Wellness Insider Facebook ad: “Feel Like Yourself Again”

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I saw the back of my own head in an elevator mirror at St. Luke's in April and I got off on the wrong floor just so I wouldn't have to look at it again. There was a man in the elevator with me. A visitor, not staff. He was holding a bouquet of grocery store carnations wrapped in plastic and he was reading something on his phone. He didn't see anything. But I saw everything. The mirror was one of those long ones that wrap around the corner of the elevator, and I had turned to press 4, and there it was. My whole scalp. Not a thinning. Not a widening part. My scalp. Pink and shining under the fluorescent light like the crown of a doll that had lost half its hair. I pressed 2 instead. I got out at admin. I walked to the stairwell and I took the stairs the rest of the way up, and I have taken the stairs at St. Luke's every day since. My name is Loretta. I'm 56 years old. I've been a hospice case manager in Duluth, Minnesota for 23 years. I've sat with more dying people than I can count. I've held hands with wives who were about to become widows. I've told grown men that their father had 3 days left, and then told them again the next week when the father was still hanging on. I know what real suffering looks like. So when I tell you I stood in a stairwell at my job and cried about my hair, I need you to know I understand how that sounds. My daughter Karin lives in St. Paul with her husband and two kids. She calls on Sundays. My mother is 82 and still lives in her own house in Superior, Wisconsin, right across the bridge. My sister Marjorie lives up in Ely, about 2 hours north, on the edge of the Boundary Waters. She retired from the Forest Service 3 years ago and I don't see her as much as I want to. I've been divorced 8 years. His name was Eugene. He works at the port. We were fine and then we weren't and now we're neither. I share a little townhouse near Lester Park with a rescue cat named Roscoe and a lot of unfinished projects. That's the shape of my life. A schedule, a route, a Sunday call, and the lake. My hair used to be my thing. That sounds vain to say out loud but it's true. It was the color my mother's used to be. A dark, warm brown with a natural wave that fell right past my shoulders. My whole life people had touched it in stores. Reached out and lifted it and asked me what I used on it. I used almost nothing. That was the joke. I stopped noticing when it changed. It happened slow. It happens slow for a lot of women my age and I want to say that out loud because I spent a year thinking I was the only one. First it was the shower drain. I'd been clearing it every couple weeks for as long as I could remember. Then it was every week. Then it was every 3 days and I stopped counting because I didn't want to know. Then it was my pillow. I started finding hairs on my pillow in the morning. Not a hair. Hairs. A little dark scatter of them across the white cotton every single morning. I'd sweep them off with my hand before I made the bed. I'd pretend I hadn't seen them. Then it was the towel. I started keeping a black hand towel by the sink because after I brushed my hair the white one looked like I'd been shedding a dog on it. Then it was the ponytail. The ponytail I've worn to work my whole adult life started feeling different in my hand. Thinner. Less. Like the elastic wanted to slip off because there wasn't enough there to hold it. I switched my part from the left to the right because the right side still had some coverage. Then I switched it back a month later because now the right side didn't either. I bought one of those powders you're supposed to shake on your scalp to hide it. It stained the collar of my navy work cardigan and I threw it out in the parking lot at Menards so no one at home would see it in the trash. I stopped washing my hair as often because every wash meant more loss. I stopped brushing it in front of the mirror because I couldn't watch the strands come out on the bristles. I started wearing a wide black headband to work. I told my coworker Denise it was because my ears were cold. It was July. The thing about hospice work is you learn to notice what people are protecting. A widow who keeps her husband's reading glasses on the kitchen counter for a year. A daughter who won't sit in her father's chair. A man who won't take off his wedding ring even though the finger under it has gone gray. I know how to see the small things people do to hold onto themselves. I just couldn't see what I was doing to hold onto me. My doctor told me it was probably my age. My thyroid was fine, my iron was fine, my hormones were "in the range for a woman your age." She said the words genetic and postmenopausal and shrugged in a way that was supposed to be gentle. She said some women lose their hair as they get older and there wasn't really much to do about it. That's a hard thing to hear at 56 in a fluorescent room while you're still wearing your work badge. I tried the shampoo aisle. I tried the pills at Walgreens with the little pink bottle. I tried the biotin gummies my daughter sent me from Target. I tried a scalp serum I ordered at 1 AM after crying in the bathroom that I dropped 42 dollars on and used exactly twice. Nothing did anything. By March I had started keeping my hair in a low bun with the bun pulled forward so it would hide the crown of my head from behind. I had cancelled a dentist appointment because I didn't want to lie back in a chair with a bright light overhead where the hygienist could see my part from above. I had asked my daughter to take our