Susan Smith Facebook ad: “Offered minoxidil for life or a wig? Read this”

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My dermatologist gave me two options for my thinning part: minoxidil for the rest of my life, or a good wig. I put $250 down on the wig. That was five months ago. We got back from Italy last week. A woman who has cut my hair for eleven years said one sentence to me on a Tuesday, and it cost me the $250. Four years ago menopause took me apart. Awake at 3am every night doing inventory on my own life. Soaked nightclothes. Ten pounds that would not move, and I have never been a woman who couldn't move ten pounds. I snapped at my daughter Emily over a parking space. An actual parking space. Then cried in the car about it. I started HRT last spring. It wasn't instant, a few months and two adjustments. But by the fall I was SLEEPING. I was walking three mornings a week with Carol from two doors down. The good jeans, the dark ones I'd kept in the bottom drawer out of pure spite, fit again. Dave booked Italy for our 30th. I got my life back. I got my LIFE back. Except for one thing. One thing menopause took that HRT never gave back, and I hid it so well that nobody in my life knew. Not Dave. Not Emily. Not Carol, and Carol has seen me in a hospital gown. There's a can of root touch-up spray behind the spare shampoo in my bathroom cabinet. Behind it, not beside it, because Dave would have to move the shampoo to find it, and Dave has not moved a shampoo bottle in thirty years. Four minutes. Head down, shake the can, short bursts along the part, blend it with a finger, then wipe the sink, because the mist settles on everything and dries the color of weak coffee. Every morning. Two years. I counted the cans once, in a moment I'd rather not describe. Eleven. Our kitchen has a downlight straight over the island. One morning I was reading something on my phone under it, the screen went dark, and I caught myself in it, and the part in my hair was not a line anymore. It was a shape. You either know exactly what I mean, or you've never had to look. After that I organized my life around it without once saying the words out loud. Up before Dave. Every day, weekends included. I checked restaurants for lighting before agreeing to them, and if the ceiling had those little spotlights I'd suggest somewhere else and make something up about the parking. And Dave, who has put his hand on the back of my head while we watch television since 1996, would reach over and I would move. Nothing dramatic. A lean forward, a reach for my water. He stopped after a while. He thought it was about him, and I let him, and that's the part I'm least proud of. In April I finally saw a dermatologist. New patient, $180, six weeks to get in. She parted my hair with the end of a pen, twice, then went back to her screen and typed while she talked. "This is menopause hair. It's very common. Your options are minoxidil, which you'd need to keep using indefinitely, or honestly, a lot of women your age do very well with a good wig." Nine minutes. I worked it out later against the parking receipt. I sat in that parking lot and did the math, because I wasn't being stupid. I was being realistic with what I'd been handed. Minoxidil: Carol has been putting it on twice a day since her fifties. Twice. A day. She told me once, laughing, that she'd stopped counting the years. Forever is a long word when you say it about a bathroom counter. The wig: real hair, fitted, about $1,800. And Dave never puts his hand in my hair again, not once, for the rest of our marriage, and he never knows why. I picked the wig. Of course I picked the wig. The shelf had already taken $1,200 off me, biotin, the $79 bottle, a scalp serum, a rosemary thing off the internet, and the part kept widening through all of it. Then Italy got close and I woke at 1am with the real math in my head. Eleven days. A hotel with a pool, which I had chosen FOR the pool. Dave has wanted me in the water with him for thirty years and I'd spent two of them on the edge in a cover-up saying I'd just had my hair done. The spray does not survive water. I found that out at a farmers market in the rain. So on the Monday I called a wig studio forty minutes away, where nobody knows me, put $250 down and booked a fitting for the Thursday. A wig fitting?? At 54. With my HRT in my purse and my good jeans on and a plane ticket to Italy for my thirtieth anniversary sitting on my phone. I didn't tell Dave. I didn't tell Emily. I didn't tell Carol, who was texting me about our walk while I was on hold. Nobody asked. I was very good at this. The studio said a wig sits better on shorter hair. So on the Tuesday I went to Renee, who has cut my hair for eleven years, and I said, "I need it short. Really short. Above the shoulder." She lifted a section, held it, and said, "Short for what? You've never gone above the shoulder in eleven years." And before I could stop myself: "It has to sit right under a wig." She put the scissors down on the counter. "Wig for what, hon?" And I cried in the cape, in the chair, with her next client right there. Then