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I hadn't properly looked myself in the eye for 23 months. When I brushed my teeth I'd stare at the tap. When I worked out I'd pick a spot on the floor and keep my eyes locked on it through every rep. When I walked past shop windows on the street I'd suddenly find my phone screen very interesting. I told my husband I was fine. I told my sister I was fine. I told my GP I was fine. By month 23, I was sitting up in bed at 11:47pm with the laptop open on my knees, my husband asleep beside me, and a R14,990 lace front wig sitting in my online checkout. My card details were saved. My finger was on the trackpad. I was 30 seconds away from clicking confirm. I am 49 years old. And if a single thought hadn't stopped me right there in the dark, with the blue glow of the laptop on my face, I would be sitting here typing this in someone else's hair. I would never have known how close I had been the whole time to the actual fix. This is for every South African woman over 45 who knows exactly what I mean when I say I had not looked myself in the eye in almost two years. For every woman who has been quietly photographing herself only from the chin down. For every woman who has stopped wearing her own hair down. For every woman who has been browsing wig websites at midnight, tabs hidden in a private window, the volume off so the rest of the house can't hear. Please give me the next few minutes. Because what I want to tell you tonight is something I genuinely believe nobody told my mother, my aunts, my friends, or me. And it changed my hair, and my reflection, and the way I look at the women in my life who are quietly going through the same thing. I want to start with the part that is hardest to write, which is not the hair. It's the mirrors. Because the hair you can hide. Hats, headbands, brown powder from the salon, partings on the other side, scarves, low buns, dry shampoo, careful blow drying. There are a hundred small daily strategies for the hair. But you cannot hide from your own reflection. And what almost nobody who has not lived this understands is that there comes a point, somewhere around month seven or eight of hair loss, where you realise you have stopped looking at your own face properly. You realise you brush your teeth looking at your chin. You realise you do your make up in segments. You realise you have not held your own gaze, in your own bathroom, in your own house, in months. I was not a vain woman before this. I had thick hair, yes. Big, slightly frizzy thick hair my mother used to call my crown. But I did not stand in front of mirrors admiring myself. I am not built that way. What this took from me was not vanity. It was the simple thing of being able to stand in front of myself, in my own bathroom in our Sandton townhouse, and be the woman I have been for 49 years. To recognise her. To meet her eyes. To finish a sentence with her about her own day. That is what hair loss takes from you that nobody warns you about. I want to walk you through how I got there, because I think it matters that you see how ordinary this is. The hair loss started about six months after the perimenopause symptoms hit. I was 47. The hot flushes came first. Then the night sweats. Then the 3am wake ups. My gynae confirmed it, started me on HRT patches, told me what to expect, life carried on. Until one Saturday morning I was leaning into my bathroom mirror to put earrings in for a friend's 50th in Bryanston, and the bathroom downlights hit my parting in this particular way, and I saw it. Pink scalp. A clean stripe of my own pale scalp showing through the top of my head, where six months earlier there had been nothing but hair. I sat down on the edge of the bath and I cried for 40 minutes. Then I put a hat on, told my husband I had a migraine, and didn't go to the lunch. That was the start of two years of the slowest, quietest hiding I have ever done. I started parting my hair on the other side. I bought brown powder from a salon to put on my scalp before any work meeting. I bought headbands at every Woolworths run. I stopped going to my regular hairdresser because I could not stand the look on her face when she sectioned my hair. I started avoiding bright restaurants. I started turning down photos at family events. At my niece's matric dance dinner I made the cousins take all the photos with my back angled to the camera, and I told them I just don't photograph well anymore. The mirrors went next. It happens by accident. You catch a glimpse of yourself in a shop window and you flinch, so you stop looking at shop windows. You see your reflection in the lift at work and you flinch, so you start looking at your phone. You walk past the long mirror at the gym and you flinch, so you start changing in the stall. The mirror in your own bathroom at home becomes the last one to go, because that's where the real evidence is, in good lighting, with no make up, the parting wider every week. By the time I had been losing hair for a year, I was brushing my teeth looking at my chin. By 18 months, I was doing my eye make up by feel, looking only at the eye I was working on. By two years, I was a 49 year old woman who had not properly seen her own face in 23 months. The worst part of all of it is what your own head does to you in the silence. You start telling yourself it is your fault. The dye. The stress. The diet you did at 42. The way you used to sleep on your hair when you were younger. The time you bleached your hair in your twenties. Some moral or biological failure that the rest of the women around you have managed to avoid and you have not. Because that is the other thing. Every other woman in my life seemed completely fine. My friends, my sisters, the women in my book club, the moms at the school events. My own mother who is 78 and has more hair than I do. Nobody else seemed to be losing handfuls in the shower. Nobody else was carrying brown powder in their handbag. Nobody else was doing make up one cheek at a time. I genuinely believed I was the only one. I believed there was something specifically broken about me. So I did what I think most of us do. I tried to fix it quietly. I bought collagen powder from Clicks. Biotin gummies from Dis-Chem. A marine peptide my old hairdresser swore by. A Korean serum from Takealot. An expensive thickening shampoo. I went to a trichologist in Rosebank who looked at my scalp under a magnifying camera, told