Christmas photo from the front instead of the side. I hadn't told anyone. Not my sister. Not my daughter. Not my best friend Ellen who I've known since nursing prerequisites at UMD. I was pretending. I was 56 years old and I was pretending. My mother turned 82 on the second Saturday in May. We do the same thing every year. Perkins in Superior, 12:30 PM, the corner booth by the window that looks out at the parking lot. My mother orders the potato pancakes with a side of applesauce and a decaf coffee she barely drinks. My sister drives down from Ely. My daughter drives up from St. Paul with the grandkids if the weather holds. That year the weather held. I pulled into the parking lot 10 minutes early. Marjorie's truck was already there. My sister is always 15 minutes early to everything, always has been since we were kids, and I love her for it and it also drives me a little crazy. I walked in. She was already at the booth. She stood up when she saw me and I stopped in the middle of the walkway between the tables like someone had pulled the brake on me. Her hair. I'm going to try to explain this the way I saw it. My sister is 63. She has always looked older than me even though she's 7 years my senior. When we were younger it was because she was outside for a living, working trailheads, doing search and rescue in the winter, running a chainsaw for 30 years. Her hands looked like a man's hands. Her face was weathered in the way beautiful things get weathered, and her hair had started to thin at the temples when she was 55, and by the time she retired at 60 she had a short pixie cut that she trimmed herself at her kitchen sink because she said there wasn't enough left up there to bother a stylist about. I hadn't seen her in person since Thanksgiving. The woman standing in front of me at Perkins on that Saturday in May had hair to her shoulders. Not thick like a magazine ad. But there. Present. Filled in through the crown where the light used to shine through when she leaned over her plate. Grown out at the temples where the two little bare patches used to be. Enough of it that she'd pinned one side back with a small tortoise shell clip like she used to wear in the 80s. I hugged her and I said "your hair" and she laughed and said "yeah, I know, isn't that something." And I sat down and I didn't taste my food. I got through lunch. I sang happy birthday. I helped my mother out of the booth and to her car. I told my sister I'd see her back at the house because we were all going over to help mom hang a new porch light. I drove the 3 miles to my mother's place in a fog. Marjorie was in the driveway when I pulled up. She was leaning against the tailgate of her truck. She had her hands in the pockets of her jean jacket. She looked at me over the roof of my car and she said "you want to talk about it." Not a question. That's my sister. We sat on the porch swing at our mother's house while my daughter and the grandkids were inside setting up the ladder. I could hear my mother telling Karin where to find the extra bulbs. The lake was 4 blocks away and you could hear a gull sometimes and a boat horn from the harbor. I told her about the elevator. I told her about the pillow. The towel. The powder. The headband in July. The Christmas photo. The dentist appointment I cancelled. I told her about the doctor with the shrug. She let me talk for a long time. My sister is a good listener. That's the thing they don't put in the retirement papers when a Forest Service ranger retires. She has spent 40 years of her life being the person a scared hiker or a lost kayaker sees first, and she knows how to let a person get to the end of a sentence before she says anything back. When I was done she put her hand on my knee and she said "Retta, this isn't age. Or not the way you think." She said it wasn't happening to her hair anymore. She said she'd been at it for close to a year and she wanted to tell me and hadn't because she didn't want to sound like every ad she'd ever scrolled past on Facebook. She said her friend Diane, who used to work dispatch out of the ranger station in Tower, was the one who'd told her, and Diane had heard about it from her sister-in-law in the Twin Cities, and it was one of those things that had moved from woman to woman in a small circle of people who'd stopped believing anything on TV. She said the piece that had finally made her try it wasn't a promise about her hair. It was a study Diane had shown her on her phone about something called oxidative stress. I want to explain this the way she explained it to me on the porch swing because it made sense in a way nothing else ever had. Marjorie said think about rust. She said think about a car that sat in a barn for 20 years. The metal underneath is fine. It's the right metal, same as when it was new. But something in the air, over time, does something to it that nobody planned for. It scales up. It roughens. And the paint on top starts to lift, and the trim starts to weaken, and after long enough the car looks the way it does not because the metal is bad but because the surface has been slowly oxidized. She said your body does that too. From the inside. She said the doctors call it oxidative stress and they call the process itself oxidation, and it's the same word. It's rust. And the tissue that gets rusted first is the tissue with the most delicate blood supply. The small vessels. The capillaries that feed the places that don't get a lot of flow to begin with. The tips of the fingers. The lining of the arteries. The back of the eyes. The scalp. She said the follicles that grow your hair are fed by the tiniest little vessels in your