Bloom & Bond Facebook ad: “Why Pumpkin Seed Oil Never Worked for My Sister”

About this ad

Meta Ad Library ID

1103800072366149

Platforms

Facebook, Instagram, Audience Network and Threads

Relaunches

0

Niche

Supplements & Wellness

How we count

Ad text

Eight months of pumpkin seed oil ended with my sister sitting on her bathroom floor at midnight with a handful of her own hair, and I'm a doctor, so I should have known why it never worked. I'm a dermatologist, and the call came at 11:47pm on a Wednesday, from my brother-in-law, and his voice was shaking. He said she was on the bathroom floor and wouldn't get up, and that she kept saying she couldn't do this anymore. I drove 22 minutes to their house and found her sitting on the tile between the sink and the bathtub with her knees pulled up, still in her robe, her hair wet from a shower she'd taken at eleven at night because she couldn't sleep. Her brush was on the floor next to her, and so was the hair she'd pulled out of the drain, wound into a little wet nest she hadn't been able to throw away. She looked up at me and said the same thing she'd said to him, that she couldn't do this anymore. I'm supposed to have answers, and I had nothing. So I sat down on the tile next to her, and I stayed there. --- This started two and a half years before that floor. She turned 45, her periods started getting irregular, and she had a few nights where she woke up hot and couldn't get back to sleep. Nothing dramatic, nothing she even mentioned to me. Then the shedding came, and not the normal kind. The kind where you run your fingers through your hair in the shower and come away with strands wrapped around every finger. Then it was the brush, then the pillow in the morning, then the hairs she'd find on the shoulders of her sweater at work and quietly pick off before anyone noticed. Then her part started to widen. She'd stand under the bathroom light, tilt her head, and see more scalp than she'd ever seen, and the next morning she'd tell herself it was just the light. Then her ponytail changed. She'd always wrapped the hair tie twice, and now it took three times, and then she stopped wearing it up at all. Two hairstyles, that's where she ended up. Down, with the part flipped to the side to cover the thin spot, or a clip low at the back of her neck. She was 47 years old and afraid of her own mirror. She told me she hated how she looked, and that she didn't want to be in photos with her own kids anymore. Getting ready took her forty minutes every morning, with root powder, dry shampoo and three different angles in the mirror before she'd leave the house. She'd sit in the car in the rain rather than walk across a parking lot and let her hair get wet. On windy days she cancelled plans. When her husband reached over to touch her hair on the couch, she'd pull away, and he asked me privately if he'd done something wrong. And she hid almost all of it from me. She told me later she was embarrassed to be the dermatologist's sister who was losing her hair, so every time I saw her, her hair was down and perfectly done, and I never looked twice. Then the heavier stuff came. Anxiety about every mirror, every photo, every bright light, and a sadness that came in like a wall. A month before the bathroom floor she told me she wasn't living anymore, she was just hiding. --- She did everything right. Her doctor, her gynecologist, then a dermatologist I'd sent her to myself, because I didn't think I should be the one treating my own sister. Bloodwork three times, thyroid, iron, vitamin D, hormones. Hundreds of dollars. Every single one of them told her some version of the same thing. Everything looks normal. It's just stress. It happens at your age. Try biotin. Have you considered it might be anxiety? Anxiety. Her hair was coming out by the handful, and my colleagues were telling her it was in her head. One of them actually told her that maybe her stress was causing the shedding. And before my sister, I probably would have said the same thing, because that's what we're trained to do. The labs come back normal, so the patient is fine. Even when the patient is on a bathroom floor at midnight. --- Then her dermatologist put her on pumpkin seed oil, the thing every hair loss forum swears by and more and more doctors are suggesting. I'd suggested it to patients myself. Eight months, four different brands, every single morning, well over $300. Her part kept getting wider. She said it herself one night on the phone, that everyone online says pumpkin seed oil works, so what was wrong with her that it wouldn't work on her? She went back to her dermatologist, who told her to keep going, because hair takes time. So she piled everything else on top of it. Biotin, collagen, rosemary oil on her scalp every night, the $45 hair gummies, the serums. Some of it seemed to help a tiny bit for a few weeks, and then the drain would be full again. She was doing everything we told her and losing more hair every single month, for two and a half years, until I found her on that floor. And I realized that this is what we do. We tell women it's their age or their stress, we hand them something to try, and we never actually fix it. --- That floor changed me. The next morning I cancelled my first three appointments, sat down at my desk, and did what I should have done the day her shedding started. I went into the research I'd been skimming past between patients for years, and started reading what had been published while the rest of us were telling women it was stress. I knew about DHT, every dermatologist does. What I'd never put together was how little of it pumpkin seed oil actually touches on its own. The two-part problem. When a woman gets into her 40s and her estrogen starts to drop, she loses the thing that protected her hair her whole life. Estrogen sits around the follicles like a shield, and as it falls, a hormone called DHT starts getting through. Every woman has DHT. Your body makes it from testosterone using an enzyme, and it was always there, waiting for the shield to come down. That's part one. With the shield gone, the DHT your body keeps making reaches your follicles more and more. Part two is what nobody explains. When DHT reaches a follicle, it latches onto it and shrinks it a little more every cycle, so each hair grows back thinner and shorter than the one before, until that follicle stops making a visible hair at all. That's the shedding. That's the widening part, the ponytail that takes three wraps, the scalp under the bathroom light. It isn't stress. It isn't just your age. It isn't in your head. It's two problems, the DHT your body keeps making and the DHT that's already latching onto your follicles, and until you deal with both, nothing changes. That's why pumpkin seed oil alone failed her. It slows down the enzyme that makes DHT, so it works on part one, but it does nothing about the DHT that's already