Hair Care

What It's Really Like to Lose Your Hair in Your 20s

When she went completely bald at 26, it was other people's reactions that she struggled with the most

by Laura Zinger, as told to Emily Woodruff, Andrea Jordan | 2 COMMENTS

PHOTO 5/7

Health & Hair One day in yoga class, a woman asked me why I was losing my hair. When I told her, she told me I should go see her naturopath. I wasn't really into alternative medicine, but I'll try pretty much anything, so I thought, why the hell not?

When I visited him, he told me that I was extremely malnourished -- not the skinny, underfed kind, but the you've-been-eating-french-fries-instead-of-food kind. He put me on a blood type nutrition program that forced me to cook my own food (rather than rely on Chipotle a couple times a week), and I lost 25 pounds in one year. After seeing him for three years, my hair started to grow back in. It grew down to my ears ... and then it all started falling out again. So I started shaving my head, rather than sporting half a head of hair with a bunch of bald patches. I had pretty much given up on ever getting a full head of hair back, but at 31, my hair started growing, and it hasn't stopped since.

Photo courtesy Laura Zinger

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