Ava Mitchell Facebook ad: “There's a switch. Yours is off.”

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1997124234208301

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Facebook, Instagram, Audience Network and Threads

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Niche

Hair Care

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There is a molecule in your body that decides if your hair grows back. Yours got switched off the day you gave birth — and nobody has told you how to turn it back on. I had gone in to wash my face before bed and ended up on the bathroom floor holding a clump of my own hair. Not a strand. Not a few. A clump. The size of a small mouse. My daughter was four months old and asleep on my chest in the carrier. I'd been running my fingers through my hair at the sink and pulled out what felt like a piece of my body. I sat down because my legs stopped working. I didn't cry. I think I was past crying at that point. I just stared at it in my hand under the bathroom light and thought, very calmly, I am going to be bald by her first birthday. That was the thought. That clean. That final. And then — because my brain doesn't know how to stop — I opened my phone and started Googling again. The same things I'd Googled a hundred times. "Postpartum hair loss when does it stop." "Postpartum hair loss four months." "Postpartum hair loss not stopping." "Am I losing my hair forever after baby." It was the fourth night in a row I'd done this on the bathroom floor. I want to tell you what my life looked like before I figured out what was actually happening, because if you're reading this on your phone right now and your hair is in your other hand, I need you to know I'm not somebody who had this together. I hadn't slept more than two consecutive hours since she was born. I cried in the cereal aisle once because I caught my reflection in the freezer door and I genuinely didn't recognize the woman looking back at me. She had see-through hair at the temples. Two little fuzzy patches above her ears like she'd been pulled at. A ponytail the size of a pencil where there used to be a fist. I had stopped wearing my hair up. I had stopped going in the pool at my sister-in-law's house. I had angled the camera up on every Zoom call for six months so my coworkers wouldn't see my part. My husband told me he didn't notice. I knew he was lying. I'd watched his eyes go to the same spot above my left ear and then jump away. He was being kind. It made it worse. I had been to my OB. She said the thing they all say. "It's hormones. It'll grow back. Most women see improvement by nine months. Try not to stress about it." Try not to stress about it. I almost laughed. I had not slept. I had not slept for one hundred and twenty-something nights. I was breastfeeding around the clock. I had a colicky baby and a husband who didn't really get it and a body that didn't feel like mine and I was being told, by a doctor, to not stress about the hair that was visibly leaving my head. I went to a second doctor. She ran my iron, my ferritin, my thyroid, my vitamin D. Everything "came back normal." She told me to be patient. I went to a dermatologist. He looked at my scalp for about forty seconds and said it was telogen effluvium and it would resolve. He charged me $290 and didn't offer me anything to do about it. I tried the expensive hair growth vitamins for three months. Biotin. Collagen peptides in my coffee. Rosemary oil. A derma roller I gave up on after two uses. Prenatals. A scalp massage thing a girl on TikTok said would work. Nothing was working. Or maybe something was working a little but I was still losing more than I was keeping. I couldn't tell anymore. The shower drain was still a horror movie. The pillow was still a horror movie. The baby's tiny fist was still wrapped in my hair every morning when she woke up. I started bringing it up to people. Quietly. Like I was confessing something. "Do you think it could be stress?" Every single time, the same answer. "Hair loss after a baby is hormonal. Stress doesn't really cause hair loss like that. You're fine. Don't overthink it." So I stopped saying it. But I knew. In my body, I knew. I had not slept. My hair was on the floor. Those two things were connected. Don't tell me they weren't connected. I was the one living in this body. Here's the part I'm actually trying to tell you about. I was at a 9 a.m. pediatrician appointment. My daughter was just over six months old. I was sitting in the waiting room next to a woman I didn't know — also a mom, also tired, also holding a baby. We were both wearing baseball hats. She looked at me and went, "Postpartum?" I said yeah. She said, "Me too. Mine never grew back the first time. With my second I tried something different. Look —" and she took her hat off. Her hairline was thick. Her temples were filled in. Her part wasn't see-through. I asked her what she did. And this is the part I want to tell you really carefully, because she didn't say it like a pitch. She said it like a person. "There was a study," she said. "I want to say 2021. My sister-in-law's a nurse, she sent it to me. They figured out that cortisol — stress cortisol, the real thing — shuts down this one molecule in your scalp. It's called GAS6. And GAS6 is what wakes up the stem cells in your follicles." "So when you're not sleeping and your cortisol is sky-high — your stem cells just stay asleep. Even after the postpartum shedding is supposed to be over." She said, "The hormones aren't the only thing. There's a switch. And in moms like us, the switch is off." I sat there. I think she kept talking. I don't remember exactly. Because in my body, something landed. That was it. That was it. That was the thing I'd been trying to say to my OB and my mother-in-law and my husband for six months and couldn't find the words for. My gut had been right the whole time. Stress wasn't vague. Stress had a name. The name was cortisol. And cortisol was doing something specific to a specific molecule in a specific place — and there was a published, peer-reviewed paper that said