Menopause & Hair

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

From 23 mirror checks a day to a windy family photo where she never once touched her hair.

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.

From 51 to 55, I lost more than half my hair. It was constantly on my clothes, on the chairs I'd sat in, poking me in the eye. I got afraid to wash it.

And I started checking.

The bathroom mirror. The car visor at every red light. My phone camera, flipped around, before I walked into any room. I learned which lights were safe. Overhead lights were never safe. My eyesight and bad bathroom lighting had been lying to me for years.

One day I actually counted. Twenty-three checks before dinner.

I had to change my part, because it was too thin there. I bought hair powder and spent every dinner wondering if it was coming off on my fingers. I bought three hats. I hate hats. I finally understood why balding men wear baseball caps or run off to Turkey.

I quit water aerobics after six years. Wet hair shows everything. Every shower, every swim, that's when I noticed it most.

My friends swore they couldn't tell. I didn't believe them.

I sent my sister a picture of what came out in the drain one morning. She texted back: "That's a small rodent!" I laughed, because if I didn't laugh, I'd cry.

At 2 a.m., I'd lie awake picturing myself in five years with glaring bald patches. Some nights I'd type into a Facebook group: "Somebody please help me calm down."

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."

It's for life now. That's what I heard.

The $4,300 We Spent Trying

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

• Oral minoxidil he prescribed himself (8 months). The first month my hair looked worse, which scared me to death. Then the shedding stopped. 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, a caffeine shampoo, rosemary oil that ruined my pillowcases ($1,100). Nothing. Every new thing felt like one more thing I'd spend money on that delivered nothing.

$4,300. My part stayed wide, dead still. And the checking never stopped.

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.

She'd been out in the yard all morning in the wind. I'd watched her. Not once did she touch her head.

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. Then you don't have to think about it."

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 checking 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 can't stop thinking about it, Daniel. Every shower. Every mirror. Every light. I'm exhausted. I don't need it perfect. I just want one normal day where I'm not embarrassed. One day where I don't think about my hair at all."

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 small rodent. 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. I had an easier time covering my thin spots. Then I didn't need to.

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 noticed something about me in front of the whole family that I hadn't even noticed myself.

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

I went back to water aerobics. First time in two years. Wet hair, bright pool lights, the whole thing.

I climbed out, wrapped my towel around me, and drove home.

It wasn't until I was in my driveway that I realized I hadn't touched my head once. Not in the locker room. Not in the visor. I'd forgotten to check.

I sat in the car and cried a little. Not about my hair. About how long I'd been carrying it.

A Few Months Later

The birthday was in their backyard. Windy. The kind of day I used to dread.

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 and walked me to the front row, right next to his mother.

Then he leaned in and said, quietly, "You haven't touched your hair once today. Did you know that?"

I didn't. I'd stopped watching myself.

The wind blew right through the picture. I didn't reach for my head. I just smiled.

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, and then they got on with their day.

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 checking her part in his mirror, 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. Then count how many times you check the mirror. That number goes down too.