I told her. All of it, out loud for the first time in two years. The can, Dave's hand, the $250. She didn't look shocked. That was what undid me. She nodded the way you nod at something you've seen before. "I hear this a lot. Can I tell you what almost nobody tells you?" She didn't stop cutting. She wet me down, combed a section forward over my eyes and talked to the top of my head between snips. "So. Estrogen isn't just the sweats. It sits around the follicle as well, like a," she waved the comb at the mirror, "a shield. And there's a hormone, DHT. Everybody's got it. Men, us, all of us." Snip. "Estrogen's been in the way of it your whole life. Then it goes. And nobody's in the way." I asked what it does when it gets there. Doesn't kill anything, she said. Shrinks it. Smaller follicle, finer hair out of it, finer again next time, and then one cycle it just, and here she made a small sound and closed her hand. Which is why it's the part first. That's me, not her. That's why it's a shape and not a line. The rest came out sideways, in pieces, while she worked. Biotin, when I admitted to the biotin: "Mm. Feeds it." Comb. "Feeds the hair, hon. Doesn't say a word to the thing shrinking it." The $79 one, when I said the name: a face in the mirror. "Same story, nicer bottle. You paid for the bottle." She didn't have to ask about the spray. She's had my head in her hands for eleven years. "Sweetheart. That's paint. You've been painting a floor in a house that's sinking." And minoxidil, Carol's bottle twice a day since her fifties: she said it opens the blood vessels up, which it does, that part's real, it's just that it's a vasodilator that doesn't block DHT. I looked up vasodilator in the car afterwards. She stopped, scissors up. "Nobody gave you two options, hon. They gave you two ways around it, and neither one touches the DHT." I got angry in that chair. Not at her. At nine minutes and a pen. I asked what you're meant to do instead. She's not a doctor, she does hair. But stop shopping for hair products, she said. Two things. One that turns down how much of it you're making. One that sits on the follicle so what's already in there can't get on. Both. One on its own leaves the other half in the room. I said I'm on HRT, I'm not adding hormones. Not a hormone, she said. Pumpkin seed oil and saw palmetto, a plant thing. Take the bottle to my own doctor, don't take her word for it. Which I did. She read the label and said fine. Renee never said a brand name. Nothing came out of a drawer, no little shelf by the register. She took the inch and a half off and asked if I wanted it blown out. I canceled Thursday from the salon parking lot. That part was instant. The girl was lovely about the $250 and I told her to keep it. Then I didn't buy anything for two nights, which I'd like on the record, because I've been sold to before. Tuesday night, iPad on my knees, I typed in the two things she'd said. It's a wall out there. Everything on the first page had biotin in it, gummies, hair-skin-nails. The one Emily's friend sells is saw palmetto with collagen and eleven other things and no pumpkin seed. I found pumpkin seed capsules for $14 and then read the label properly: ground seed powder, not oil. I nearly bought two separate bottles and stood them by the coffee maker, then realized I'd take one for a week and forget the other, like the magnesium. Wednesday night I found one that was only the two of them. Both, one softgel, nothing packed around it. I read it twice and ordered it on the sofa next to Dave, who was watching golf. Now the part I hate seeing skipped. Weeks 1, 2 and 3: nothing. Absolutely nothing. Weeks 4 to 7: the brush. I wasn't pulling a wad out of it every morning, and one day I realized I'd stopped checking the shower drain with my foot. Weeks 8 to 10: short hairs along the part, standing straight up, completely uncooperative, ridiculous. I nearly cried at a stoplight. Week 12: Dave squinted at me over the coffee pot and said, "Did you change something?" He couldn't say what. He just knew. Month 4: Italy. I was in that pool every single day. There's a photo Dave took from behind, on the balcony, of my wet head in the morning, and I let him keep it. Two years ago I'd have made him delete it. I'm not a doctor and this is just what happened to me. It isn't a promise. I can't tell you your part will do what mine did, bodies are bodies, and some of it might be the HRT still settling in. But I know this much: the two I was given were never the whole list. If you're where I was, go read how it works. That's all. Pumpkin seed oil and saw palmetto, Bloom & Bond, and they say give it 90 days, which sounds long until you remember I gave eleven cans two years. P.S. The last can is still under my sink. I keep meaning to throw it out and I don't, I think because I want to be able to look at it. On our last night in Italy, Dave put his hand in my hair, and I let it stay there.

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trybloomandbond.com

Offered minoxidil for life or a wig? Read this ☝️

What my hairdresser said the week of my wig fitting.