body. Smaller than you can imagine. And when the vessels get rusted, the follicles don't get what they need. They don't die exactly. They just get quiet. They shrink. They put out a thinner strand. Then a shorter one. Then nothing at all for a while. And the whole system slows down not because the follicle is broken but because the environment around it has gotten too rusty for it to do its job. She said all those pills and shampoos and gummies I'd tried had been trying to feed a follicle that couldn't hear them. Because the mailbox was rusted shut. I sat there on the porch swing with my hand over my mouth. She said what she'd been taking was pomegranate. I said pomegranate. She said yes but not the kind you drink and not the kind at the produce counter. She said it was an extract, and specifically an extract of the peel of the pomegranate, and she said that mattered a lot and she'd explain why in a minute. She said the peel of the pomegranate has a set of compounds in it called punicalagins. She said the word slow so I could hear it. Pyoo-nih-kah-lah-gins. She said they are among the strongest natural antioxidants anyone has ever measured. She said they don't exist in the juice. They don't exist in the seeds. They exist in the peel, which nobody eats and which most companies throw away. She said the reason that matters is because when you take those compounds in, your body uses them to quiet down the oxidation. To slow the rust. She said it works on the vessels first. The small vessels. The ones that feed the places that were getting starved. She said her hair coming back wasn't the point. Her hair coming back was the sign. The scalp was the place she could see it happening because the scalp is where the small vessels are close to the surface and the follicles are sensitive enough to respond quickly when the environment changes. But she said she'd noticed other things too. Her hands didn't hurt in the morning anymore. Her energy in the late afternoon had stopped bottoming out. Her nails were less brittle. Her skin on her forearms had stopped looking papery. She said the whole body had gotten a little less rusty. Then she said something I want you to hear. She said most of the pomegranate supplements you'll find are standardized to something called ellagic acid. And ellagic acid is one of the compounds you get when the punicalagins in the peel break down inside your body. It's downstream. It's the after, not the before. She said companies use it because it's cheaper to standardize to. It sounds impressive on a label. It's technically related to pomegranate. But it's not the same thing as taking in the actual peel extract with the actual punicalagins in it, because the peel extract gives your body the raw material to make what it needs when it needs it, not just one downstream piece. She said "if you're going to try one thing, try the thing that's actually the peel." She said the one she took was called Auniva. She said it was two capsules in the morning with her coffee. That was the whole routine. She'd been taking it every morning for close to a year. She pulled her phone out and she showed me the bottle. Orange label, dark green cap. She said it was organic and made in the USA and she said the company had a 90-day guarantee where you sent the bottle back if it didn't work and they refunded your money. She said she'd known within about 6 weeks that something was different. I didn't order it that night. I want to tell you I did but I didn't. I went home and I sat with it for 4 days. I'm a hospice case manager. I don't buy things off the internet at 1 AM anymore. I've done that too many times. I looked up what she'd said about the peel and the punicalagins. I looked up oxidative stress and the vascular pathway. I read about follicle blood supply. I read about NF-κB, which is a signaling pathway involved in the low-grade inflammation that gets stirred up when things stay oxidized for too long, and I read that pomegranate polyphenols seemed to quiet it down. None of it promised me my hair would come back. That was the strange part. Every ad I had ever seen about hair had promised me my hair would come back. And this stuff, when I actually read about it, didn't promise me anything about hair at all. It talked about vessels and antioxidants and inflammation. Hair was just the thing that some people happened to notice. That was the part that made me finally order it. I ordered it on a Wednesday in May. It came the following Tuesday. The bottle looked like the one my sister had shown me on her phone. I put it on the kitchen counter next to the coffee maker so I wouldn't forget. I want to tell you what happened the way it actually happened, because I don't want to be one of those ads. Week 1: Nothing. I mean nothing. I took 2 capsules with my coffee every morning. I felt no different. I kept checking the pillow like it was going to change overnight. It didn't. I almost stopped. Week 2: Still nothing on my head. But I noticed that the little ache I get in my thumb joint when it's cold at night wasn't there when I woke up on Thursday. I noticed I'd made it through the whole workday on Friday without hitting the 3 PM wall. I filed it away. Week 3: Same. I told myself I would give it the full 90 days because I was not going to be the woman who quit at 3 weeks and then wondered. Week 4: My daughter called on a Sunday and said "mom, did you get your hair cut" and I laughed because I hadn't been to a stylist in months. I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror after we hung up. Something looked different at my temples. I couldn't say what. Week 5: The hairs on the pillow were