Dana Mercer Facebook ad: “My Hairdresser Asked What I Changed”

About this ad

Meta Ad Library ID

2061389331142922

Platforms

Facebook, Instagram, Audience Network, Messenger and Threads

Relaunches

0

Niche

Supplements & Wellness

How we count

Ad text

I have run 4 days a week for 22 years and my hair is falling out. I don't know how else to start. I've been sitting at this table for 20 minutes trying to figure out the right way to say it and there isn't one. So I'm just going to say it. I have done everything right. I eat well. Not perfectly. But well. I cook 5 nights a week. I buy the organic eggs. I make the salads. I drink the water. I cut back on sugar in 2014 and I have not gone back. I take a multivitamin, a vitamin D, a magnesium, a fish oil. I know their doses by heart. I run. I have run 4 mornings a week since I was 29 years old. Three miles. Sometimes four. Rain or cold or July in North Carolina, it doesn't matter. I run. My husband Michael jokes that if the house were on fire I'd still lace up my shoes before I ran out of it. I don't smoke. I drink one glass of wine on Fridays. I go to bed by 10. I see my doctor every year. I get the mammogram. I get the bloodwork. Last October, my doctor looked at my labs and said, "Susan, you are one of the healthiest 51-year-olds I have ever seen." My cholesterol is beautiful. My blood pressure is perfect. My resting heart rate is 58. My bone density is above average for my age. I am, on paper, the picture of a woman who has taken care of herself. And my hair is falling out. I want you to sit with that for a second. Because I have been sitting with it for 14 months and it has not gotten easier. My name is Susan. I'm 51 years old. I live in a town called Davidson, North Carolina, about 20 miles north of Charlotte, in a house on a quiet street with a dogwood in the front yard that blooms every April whether the world deserves it or not. Michael is 54. He teaches engineering at the community college. Our son Ben is 24, lives in Raleigh, works in tech, calls on Sundays. I'm a financial analyst for a healthcare company. I've been with the same firm for 16 years. I work with spreadsheets and projections and regulatory filings. I am a precise person. I track things. I measure things. I do not leave things to chance. Which is why this has been so hard. Because I cannot track my way out of this. I cannot measure my way out of it. I cannot run my way out of it. I have been running for 22 years and it has not protected me from the thing that is happening on top of my head. That is not a sentence I ever expected to write. I first noticed it in August of last year. Not in the mirror. In my hands. I was in the shower after a morning run. I was rinsing my hair and I pulled my fingers through it the way I've done every single day for decades. And my fingers came out with a clump that was bigger than usual. Not dramatically bigger. Just enough to notice. Just enough to hold it up to the shower light and think, hm. I didn't panic. I don't panic. I reasoned with it. I said to myself: it's August, it's hot, you sweat more in the summer, your hair cycles change with the season. I let it go. September. The clumps got a little bigger. October. I had my annual physical. Everything was perfect. I almost asked about the hair. I didn't. Because my doctor had just told me I was one of the healthiest 51-year-olds she'd ever seen and I didn't want to be the woman who heard that sentence and immediately complained about her hair. November. I was getting dressed for Thanksgiving at my sister's house. I was standing at the bathroom mirror putting my hair up in the way I've worn it for years, pulled back, a low twist. And I saw it. My hairline at the temples was thinner. Visibly thinner. The twist, which used to sit full and secure, looked sparse. The kind of sparse where you can see the elastic underneath. I took the twist out. I wore it down. I told myself it looked fine. December. My ponytail was thinner. I measured it with a hair tie. It used to wrap twice and sit snug. Now it wrapped twice and had room. January. I started finding hairs on my pillow. On my desk at work. On the back of my office chair. Hairs that didn't used to be there. February. Michael said something. He said it carefully, the way he says everything. He was standing behind me in the bathroom while I was brushing my teeth and he put his hand on the back of my head, gently, the way he does, and he said, "Hey. Are you losing some weight back here?" He meant my hair. He was looking at my crown. He'd noticed. I said, "It's fine. It's just the season." He didn't push. Michael doesn't push. But I saw him look at me the way he looks at a problem he's going to think about later. Engineers do that. I went to bed that night and I lay there in the dark and I thought: I have done everything right. I have run 4 days a week for 22 years. I eat better than anyone I know. My bloodwork is perfect. My doctor just told me I'm the picture of health. And my body is ignoring all of it. In March I went back to my doctor. Not for the annual physical. Specifically for the hair. I sat in the exam room and I said, "Dr. Reeves, my hair is thinning. It's been thinning for 7 