me I had typical diffuse thinning, and sold me a topical serum that burned my scalp so badly I had red itchy patches behind my ears for a week. I stopped using it. By the end of two years I had spent close to nine thousand rand on products that did absolutely nothing. That is when the wig idea arrived. It did not feel like giving up at the time. It felt like rescue. It felt like the kindest thing I could do for myself. Stop fighting. Stop trying. Stop feeling. Just buy the hair. Put it on. Go back to being a normal woman in family photos. But I could not bring myself to walk into a wig shop in person. Even the thought of sitting in a chair in a boutique somewhere, with a consultant fitting hair to my actual head, in a room where I might bump into someone I knew, was unbearable. The shame I had been carrying for two years did not allow it. I could not let another human being look at my scalp under good lighting and pin a wig to it. I could not put words to the problem out loud to a stranger. So I started shopping the way I had been doing everything else. Quietly. Online. Late at night. With the laptop angled away from my husband's side of the bed, the volume off, an incognito tab open. I spent about three weeks on it. I read 300 wig reviews. I joined a private Facebook group under a fake name. I learned about cap construction, density, hair length, lace types. I narrowed it down to two boutiques that shipped from Joburg and offered private home try ons. I picked a R14,990 lace front. I added it to the cart. I left the cart open for two days, then closed the laptop, then opened it again. On a Tuesday night at 11:47pm, with my husband asleep next to me and the lights off and the dog snoring at the foot of the bed, I went to checkout. My card details were saved. My address was filled in. The laptop screen was the only light in the room. My finger was on the trackpad. And the thought that stopped me, the only thing standing between me and almost fifteen thousand rand of someone else's hair, was this. I am 49. I am not 79. I cannot have given up at 49. I have not even bothered to understand what is actually happening on my own scalp. I have walked into Clicks and Dis-Chem and Wellness Warehouse and bought what was on the shelf in the order it was recommended, and when none of that worked I started shopping for wigs in the dark in my own bed. I haven't read a research paper. I haven't asked one proper question. I have just panicked and shopped and panicked and shopped for two years, and I cannot, I cannot sit here in the dark at 49 years old and pay this much money for someone else's hair to glue on top of my own before I have even tried to understand what is happening underneath. I closed the laptop. I lay in the dark for a hour, staring at the ceiling, with my heart pounding. The next morning I opened it again, but for something else. For research. I made a cup of rooibos at the dining room table, and for six hours straight I read everything I could find about hair loss in women over 45. What I found made me close the laptop and cry into my hands. Because here is what nobody had told me. The reason women lose hair after 45 has very little to do with hormones the way we are told. The hormones are the trigger, not the actual cause. What the hormones do, specifically the drop in oestrogen, is cause something physical to happen underneath the scalp. And it is that physical thing that is making your hair fall out. Underneath your scalp, every single hair follicle is fed by a tiny blood vessel, smaller than a single strand of hair. These are called micro capillaries. They are the supply line. They carry oxygen, amino acids, peptides, growth factors and nutrients from your blood, all the way up to each individual follicle. That is the entire feeding system for your hair. In your twenties and thirties, when oestrogen is high, those micro capillaries are wide open. Pumping. Flowing. Your follicles are well fed. Your hair grows thick, stays attached, and sheds at a normal rate. Then perimenopause starts. Oestrogen drops. And the studies show those micro capillaries start to constrict. They narrow. They lose elasticity. By the time you are 50, the tiny vessels feeding your follicles can be up to 50 percent thinner than they were at 30. Half. The road feeding your follicles, half closed. Your follicles are not dead. They are not gone. They are starving. They are still there. Still attached. Still alive. Still ready to grow hair the moment they are fed properly. But the supply line is half closed and the food is not getting through. I sat at my dining table reading this and I started laughing through tears, because suddenly every single product I had wasted money on for two years made sense. Every supplement, every collagen powder, every biotin gummy, every marine peptide. They were all hitting my bloodstream perfectly. They were all being absorbed into my body just fine. They just couldn't get up the last few millimetres to my actual follicles. Because the road was half closed. It was not the brand. It was not the dosage. It was not that I needed a different kind of biotin or a more expensive collagen. The whole approach was wrong. You cannot feed a starving follicle from the inside if the delivery road is half closed. The food has to be applied directly to the scalp, where the follicle can absorb it on the spot, locally, without depending on a supply line that has been quietly shut down by menopause. You also need to reopen those capillaries. That is what I went looking for next. I needed something that did two specific jobs at the same time. One, something that would help relax the constricted micro capillaries and bring blood flow back to the starving follicle. Two, something that would deliver clinically backed nutrients directly into the scalp where the follicle could absorb them on the spot. That is when I found Alyra. Alyra is a topical mist made for South African women experiencing exactly the kind of thinning I had been experiencing. The first active is caffeine, which has been shown in human studies to help relax constricted scalp capillaries and bring blood flow back to the follicle. The second is hydrolysed rice protein, which in a 16 week placebo controlled trial increased both hair density and hair strand diameter. Then panthenol to strengthen the hair shaft and the scalp barrier. It does both jobs at the same time. It opens the road. And it delivers the food