Susan Smith Facebook ad: “274 hairs in my drain at week six. I quit. I was WRONG.”

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Fuck this bottle. That is what I posted, those three words, under a photo of a Bloom & Bond bottle face up in my bathroom trash can with my own middle finger over it, in a menopause hair group with forty thousand women in it, at 11:40 at night in March. I meant it. 386 women agreed with me. I was also completely wrong, and this is me going back into that same group to say so, because my husband did something behind my back for five weeks and my HAIRDRESSER caught it before I did. Read all of this before you decide what I am, because somewhere in here you are going to get MAD, and I do not think it is going to be at me. You are going to be mad at a sentence. Three of them actually, and if you are over 45 I would bet money you have heard at least one. "It's your age." "It's menopause, and menopause is for LIFE." "Your bloodwork is fine." I got all three inside of fourteen months, from three different offices, all in the same nice voice, the way you tell somebody their flight is delayed. Let me tell you what "your age" looked like at my house. There is a drain catch in my shower, the little silicone one from Amazon, and starting last October I counted what was in it every single morning and wrote the number on the bathroom mirror in eyeliner. Day 1: 212. I am not exaggerating that for you, I sat on the edge of the tub with the catch in my lap and moved them with a bobby pin one at a time onto a square of toilet paper, TWO HUNDRED AND TWELVE, and then I went to work. By Thanksgiving there were 41 numbers on that mirror and Glenn was shaving around them. My mother has swept her hair over from the far left since about 1994. This Thanksgiving I stood behind her at the hall mirror and looked at the top of her head and then at the top of mine, and I had to go sit in the car. Is that where you are too, watching your mother's head like it's a weather report? So I did what all of you did, didn't you? Biotin, the big bottle, since the summer before, and I got nails like a contractor and the same 212 in the catch. A thickening shampoo for thirty one dollars that made my hair feel thick for exactly as long as it took to dry, and then it lay down and told the TRUTH. The foam from the drugstore twice a day, and by week three my scalp itched so bad I was scratching under the table at a work dinner like I had LICE, and nothing different at the part. And when I carried all of it into an office in January and asked what was actually WRONG with me, I got "your bloodwork is fine," a printout, and a pat on the arm on the way out. FINE. Do you know what fine feels like when you are pulling hair off toilet paper with a bobby pin at six in the morning? I sat in the driveway with a piece of paper that said fine and made a decision out loud to nobody. I am NOT going to be the woman doing the sweep in the hall mirror at seventy. I am NOT counting hair on toilet paper for the rest of my life. I found the group that week and read for three nights straight, and Bloom & Bond kept coming up, pumpkin seed oil and saw palmetto in one softgel, two a day, ninety days. I ordered the three month supply at one in the morning with the mirror numbers glowing at me from across the room. And now the part I got wrong, and I have to tell it flat, because I was so SURE. Week two, nothing, 218 in the catch. Week four, nothing, 209, which is one bad brushing, that's not a result. Week five the number started going UP. 241. 256. Week six it was 274, and I stood in the shower with the water off and a catch FULL of my own hair and said okay, this one is not just not working, this one is making it WORSE. What would you have done, kept swallowing it? I got out and I did not even dry off. I dropped the bottle face up in the little trash can, took the picture with my middle finger in it under that ugly overhead light, and posted it before I could THINK. Fuck this bottle. By morning there were 386 reactions and a hundred and something comments, and I read EVERY one of them on the toilet with the door locked. "Same. Total SCAM. I gave it two months." That was a woman named Lorraine, and she got 90 likes of her own. "They all do this to us. Every single one." A woman named Barb typed her whole story under mine, biotin and the foam and a husband named Rick who kept telling her he couldn't see it and a dermatologist who told her to "consider a topper," and I cried because it was MY story with a different husband's name in it. And one woman didn't write anything at all, her profile picture was a golden retriever in a birthday hat, and she just hit the heart. I thought she was on my side. Hold that thought. Do you know that feeling, when 386 strangers agree that you got ROBBED? It is the best you will ever feel about the worst thing. And then it was week eleven, which I only know because I counted backwards, and I was in Tammy's chair for my color. Tammy has done my hair for six years, she has no product line, she has never once tried to sell me anything, and if a cut is wrong for your face she says so. She had me half foiled, sectioning along my part with the tail of the comb, and she stopped with a foil in one hand and leaned down so her face was next to mine in the mirror. "What did you change?" I said nothing, I threw the last thing away, actually. She said, "No. Look." She tipped my head toward the big salon light and ran the comb along the part, and there was a whole line of them, short, standing straight up, all the way down the part like a little fence. Baby hairs. I had never seen a baby hair on my own head in my LIFE. "That's new growth," she said. "That's a lot of new growth. You're telling me you're not doing anything?" I sat under that light with