months. My husband noticed. I need you to tell me what is happening." She pulled up my chart. She asked about my cycle. I told her it had been irregular since the previous spring and had stopped entirely in December. She nodded. She said, "You're in menopause. Hair changes during menopause are very common. Estrogen drops, and that can affect hair density. It's hormonal." I said, "I understand it's hormonal. My question is what we do about it." She said, "Well, there's minoxidil. Some women try that. There are supplements, though the evidence is mixed. And honestly, for a lot of women, it stabilizes on its own." I said, "And if it doesn't stabilize?" She said, "We keep monitoring it." I sat there for a moment. I said, "Dr. Reeves. I run 4 days a week. My labs are perfect. I eat better than most of your patients. I take 4 supplements a day. I have done every single thing in my power to take care of this body. And you're telling me that for the one thing I can't control, the plan is to monitor it?" She was quiet. She's a good doctor. She could hear what I was saying. She said, "Susan, I know this is frustrating. But there isn't a standard intervention for this that I can confidently recommend." I thanked her. I drove home. I did not run the next morning. I sat on the front step with my running shoes on and my laces tied and I just sat there. I didn't cry. I just sat and looked at the dogwood, which was about 2 weeks from blooming, and I thought about how unfair it was that a tree could renew itself every April and I apparently could not. Then I went inside and I untied my shoes and I sat at the kitchen table with my laptop. If my doctor couldn't tell me what was happening, I was going to find out myself. I spent 4 nights reading. And I want to tell you what I found, because the thing I learned changed the way I understand my own body, and nobody in 16 years of annual physicals had ever explained it to me. Here is what I had always assumed. I assumed that taking care of your body, eating right, exercising, keeping your numbers perfect, protected you from things like hair loss. I assumed the body was a system, and that if you maintained the system well, the system rewarded you. That assumption is wrong. Or more precisely, it's right about almost everything except DHT. DHT is a hormone your body makes. It stands for dihydrotestosterone. Your body produces testosterone in small amounts, and an enzyme called 5-alpha reductase converts some of that testosterone into DHT. This is normal. It happens in every woman's body. Here is what DHT does that running cannot prevent and diet cannot stop. If your hair follicles are genetically sensitive to DHT, and many women's are, DHT causes those follicles to shrink. Slowly. Over time. The follicle gets smaller. The hair it produces gets thinner. Eventually it produces hair so fine it's invisible. And eventually it stops producing hair altogether. This process is called follicle miniaturization. It is happening at the level of the individual follicle, inside the scalp, underneath everything you can see and everything you can control. Your cholesterol has nothing to do with it. Your blood pressure has nothing to do with it. Your resting heart rate of 58 has nothing to do with it. You can be the healthiest 51-year-old your doctor has ever seen and your follicles can still be shrinking. Now here is the part that made me close my laptop and stare at the wall. For most of my adult life, my estrogen had been quietly protecting my follicles from DHT. Estrogen acts as a shield. When estrogen is high, DHT can't do significant damage to the follicles, even if the genetic sensitivity is there. The system is in balance. When estrogen drops during menopause, that balance breaks. DHT doesn't increase. But its relative power does. The shield that had been protecting your follicles for 35 years lifts. And the follicles that were always genetically vulnerable start to shrink. That is why my hair is thinning. Not because I'm unhealthy. Not because I'm doing anything wrong. Not because I need to eat more spinach or take another vitamin. Because an enzyme in my body is converting testosterone to a follicle-shrinking hormone and the estrogen that used to counterbalance it isn't there anymore. Exercise doesn't inhibit 5-alpha reductase. Running doesn't inhibit 5-alpha reductase. Salmon and organic eggs don't inhibit 5-alpha reductase. The 4 supplements I take every morning don't inhibit 5-alpha reductase. Nothing I was doing was touching the actual mechanism. I sat at my kitchen table at midnight and I felt two things at the same time. I felt angry, because nobody had explained this to me in 7 months of watching my hair thin. And I felt relief, because for the first time, I understood that this wasn't a failure of my discipline. It wasn't my body ignoring everything I'd done. It was a specific biological process that requires a specific intervention. Not more effort. Not more discipline. The right thing. I read for 2 more nights. I read about minoxidil and closed that chapter in 30 minutes. Minoxidil doesn't block DHT. It forces blood to the scalp. The follicles keep shrinking underneath. And if you stop, you lose more than you had before