been made and is still latching onto her follicles every day. She was turning down the factory and leaving the door wide open. --- And here's what made me furious. None of this is new. It's been published for years. But nobody puts it together for women like my sister, because there's no prescription for it and nothing to bill for. There's money in foam you have to rub into your scalp for the rest of your life. There's money in injection sessions that cost hundreds of dollars each. There's money in follow-up visits, and in hair gummies at $45 a month, forever. The longer her hair kept falling out, the more everyone got paid. Nobody in a white coat had any reason to tell her how to actually fix it. So I'm telling you now. --- What fixes it isn't one ingredient. It's two plants working together, and the second one is what almost every pumpkin seed oil is missing. That second plant is saw palmetto. In Germany, saw palmetto extract is sold in pharmacies as a registered medicine, standardized to 85 to 95 percent fatty acids and sterols, and doctors have prescribed it for years for a different problem caused by the very same hormone. Same hormone, different place. And before you think, wait, I already tried pumpkin seed oil and it didn't work, please hear this. Pumpkin seed oil on its own is not the same thing as pumpkin seed oil and saw palmetto together. If pumpkin seed oil failed you, that isn't proof the ingredient doesn't work. It's proof you were only ever treating half the problem. Together, they do four things. The phytosterols in cold-pressed pumpkin seed oil slow down the enzyme that turns testosterone into DHT, so less of it gets made in the first place. The phytoestrogens in pumpkin seed oil help stand in for some of the estrogen shield your follicles lost. The fatty acids and sterols in saw palmetto extract block the DHT that's already been made from latching onto your follicles. This is the piece pumpkin seed oil can't do, and the piece my sister never had. And the zinc and natural fats in pumpkin seed oil feed the follicle while it recovers, so the new hair has something to grow from. Four actions, both parts of the problem, one formula. --- But most pumpkin seed oil on the market is hot-pressed. The seeds are heated so more oil comes out faster and cheaper, and that heat strips out the phytosterols. What's left is expensive cooking oil with a pumpkin on the label. I went and looked at the four bottles my sister had bought. Not one of them said cold-pressed, and not one of them had saw palmetto in it. And when brands do add saw palmetto, most of it is ground-up berry powder at a dose so small it barely registers, not the extract. She needed cold-pressed pumpkin seed oil and real saw palmetto extract, at a real dose, together. A colleague who specializes in hormonal hair loss pointed me to Bloom & Bond. 2,000mg of cold-pressed pumpkin seed oil. 200mg of saw palmetto extract, not berry powder. Both in one formula, third-party tested, with no fillers. I put my sister on it that week. --- Around three weeks in, she texted me a photo of her shower drain with almost nothing in it, and all she wrote was, look. A couple of weeks after that she called me crying, the good kind. She'd brushed her hair that morning and there were only a few strands in the brush, and she said she couldn't remember the last time she wasn't scared to brush her hair. Around the three month mark I went to her house for dinner. She was at the stove making pasta, and her hair was up in a ponytail. I watched her reach up and fix it without thinking. I waited for the old habit, the hand going to her part, the tilt of her head away from the light. It never came. When she turned around, I could see them, tiny baby hairs all along her part and her hairline. Her husband looked at her and said, your hair's up. She said, I know. The last time I'd been in that house at night, she was on the bathroom floor with a handful of her own hair, telling me she couldn't do this anymore. Now she was standing in her kitchen with her hair up, looking at her husband like a normal woman on a normal night. At around six months she went back to her hairdresser for the first time in a year. Her stylist ran her hands through her hair and asked what she'd been doing. She told me afterwards that she'd forgotten about her hair for a whole afternoon, and that hadn't happened since before any of this started. --- Last Thanksgiving she wore her hair up all day. She was in every single photo, and she stayed up laughing with the family until midnight. Her cousin grabbed my arm in the kitchen and asked me what on earth we'd done. I told her everything. Her face changed, and she told me her part had been getting wider since she turned 46, and she'd been taking a pumpkin seed oil from Amazon for months. A few weeks later she texted me that her shedding had slowed down for the first time in a year, and thanked me. --- My sister looked at me last week and said it out loud. Two and a half years, a bathroom floor at midnight, two hairstyles, hiding from photos with her own kids. She said she wasn't crazy and it wasn't just her age, she'd only ever been given half of what she needed, and nobody, not even me, had told her. She was right, and that's why I'm telling you now. This doesn't stay where it is. Every month DHT stays on those follicles, it shrinks them a little more. The part keeps widening, the ponytail keeps thinning, and the longer a follicle has been shrinking, the longer it takes to bring back. Someone in a hair loss group wrote that she'd been on only pumpkin seed oil for a year and it had done nothing. A year. Every month of it was a month the door was left open. I watched my sister go from a bit more hair in the brush to the bathroom floor in two and a half years, and every month we waited, it got harder to undo. Don't wait until you're on the floor. Even if you're skeptical, especially if you're skeptical, try it the way my sister did, every morning, for 90 days. See if your hair responds the way hers did. Bloom & Bond. Cold-pressed pumpkin seed oil and saw palmetto extract, every morning. Right now they're running buy 2 get 1 free, which doesn't happen often, and every order comes with a 90-day money-back guarantee. If your hair doesn't get better, you get every penny back. I don't want anyone else on that floor. Try Bloom and Bond 👉 https://thebloomandbond.com/products/new-pumpkin-seed-oil-softgels P.S. If you've already tried pumpkin seed oil and given up, you're exactly who this is for. Turn your old bottle over. If it doesn't say cold-pressed and there's no saw palmetto extract in it, it was only ever doing half the job. P.P.S. The buy 2 get 1 free offer won't be there forever, and it's the easiest way to give it the full 90 days my sister did.

Where the ad sends people

trybloomandbond.com

Why Pumpkin Seed Oil Never Worked for My Sister

45,000+ Happy Customers