fewer. Not gone. Fewer. I counted them one morning. There were 6. There used to be more than I could count. Week 6: I took my headband off at work on a Tuesday and I forgot to put it back on and it was 3 in the afternoon before I noticed. Denise didn't say anything. But she looked at me a beat too long over the top of her monitor. Week 7: My mother called and said "Retta, is your hair growing back." Week 8: There was a soft fringe of new little hairs at my hairline that hadn't been there before. Very short. Like the first grass after a burn. I touched them with my fingertip and I sat down on the closed lid of the toilet in my bathroom and I cried for about 5 minutes. Week 10: I put it in a ponytail one morning without thinking. And the ponytail felt like a ponytail again. Not a wisp. A ponytail. Week 12: My sister came down for the 4th of July. She stood on my porch and she looked at me and she said "there you are." I want to tell you that's when it hit me. But it hit me in pieces over the next month. The powder went in the trash for real this time. The headband I kept, because it turns out I did like it as an accessory. But not to hide anything. I made the dentist appointment. I let the hygienist see my part from above and I didn't think about it once. My daughter took a photo of me on a boat in August with the sun behind me and I sent it to Marjorie without cropping it. Marjorie sent back a photo of her own hair pinned up with the same tortoise shell clip she'd worn at Perkins. She wrote "same team." I'm not telling you this because my hair is the point. I'm telling you this because I lost something I didn't know how to talk about, and I got it back, and the getting it back changed more than my hair. I stopped hiding. That's the part. There is something that happens when your body starts giving you back small pieces of what it used to do. You realize how much energy you were spending on the hiding. On the compensating. On the not-mirror-glancing and the not-Christmas-photo and the not-ponytail. And when the reason to hide goes away, all that energy comes back to you. And you don't know what to do with it at first, and then you remember. I take my 2 capsules with my coffee every morning. I keep an extra bottle in the cabinet because my sister told me they sometimes run out and she's right, they have twice. If you're a woman my age and something similar has been happening to you, and you have been quietly hiding it the way I was quietly hiding mine, I want to tell you a few things. You are not vain for caring about this. You are not shallow. You are not making it up. What you are seeing is real. And it does not have to be the shrug your doctor gave you. It does not have to be the shampoo aisle. It does not have to be the pink pills in a box or the powder in a bottle or the wide black headband in July. You have a lot of body left. And a lot of that body is fed by small vessels that have been slowly rusting for a long time and no one has ever explained it to you the way my sister explained it to me on that porch swing. Auniva is what she showed me. Auniva is what I take. It's the actual peel extract with the actual punicalagins in it, not the cheaper ellagic acid stand-in that most companies use. Two capsules with your coffee. That's the whole routine. They have a 90-day guarantee. If it doesn't do anything for you, you send the bottle back and they refund every penny. I looked at their site for a long time before I ordered it because I wanted to know what I was signing up for. They make it easy. If it isn't for you, mail it back inside the 90 days. Try it for 90 days. Give your scalp enough time to hear you. Give the small vessels enough time to catch up. If it does nothing, you send it back and you are out nothing. If it does what it did for my sister and what it did for me, you are going to know it before the 90 days are up. 👉 https://auniva.co/pom/5 P.S. I want to say one more thing about the peel. When you look at most pomegranate supplements at the drugstore or online, they'll say pomegranate on the front and then somewhere on the back they'll list ellagic acid. That's the giveaway. The company that gives you the whole peel extract will tell you about the punicalagins on the front of the bottle because they know what they've got. The company that gives you a cheaper knockoff will hide the ellagic acid on the back and put a picture of a shiny red fruit on the label. If you take anything from all of this, take that. Look for the peel. Look for the punicalagins. P.P.S. I did not sleep more the first few weeks. I did not eat different. I did not change my shampoo. I did not add a scalp massage or a special brush or an oil. All I did was take the 2 capsules in the morning. I want to say that clearly because I know a lot of women my age have tried a lot of things and are tired of adding more things to the routine. This is not a new routine. This is one thing in the morning. That's it. P.P.P.S. Auniva has a 90-day money-back guarantee. If you try it for the full 3 months and you don't see or feel what I saw and felt, you send the bottle back and they give you your money back. That's the whole deal. There is no fine print I could find. My sister took the guarantee at its word before she ordered and I took her word for it and here I am writing this on a Sunday in September with a ponytail in my hair. If you're on the fence, let the guarantee do what a guarantee is supposed to do. Let it be the thing that lets you say yes. 👉 https://auniva.co/pom/5

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Feel Like Yourself Again

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