foils in my head and could not think of one thing I had done differently since March except QUIT. Glenn was at the kitchen table when I got home, and I said Tammy says I have new hair coming in, and he put his coffee down and got a look I have seen twice in twenty two years. I said, what. He said, "Don't be mad." Have you ever heard a sentence you already knew the end of? He said the night I posted the picture, after I went to bed, he took the bottle out of the trash and wiped it off and put it in his side of the medicine cabinet behind his fish oil. And every morning since, at six, before I came down, he had been setting two softgels on the saucer next to my coffee mug, right beside his two fish oil. I had been swallowing them with my first sip for FIVE WEEKS thinking they were his. I said, why would you DO that? And he said, and this is the line, "Because you paid for ninety days and you gave it forty two, and I have watched you count hair off toilet paper for six months and I couldn't stand it anymore." Then he went out to the garage, because he does not know what to do with his hands when I cry. Twenty two years, and I could not tell you one bigger thing that man has done for me than two softgels next to a coffee cup and not one WORD about it. So here is what I did not understand in March, and what not one of those 386 women understood either. I did not fail the product. I quit in the one week it LOOKS like failing. Something changed inside me after forty five, and nothing I had bought before was going anywhere near it. Tammy told me under the dryer that she has seen it in other women, around week five and six, the old tired hair that was on its way out anyway lets go all at once so the new hair can come up behind it. 274 was not the product failing. 274 was the product WORKING, and I flipped it off and told forty thousand women it was a scam. How many of them quit that week because of me? I think about that more than I want to. Then I started counting again, and this time I want you to see the numbers. Week twelve: 160. Week fourteen: 118. Week sixteen: 91, and I stood back and looked at it on the mirror next to the 212 from October and had to sit down on the tub. Week eighteen: 74. SEVENTY FOUR. I counted them twice because I thought I had lost some in the catch. Tammy says seventy something is not thinning, that is just a head of hair doing what a head of hair does. My ponytail elastic, the same black one I have had since last summer, went around three times in March with room to spare. It goes around twice now and I have to FIGHT it for the second one. And my part, which I check at red lights in the driver's side window because that is the MEANEST light there is, is still there, I won't lie to you, but it is a line again. In March it was a ROAD. At week twenty Tammy had her hands in my hair at the shampoo bowl and said, "Still not doing anything, huh." I told her all of it, the trash can, the finger, the saucer, and she had to lean on the sink. It's your age. It's for life. Your bloodwork is fine. I am the same age I was in January, I am still in menopause, nobody has drawn one drop of blood out of me since that printout, and there are 74 hairs in the catch. So which one of those three sentences was ever TRUE? Now what it is NOT, because I was lied to by nice voices for fourteen months and I am not going to do it to you. I do not have my thirty year old hair. I am 53, and the corners at my temples are still thinner than I want them to be. What I have is 74 hairs in the catch instead of 274, a part that is a line instead of a road, and a hairdresser who saw it before I did and had NOTHING to gain by saying so. Now here's the thing I need you to understand. If you have a bottle on the counter and a number on a mirror and it is week five or six and the number just went UP, that is the week. That is the exact week everybody QUITS, that is the week I quit, and 386 women cheered me for it. And if you have not started anything, think about a year from now, not the hair, the COUNTING, the same catch and the same eyeliner and one more nice voice telling you it's your AGE. How many more mornings on the edge of the tub do you have in you? Because I will tell you what your age is, your age is the reason nobody bothers to LOOK. So here is what I wrote three days ago, under my own post, with the middle finger picture still sitting at the top of it. I was wrong. I quit in week six and my husband didn't let me. Here is my part in March and here is my part today, same bathroom, same ugly light. Lorraine, Barb, if you're still in here, please give it the NINETY. Every Sunday morning now I take one photo of my part in the same spot under the same bathroom light, and I do not look at it, I just take it. Because they tell you ninety days going in, and the only way to know is to compare day one to day ninety, and not day forty two to your FEELINGS. If you want to try it, the softgels are below, pumpkin seed oil and saw palmetto in the one capsule, two a day. Start the Sunday photo the first morning you take them, and whatever your drain says in week six, do not take the picture I took. P.S. Glenn will not let me wipe the numbers off the mirror. He says the 274 stays up there next to the 74 so I REMEMBER. He still shaves around them. P.P.S. The golden retriever woman messaged me after the recant. She hit the heart because she was in week seven and about to quit too. She didn't. She is at month five now. P.P.P.S. My mother is coming for Thanksgiving. I am going to stand behind her at that hall mirror one more time, and then I am going to tell her about the saucer.

Where the ad sends people

trybloomandbond.com

274 hairs in my drain at week six. I quit. I was WRONG.

Pumpkin seed oil and saw palmetto in one softgel. Two a day for ninety days.