directly to the follicle on the spot, no detour through the bloodstream. You spray it on dry or damp scalp twice a day. Twenty seconds. No washing out. No greasy residue. No pulling on a wig. I read every review I could find. I read the ingredient list three times. I cross checked the mechanism against everything the trichologist in Rosebank had told me about my own diagnosis, and it lined up exactly with the diffuse menopausal thinning she had described. I ordered two bottles that night, before I lost my nerve. The bottles arrived two days later. I started spraying twice a day, morning and evening. I had to stand in front of the bathroom mirror to do it properly, the one I had been avoiding for almost two years. The first time I stood in front of it, I sprayed the mist with my eyes closed, then opened them, and looked at the part of the mirror that showed my hairline. Not my eyes. Just the hairline. That was as much as I could manage. It was a start. I want to be honest about what happened next, because I think the slowness of it is part of the story. This was not a transformation. This was a slow turn. The first month I felt almost nothing on my scalp. The mist had a faint cooling sensation. It absorbed in 30 seconds. It smelled clean, slightly herbal. I sprayed and went on with my day, with no idea whether anything was happening underneath. Around the end of month one I started to notice, in a vague way, that the hairs in my brush each morning were slightly fewer than they had been. Not a single dramatic morning. Just a slow shift over a few weeks, where the small ball of fluff I usually pulled out of the brush after a blowdry was getting smaller. By the start of month two, my scalp felt different. Not better exactly. Just calmer. The dry, slightly tight feeling I had lived with for two years had quietly softened. I noticed I had stopped scratching the back of my head at my desk in the afternoons. Halfway through month two, I caught myself in the bathroom mirror with wet hair after a shower, and I noticed the hair clumped together when wet looked thicker than I remembered. I did not trust myself yet. I told myself I was probably imagining it. Month three was when the change became something I could not quite explain away anymore. I was blowdrying my hair on a Saturday morning and I noticed it was taking longer than it used to. There was more hair to dry. Not a lot more. Just enough that the routine I had perfected over two years of having less and less hair was starting to feel slightly off. Around the middle of month three, I leaned in close to the bathroom mirror in good morning light and I saw the first baby hairs along my hairline. Not a dramatic moment. No tears. I just touched them with my fingertip, confirmed they were real, and stood there for a while looking at the hairline I had not allowed myself to look at properly in two years. By the end of month three, my parting was not narrower yet, but the scalp showing through it was less pink. The skin underneath looked less exposed, somehow. Like something was filling in just below the surface. Month four was when I started believing it. The baby hairs along my hairline were no longer just along the front. They were coming through along the side parting too. My hair felt heavier in my hand when I pulled it back. I could pull it back, actually, without the loose strands at the temples sliding straight out. My hairdresser, who I had finally gone back to in month three, told me she could see new growth coming through near the crown. By month five, my parting had visibly narrowed. I took a photo of the top of my head in the same bathroom light I had been avoiding for two years, and I compared it to a photo I had taken in shame nine months earlier, and I sat on the edge of the bath and cried for the second time in this whole story. Not the dramatic cry of two years earlier. A quiet one. A relieved one. By month six, I had stopped wearing the brown powder. The headbands stayed in the drawer. I started wearing my hair down again, slowly, on weekends first, then to work. Somewhere around month six I realised, almost in passing, that I had been making eye contact with myself in the bathroom mirror for weeks without thinking about it. She was back. I am writing this on a Sunday afternoon, more than half a year after the night I almost clicked confirm on a R14,990 wig at 11:47pm in the dark. My hair is in a small messy bun for the first time in three years. There is no wig in this bun. No clip in piece. No brown powder hiding the parting. Just my own hair, growing back, slowly, naturally, because I finally gave my follicles what menopause had been quietly taking from them. I want to say something to you that I needed someone to say to me two years ago. You are not the only one. You are not the only woman over 45 in South Africa hiding under hats and headbands. You are not the only one carrying powder in your handbag. You are not the only one doing your make up one cheek at a time. You are not the only one who hasn't looked herself in the eye in months. You are not the only one who has been shopping for wigs at midnight in the dark in your own bed. You are not failing at something every other woman has figured out. The reason it feels like that is because nobody talks about it. Hair loss is one of the loneliest experiences a woman in this country can go through, and the silence around it is the cruellest part of all of it. But you also do not have to buy a wig. Alyra are running a buy 2 get 1 free deal at the moment, which is roughly the supply you need to give it enough time to actually work. They also back it with a 120 day money back guarantee, which is the right length for this. You will probably notice the shedding slow down inside the first month. The visible regrowth tends to come through somewhere between months three and four. The full turn, the kind I am sitting in right now, came for me around month five and six. The 120 days is genuinely the right amount of time to give it a real chance, and if it doesn't work for you, you get a full refund. If you are 45+, and your parting has been getting wider, and you have been shopping for wigs in private windows after dark, please try this first. Please give your own follicles four to six months. And if you have not properly looked yourself in the eye in a while, I promise you, she is still in there. She is waiting. Tap learn more below to try Alyra for yourself.