Emily Johnson Facebook ad: “Why I'm Never in Any of Her Photos”

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1668516270829983

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Hair Care

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I have hundreds of photos of my daughter. I'm not in any of them… Not because nobody offered to take them. My husband asks all the time. "Here, let me get one of you two." My mom holds up her phone at every visit. "Let me get a picture of you and the baby." I always say no. Or I take the photo and then delete it when nobody's looking. Because every time I see myself in a photo with my daughter, I don't see a happy mom with her baby. I see a stranger. This thin, tired woman with a widening part line and temples that look like they belong to someone twenty years older, holding the most beautiful baby in the world. My daughter is five months old. She is perfect. And I have almost no proof that I exist in her life right now because I can't stand to look at myself. When did this happen? I swear I looked like myself at the baby shower. I have photos from my third trimester and I look like me in them. My hair was thick. Full. The best it had ever been in my entire life. People commented on it constantly. "Pregnancy looks so good on you." "Your hair is amazing." "You're glowing." I was glowing. Then the baby came. And the glow left. And it took my hair with it. Motherhood was supposed to be beautiful. I told everyone it was. Posted the hospital photos. Shared the tiny-feet pictures. Wrote the "we're so in love" caption on Instagram. And I meant it. I did. I am so in love with my daughter that it physically hurts sometimes. But then everyone goes home. The visitors stop coming. It's 2 AM and the baby needs to eat again and I catch a glimpse of myself in the dark bathroom mirror and I see that stranger again. The one from the photos I keep deleting. Thin hair plastered to her head. Part line so wide you can see scalp. Temples that used to frame her face now just... gone. I used to have beautiful hair. I know how that sounds. I know it sounds vain. I know there are real problems in the world and I'm sitting here grieving my hair while I have a healthy, perfect baby sleeping in the next room. But grief is what it is. It doesn't care if it's "reasonable." It doesn't care if other people think your reason is good enough. It just shows up and sits on your chest and makes everything heavier. And losing your hair after a baby is grief. Even if nobody calls it that. Because it's not just hair. It's looking in the mirror and not seeing the woman you used to be. The one who felt confident. The one who could wear her hair down without thinking about it. The one who didn't delete every photo of herself because she couldn't stand what she saw. That woman is gone. And in her place is this exhausted person who pulls clumps of hair out of the shower drain every morning before she even checks on the baby. I started tracking it because I couldn't believe what I was seeing. The shower drain. Every day. Clumps that would make you sick if I showed you a photo. My ponytail went from three wraps on the hair tie to five. Then I stopped wearing ponytails because even at five wraps it looked pathetic. Like a little girl's ponytail on a grown woman's head. I found my hair on the baby's onesie. In her diaper. Wound around her tiny fingers and toes. I read about something called a hair tourniquet, where a strand wraps around a baby's toe and cuts off circulation. I started checking her feet three times a day. My hair was falling out so much it was becoming a safety concern for my own child. And the worst part was the ugly math that runs in your head at 3 AM while you're nursing. If my hair looks like this at five months postpartum, what will it look like at eight months? If I've already lost this much, how much more is coming? Is this going to be my hair now? Is this just who I am? I thought about my mom. How she always had thin hair. How she wore scarves and headbands my entire childhood and I never thought about why. I'm turning into her. That thought used to make me happy. Now it just scared me. Because I'm thirty-two years old. And I look in the mirror and I see a woman who looks tired and depleted and ten years older than she is. Not aging old. Just... used up. Wrung out. Like my body gave everything it had to grow this baby and there's nothing left for me. My husband tells me I'm beautiful. He says he doesn't notice the hair. He's lying. Or he's being kind. Or he loves me too much to say what we both already know. Because I notice. Every mirror. Every photo. Every time I catch my reflection in a window or the black screen of my phone. I see it. And I can't unsee it. My daughter is going to turn one in seven months. There will be a party. There will be photos. Family will come. And right now, if you scrolled through my phone, you would find hundreds of photos of her first five months of life. Her first smile. Her first time rolling over. Her sleeping in her crib, in her carseat, on her dad's chest. I'm not in a single one. I don't want that to be true for her first birthday too. I don't want my daughter to grow up and flip through her baby album someday and wonder why mama is never in the photos. Is it wrong to want to feel like a person again? I thought about cutting it all off. Just chopping it short so the thin spots weren't as obvious and the shedding wasn't as dramatic. A lot of women in the mom groups do that. They call it "the big chop." They post photos with brave smiles and captions about embracing the change. I thought about it. Then I cried. Because I didn't want to embrace the change. I didn't want to cut my hair into a bob and pretend I was doing it for style reasons when really I was doing it because I couldn't stand to watch one more clump go down the drain. I wanted my hair back. I wanted ME back. Not the pregnancy version. Not some impossible standard. Just the normal, regular, before-the-baby version of myself. The woman who could wash her hair without it feeling like a funeral. The woman who could take a photo without calculating which angle hides the most scalp. So I did what I always do when I'm stuck and desperate and running on four hours of sleep. I started reading. Not googling "how to stop postpartum hair loss." I'd already done that a hundred times. The answers were always the same. Take biotin. Try rosemary oil. Eat more protein. Just wait. It'll grow back eventually. I'd been waiting. It wasn't growing back. This time I went deeper. Not "what can I take" but "why is this actually happening." And what I found changed everything. Turns out my follicles aren't dying. They're sleeping. The hormone crash after delivery, the estrogen dropping up to 8x within days, sends your follicles into emergency