so. I went home and looked it up. Choi et al, Nature, 2021. Out of Harvard. An actual paper. I read it twice. It said exactly what she said. Stress isn't soft. Stress is a molecular event. And nobody — none of my doctors, not the prenatal vitamin company, not the postpartum blog I read every night — had told me. So now I knew what was wrong. Knowing what's wrong does not, by itself, grow your hair back. I want to be honest about that. I sat with this information for probably a week before I did anything with it. I felt vindicated and also kind of furious. Two doctors, a dermatologist who charged me $290 to tell me to wait, and a mom in a waiting room is the one who finally told me what was actually happening in my own scalp. The woman from the pediatrician had texted me the name of what she was using. It was a scalp serum called Naventri. Copper peptides — the kind that actually absorb into the scalp instead of sitting on top of it. She'd said the strength mattered. That most of the other brands underdose it and that's why nothing happens. And she said one more thing I haven't been able to stop thinking about. "It doesn't turn the molecule back on. It removes the things that are keeping it off." I sat with that for a long time, too. Because that was the piece I had been missing. Every other product I had tried — the expensive gummies, the biotin, the rosemary oil — was trying to add something. Push something. Force my body to do a thing it was being prevented from doing. This was different. This was removing blockers. This was telling my scalp, you're allowed to come back online now. She'd told me, walking out of the pediatrician's office while she put her coat on, that the molecule doesn't switch back on by itself. Five things have to happen first. The follicle has to be fed. The inflammation has to come down. The stress chemistry has to settle. The scalp itself has to calm down. And only then — once those four things stop suppressing it — do the dormant stem cells get the signal to wake up. Five layers. All five at once. That's what she said. And I sat there in my car in the pediatrician's parking lot and realized I had been solving one layer of a five-layer problem. Of course nothing had worked. I ordered it that night. I am not a person who buys hair products at 11 p.m. I am a person who reads ingredient lists for forty minutes and asks her sister-in-law if it's safe while breastfeeding. I did both of those things. (It is. No minoxidil. Nothing systemic. You put it on your scalp.) It came in a small bottle with a dropper. I want to tell you that the first time I used it I felt something cinematic. I didn't. I felt the dropper on my part line and I felt a little cool tingle and I thought okay, we'll see. I don't have a week-by-week thing to tell you. Healing didn't happen on a schedule. There was a morning — maybe a month in, maybe a little more — where I was brushing my hair and I realized I hadn't braced. I had been bracing for six months. Every brush, my whole body would clench because I knew what was about to come out. And one morning I just… didn't. That was the first thing I noticed. The second was the drain. Less in it. Not zero. Enough less that I noticed. The third was the part. I caught it in harsher lighting at my mom's house and realized I couldn't see scalp the same way. Something was filling in. Slowly. Not the cinematic kind. Just enough that I could tell. And then somewhere along the way — and I genuinely could not point to the day — the little wispy "antenna" hairs at my temples stopped looking like a scar and started looking like hair. They got longer. They got darker. They lay down. There was a Sunday, I want to say my daughter was around nine months old, where I put my hair up in a ponytail without thinking about it. I caught myself in the hallway mirror on the way out the door and stopped. I had put my hair up. Without thinking. I had not done that in nearly a year. I cried in the hallway. Not the bathroom-floor crying. The other kind. The kind where you realize you almost lost something and didn't. I want to circle back to the bathroom floor. If I hadn't run into that woman, I would still be on it. I would have spent another year half-trying things, googling at 3 a.m., angling the Zoom camera up, telling myself it would grow back when she stopped breastfeeding, when I started sleeping. I would have missed my daughter's first birthday in the photos. I had already started not being in the photos. I think about that a lot. I almost lost more than my hair. I was disappearing from my own life. Not because of the hair — because of the version of myself that the hair was attached to. The woman in the wedding pictures. The one who tied it up without thinking. The one whose husband used to grab a handful when he kissed her. She was the one who was almost gone. I got her back. I'm not being dramatic when I say that. I genuinely got her back. I'm telling you this because if you are six months postpartum, or twelve, or eighteen, or three years out and still wondering when it's going to stop — your gut isn't wrong. Stress isn't vague. There is a real, named molecule. There is a real, published study. There is a real reason your hair isn't coming back yet. And your doctor probably doesn't know. Mine didn't. I want to be honest — Naventri isn't magic. There were days I forgot to use it. There were weeks I almost stopped because I couldn't tell yet if it was working. The whole thing was less dramatic than I'm making it sound, just because I'm telling it all at once. But it was the first thing in a year that worked under the surface, where the actual problem was. Not on top. Underneath. Where the molecule lives. If you're sitting on a bathroom floor tonight holding a piece of yourself in your hand — I see you. I was you eleven months ago. It's not just hormones. It's not in your head. You're not overthinking it. There's a switch, and yours is off, and somebody is finally telling you that.

Where the ad sends people

naventri.com

There's a switch. Yours is off.

Read this if your hair still hasn't grown back 👆