. For the first time in two years, I wasn't afraid to wash my hair.

Week 3 to 4: I counted the drain. 31 strands, down from a handful. Then 14.

Week 5 to 8: Short new hairs standing straight up along my part. Dozens of them. On my head. Not on my back.

Week 9 to 12: My part looked half as wide in the photos. My hair tie went around twice, not four times.

That was the week Daniel asked who'd been writing me prescriptions.

What His Own Eyes Showed

He didn't trust my log. He took me into his office on a Saturday and put me under the same scope he uses on his patients.

"The new hairs aren't the thin, wispy kind," he finally said. "They're coming in thicker."

"I told you years ago what the problem was," he said. "I just never had a fix that held without a pill. Something here did."

I handed his own explanation back to him. DHT is made at the root. So you work at the root.

And at his mother's 92nd birthday, he did something in front of the whole family I will never forget.

But that week ten moment first. The one that isn't in the log.

On a Tuesday, I caught myself in the hallway mirror, right next to our wedding photo, and stopped. Not to check my part.

For a second, the woman in the mirror and the woman in the photo looked like the same person.

I stood there so long my coffee went cold.

A Few Months Later

At the birthday, the whole family lined up for the photo. Four generations of women with thick hair. I went to stand in the back, the way I always had.

Daniel stopped the photographer.

He walked me to the front row and stood me right next to his mother. "There," he said. "Now it's all of them."

When the picture came back, I looked like me. Older. 55. But me.

He framed it and put it on his office desk, right next to our wedding photo. Same curls. Same woman, 31 years apart.

I look like myself again. And honestly, I've never liked her more.

The Truth After 31 Years Married To Him

31 years next to a hair specialist taught me one thing.

Being close to medicine doesn't save you. My husband could name the exact thing taking my hair and still couldn't stop it.

The women in his family never had his medicine. They took care of the root, where the problem starts.

For us, it came back in a little green bar that did what $4,300 and his own prescriptions could not.

Now, when a woman sits in his chair with the part I used to have, he tells her the first step is something she can do herself, in the shower, in sixty seconds.

Click below to see the Korean Herbal Root Rescue Bar. 14,653 reviews. 4.7 stars. 90 days to try it, or your money back.

Use it every wash. Count your hair-tie wraps and photograph your part under the same light every 2 weeks for 12 weeks. Your photos will tell you.