you started. I'm not going to sign up for something I can never quit. Then I kept seeing two ingredients show up together in the research. Pumpkin seed oil. Saw palmetto. Pumpkin seed oil contains phytosterols that inhibit 5-alpha reductase. That's the enzyme. The one that converts testosterone to DHT. Blocking the enzyme means less DHT reaches the follicles. Saw palmetto works at the other end. It blocks DHT from binding to the follicle receptor, even when DHT is present. It prevents attachment. Two ingredients. Two blocking points. One at the enzyme. One at the receptor. A dual defense. I'm a financial analyst. I build models. I look at systems. And when I looked at this system, what I saw was a feedback loop with two intervention points, and every other thing I'd tried in my life had been addressing neither of them. Biotin doesn't touch the enzyme or the receptor. Collagen doesn't. Fish oil doesn't. Running doesn't. Eating clean doesn't. None of it was irrelevant to my health. All of it was irrelevant to my hair loss. Because my hair loss wasn't a health problem. It was a DHT problem. I found Bluume through a woman in my Thursday morning yoga class. Her name is Grace. She's 49. She's one of those people who doesn't say much but when she does say something, you listen. She's a nurse practitioner. She runs trails on the weekends. She is, like me, a woman who takes care of herself. I hadn't seen Grace in about 3 months. She'd been coming to class sporadically and I hadn't thought much about it. In late March she started coming again, and about the second week I noticed something. Her hair was different. It was fuller. Specifically at the crown and the temples. I know that sounds like a strange thing to notice about someone in a yoga class. But when you've been staring at your own crown in the mirror for 7 months, you start seeing crowns everywhere. After class I said, "Grace. I have to ask you something and I'm sorry if it's weird." She smiled. She said, "It's about the hair." I stared at her. She said, "You're the fourth person to ask me. My hair was thinning last year. Bad. Perimenopause. My part was getting wider. I was pulling clumps out in the shower. The whole thing." She told me she'd looked into it the way she looks into everything, methodically, reading the actual research. She'd found the same two ingredients I'd found. She'd ordered a brand called Bluume because it was the only one she could find that had the right dose, 3,000 milligrams of cold-pressed pumpkin seed oil plus 300 milligrams of saw palmetto at a 4:1 extract concentration. She said most of the bottles on Amazon had a fraction of that dose and no saw palmetto at all. She said, "The dose matters, Susan. You can buy pumpkin seed oil capsules for 12 dollars on Amazon and they'll have 500 milligrams in them and you'll take them for 3 months and nothing will happen and you'll tell yourself it doesn't work. It does work. At the right dose." She said she'd been on it for 5 months. Her drain cleared in the first 3 weeks. Baby hairs came in at week 7. By month 4 her stylist asked her what she'd changed. She said Bluume has a 90-day money-back guarantee. 90 days. If nothing changes, you send it back. I ordered it that night. The bottle came on a Friday. 2 capsules a day with food. I put them next to my other 4 supplements on the kitchen counter. Five bottles in a row. The first four had been protecting everything except the thing that was actually under attack. The fifth was for the thing that was actually under attack. Week 1, nothing. Week 2, nothing. I kept running. I kept eating well. I kept taking everything. I told myself to be patient. Grace had said 3 weeks. Week 3 I was in the shower after my Tuesday morning run. I looked down at the drain. It was clear. Not empty. There were a few hairs. But the clump was gone. The clump that had been growing bigger every month since August. The clump I had been training myself not to count. I stood there with the water hitting my back and I counted anyway. 11 hairs. In August it had been 50 or more. I did not text Michael. I did not text Grace. I stepped out of the shower and I stood at the mirror and I pulled my wet hair back the way I used to wear it and I looked at the twist. It was still thin. It was not fixed. But the shedding had stopped accelerating. The bleeding had stopped. I exhaled for what felt like the first time in 7 months. Week 6 I was running on a Thursday morning on my usual loop, the one that goes past the elementary school and down along the creek. I'd pulled my hair back in a ponytail. And about a mile in, I reached back to tighten the elastic the way I always do, and I felt something. The ponytail was fuller in my hand. Not dramatically. But measurably. The elastic was sitting snugger than it had in months. I stopped running. I stood on the path by the creek and I held my ponytail in my hand and I squeezed it. Then I kept running. And I ran faster than I'd run in a year. Week 9 I tilted my head forward in the bathroom mirror and I looked at my crown. I saw the baby hairs. Soft. Short. Standing along the part and at the crown. Dozens of them. New growth. Living proof that my follicles were still there, still capable, still