shutdown. They just stop. It's a survival reflex called telogen effluvium. They're not dead. They're not damaged. They're dormant. Waiting for a signal to wake up and start growing again. And here's the part that made me want to scream. Biotin can't send that signal. Collagen can't send it. Prenatals can't send it. None of them can. They're food for hair that's already growing. But my hair isn't growing. It's asleep. Every supplement I'd taken for months was like setting a plate of food in front of someone in a coma. The food is fine. They can't eat it. They're unconscious. All those months of biotin. All that Nutrafol at $88 a month. All that collagen in my morning coffee. I was feeding follicles that couldn't hear me. When I read that, I didn't feel angry. I felt something closer to relief. Because for the first time since the shedding started, there was an explanation that actually made sense. It wasn't that nothing works. It wasn't that I was doomed to just wait. It was that everything I'd tried was designed for a completely different type of hair loss. Then I read about peptide signaling. Growth factor peptides that mimic the wake up signal your body is supposed to send after the hormone crash stabilizes. The signal that tells dormant follicles: it's safe. Start producing again. They're topical. Applied directly to the scalp. They don't go through your digestive system. They don't enter your bloodstream. The molecules are too large to pass through the skin into systemic circulation. Which means they're safe while breastfeeding. I need to say something about that. I'm breastfeeding. My daughter's safety is not negotiable. If something has even the slightest chance of getting into my milk, I won't touch it. That's why minoxidil was never an option. There's a documented case of a baby developing abnormal hair growth because minoxidil transferred through breast milk. So I checked. I read about the 500 Dalton rule. Anything above 500 Daltons in molecular weight can't penetrate deep enough to reach systemic circulation. The peptides used in follicle signaling serums are well above that threshold. My friend Sarah, who's a nurse practitioner with two kids, confirmed it. They physically cannot get to your breast milk. They stay at the scalp. They reach the follicle. That's it. That's how I found Maven. Not from an ad. Not from an influencer. From a rabbit hole of reading about follicle dormancy and peptide signaling at midnight while my daughter slept on my chest. What stopped me on their page was one line: "Designed specifically for postpartum hair shedding. 100% topical. Breastfeeding safe." Nobody else says that. Every other product either ignores breastfeeding entirely or buries it in a disclaimer. Maven put it at the top of the page. Like they actually built this for women in my exact situation. I ordered the three month supply because everything I'd read said follicles need consistent signaling to transition from dormant back to active growth. Three months is the minimum window. There's also a 100 day money back guarantee. And honestly, after months of spending money on supplements that were never going to fix the actual problem, a guarantee was the thing that pushed me from "maybe" to "okay, I'll try." The first two weeks I didn't see anything dramatic. My scalp felt different. Healthier somehow. But I wasn't watching my scalp. I was watching the drain. Week three. I washed my hair and there was hair in the drain. But not a clump. Not the horror show I'd been staring at for months. Just... normal hair. The amount that used to come out before pregnancy. I stood in the shower for an extra minute just staring at the drain because I couldn't believe it. Week four. My husband looked at me across the dinner table and said, "You look different." He didn't say better. He didn't say younger. He said different. Like something had shifted. I knew what it was. I looked like myself. Not completely. Not overnight. But the trajectory had changed. For months everything was moving in the wrong direction. More shedding. More thinning. More hiding. Now it was moving the other way. It's been ten weeks. I have baby hairs at my temples. These tiny little sprouts that stick straight up and make me look slightly ridiculous. But they are the most beautiful thing I've seen since my daughter was born because they mean my follicles woke up. My ponytail went back to four wraps. I wore my hair down last weekend for the first time since delivery. I just... wore it down. Didn't think about it. Didn't calculate angles. Didn't check mirrors. I just got dressed and left the house with my hair down like a person who doesn't think about her hair all day. My mom came over last Sunday. She held up her phone and said, "Let me get one of you and the baby." I said yes. I didn't delete it. I can't tell you how long it's been since that happened. I still look in the mirror and see the tired mom. The dark circles. The spit up stain on my shoulder. The general chaos of having a baby. But I also see me. Not the pregnancy version. Not the before version. Just the current version. The mom version. The one who's exhausted and overwhelmed and so deeply in love with her baby and also, finally, starting to recognize herself again. That's all I wanted. Not perfect hair. Not Instagram hair. Not pregnancy hair. Just to look in the mirror and not feel that gut punch of "who is that." Maven didn't give me back my old life. Nothing can do that. I'm a mom now and everything is different and that's okay. But it gave me back the part of me I thought I'd traded away. The part that feels like mine. Not the baby's. Not the hormones'. Mine. If you're postpartum and you've been staring at a stranger in the mirror, if you've been skipping photos, if you've been crying in bathrooms or cars or showers, if you've been telling yourself it's vain and selfish to care about your hair when you have this beautiful baby... It's not vain. It's not selfish. You didn't trade yourself for your baby. You don't have to choose. Your follicles aren't dead. They're dormant. Waiting for a signal that supplements can't send. Maven sends that signal. Topically. Without entering your bloodstream. Without touching your breast milk. 100 day money back guarantee. You don't have to wait twelve months to feel like yourself again. You don't have to cut your hair to cope. You don't have to keep feeding a follicle that's asleep. You just have to wake it up.

Where the ad sends people

mavenlabs.store

Why I'm Never in Any of Her Photos 👆

The Peptide Hair Serum is a powerful blend of bioactive compounds, including five peptides and natural botanical extracts, designed to provide superior cosmetic care for your hair. Peptides like sh-Polypeptide-1 and sh-Oligopeptide-10 help support the appearance of thicker, more voluminous hair, whi...