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For about four days, I had a profile picture I actually loved. It was the staff photo from our year end function. All of us crowded onto the steps outside the venue, laughing at something, the light going gold behind us. For the first time in longer than I can tell you, I looked at a photo of myself and thought, there I am. I look well. I made it my WhatsApp picture that same night. I sent it to my mother. Then on the Thursday, Lerato, the young woman who runs our company social media, asked if she could have a quiet word. She looked uncomfortable. She had her laptop with her. She said she needed to tell me something, and she hoped I would not be upset, because she had only been trying to do something kind. She turned the laptop around. It was the same photo. The same steps, the same gold light, all of us laughing. Except in this one, the real one, the one the photographer had actually taken, I could see my scalp straight through the top of my hair. She had painted my hair back in before she sent the photo to everyone. She had sat at her desk, opened the picture, and quietly filled in the top of my head. At 24 years old she had taken one look and decided it was the kind thing to do. The whole company had the soft version. The version of me that was not real. And every person standing on those steps had been close enough to see the version that was. I am 53. The thinning started somewhere in my late forties, around the same time the hot flushes did, and like most women I told myself it was nothing serious. A bit of shedding. Everyone sheds. But it crept. My ponytail thinned until the elastic went round an extra twice. My parting widened. The hair at my crown went soft and sparse and would not lie the way it used to. So I became very good at managing it. I knew which way to part it. I knew which seat at the table kept the overhead light off the top of my head. I knew never to let anyone photograph me from above, and never to be caught on the stairs with someone standing below me. I had convinced myself that as long as I was careful, nobody could really tell. The photo took that away from me in one afternoon. A 24 year old had not only seen it. She had seen it clearly enough to feel she had to protect me from it. I went home that night and cried in a way I had not cried in years. Then I did what I imagine you have done. I tried to fix it on my own, quietly, so nobody would have to do me any more favours. I took biotin every morning for months. My nails grew beautifully. My hair did not. I worked through the thickening shampoos on the Clicks shelf, one after another. They gave me ten minutes of fullness in the shower and then my hair dried flat against my head exactly as before. I tried the foam from the pharmacy. It made my scalp itch and flake until I gave up. Months of trying. A great deal of money. And my crown carried on thinning the entire time. It was only after that photo that I stopped buying things and started trying to understand what was actually happening underneath. And what I found is the reason I am writing this. Beneath the scalp there is a network of blood vessels so fine they are thinner than a single strand of hair. Every minute of every day, their job is to carry oxygen and nutrients up to each hair follicle on your head. A follicle is one of the hungriest structures in the body. To grow a thick, strong hair, it needs that delivery to be steady and generous. Here is the part no one had ever explained to me. From around the age of 35, those tiny vessels naturally begin to stiffen and narrow. And once a woman reaches 50, the drop in hormones speeds it up considerably. By your fifties, the supply line feeding your follicles can be running at a fraction of what it once did. The follicle is not broken. It is being starved. Researchers call it follicle starvation. And it explained every wasted rand. The biotin worked. The vitamins worked. The nutrients had been in my bloodstream the whole time. They simply could not reach my follicles, because the road leading to them had narrowed almost shut. Once I understood that, I knew what I needed was not another pill. I needed something that worked on the scalp itself. Something that opened that supply back up, and then fed the follicle directly. That is when I found Alyra. Alyra is a hair mist built around this exact problem. It works in two steps. First, caffeine. Sprayed onto the scalp, caffeine helps wake up the circulation up there and encourages those narrowed vessels to relax and open, so blood can travel back toward the follicle. Then the botanicals feed it. Hydrolyzed rice protein to strengthen the strand. Aloe vera and ginger to calm a tight, irritated scalp. Panthenol to keep everything hydrated. Open the way to the follicle. Feed the follicle. Deal with the real reason the hair was thinning, instead of painting over it. You spray it on in the morning and carry on with your day. I started that same week. The first two weeks were quiet. My scalp just felt less tight and less dry. By week four I noticed my brush. Clearly less hair in it. The drain told the same story after my next wash. By the third month the baby hairs came. Fine soft new growth along my hairline, the kind you have to catch in good light. I stood at the window and counted them like a fool. By month four my parting had closed up and my crown had filled in. I caught the overhead light in the bathroom one morning, the light I had spent years dodging, and it did not land on a scalp anymore. If your hair has been thinning, and you have quietly built your whole life around hiding it, please hear me. It is not vanity and it is not your fault. There is a real reason, and there is something you can do about it. Alyra comes with a 120 day money back guarantee, which gives you four full months to see it work on your own hair, about the time the growth cycle needs. If you are not happy, you send it back and your money is returned, no fuss. The multi bottle bundles bring the price down and give you enough to see the change through properly. A few weeks ago, someone snapped a photo of me at my desk. An ordinary one. No function lighting, no warning, taken from slightly above. I looked at it for a long time. Then I made it my profile picture. The real one, this time. Nobody had touched it. Tap below to try Alyra for yourself https://alyra.co.za/products/alyra-hair-enhancer-mist