responding once they got the right support. I closed the bathroom door. I sat on the edge of the tub. And for the first time in the 14 months since August, I cried. Not because I was sad. Because I was furious that it had taken this long. Because I had done everything right. For 22 years I had done everything right. And the one thing my body needed, the one specific intervention for the one specific mechanism that was actually causing the damage, nobody had told me about. Not my doctor. Not my trainer. Not the 4 supplement bottles on my counter. Nobody. A woman in my yoga class had to tell me. It has been 4 months now. I take Bluume every morning with my other supplements. I run 4 days a week. I eat well. I sleep by 10. I do all the things I have always done. The difference is that now I am also addressing the thing that none of those other things were addressing. My ponytail wraps twice and sits snug. My stylist told me last month that my crown is filling in. Michael put his hand on the back of my head last Sunday the way he used to, gently, and he didn't say anything about weight. He just left his hand there. I went to the pool last weekend for the first time since last summer. I swam. I got out. My hair was wet and I walked across the deck and I didn't reach up to cover my crown with my hand. I didn't even think about it until I was in the car driving home. That's the part I want to tell you about. Not the baby hairs. Not the ponytail. The moment you stop thinking about it. The morning you get up and brush your hair in 30 seconds and walk out the door and it's not the first thing on your mind. That's what getting your life back actually feels like. Not a dramatic moment. The absence of a dramatic moment. If you are a woman who takes care of herself. If you run or walk or swim or do yoga. If you eat right and take your supplements and see your doctor and get your bloodwork and hear that everything looks great. And your hair is still thinning. I want you to know that it is not a failure of your effort. It is not your body betraying you. It is a specific enzyme producing a specific hormone that is shrinking specific follicles, and nothing in your diet or exercise or supplement routine is targeting that enzyme. Two things target it. Pumpkin seed oil inhibits 5-alpha reductase, the enzyme that produces DHT. Saw palmetto blocks DHT from attaching to the follicle even when it's present. Together, at the right dose, they create a defense that addresses the mechanism your discipline cannot reach. Bluume has both. 3,000 milligrams of cold-pressed pumpkin seed oil. 300 milligrams of saw palmetto, 4:1 extract. Two capsules a day with breakfast. No fillers. No proprietary blend. Just the two ingredients the research points to, at the dose the research uses. 90-day money-back guarantee. If your drain doesn't clear. If the baby hairs don't come. If nothing changes. You send it back and you don't pay for it. 👉 trybluume.com/products/pumpkin-seed-oil-saw-palmetto-softgels P.S. Grace and I have coffee after yoga now on Thursdays. Two weeks ago she brought another woman from the class, a woman named Ellen who is 53 and who told us over lattes that she'd been wearing a headband every day for a year because her hairline had receded and she didn't know what else to do. Grace told her about Bluume. I told her about my drain at week 3. Ellen ordered it on her phone before we finished our coffee. She texted me last Thursday and said, "Susan. The drain." That was the whole text. I knew exactly what she meant. P.P.S. The 90-day guarantee is the reason this was different from every other supplement decision I've ever made. I've wasted money on things that didn't work. I've kept bottles on my counter for months out of guilt. Bluume said: try it for 90 days. If nothing happens, send it back and we'll refund you. That's not a marketing promise. That's a bet they're making on their own product. I respect that. I've never had to use the guarantee. But knowing it was there is the only reason I ordered the bottle. P.P.P.S. Michael asked me last week what was in the new bottle on the counter. I told him. I explained the mechanism. I explained DHT and 5-alpha reductase and the estrogen ratio. He listened the way engineers listen, which is without interrupting and then asking one very precise question. He said, "So this is the one that's actually targeting the problem?" I said yes. He said, "Why wasn't this the first thing your doctor told you about?" I didn't have an answer. P.P.P.P.S. I ran this morning. 4 miles. My ponytail stayed tight the whole way. When I got home I stood on the front step and unlaced my shoes the way I've done a thousand mornings and I felt something I haven't felt in over a year. Normal. Not triumphant. Not transformed. Just normal. The way running felt before I started losing my hair. The way everything felt before I started losing my hair. I'm 51 years old. I've done everything right. And now I'm finally doing the one thing I was missing. 👉 trybluume.com/products/pumpkin-seed-oil-saw-palmetto-softgels

Where the ad sends people

trybluume.com

My Hairdresser Asked What I Changed

"3 weeks in, my drain cleared. I'm never going back." — Marion R.