Haircare Guide Facebook ad: “Grandma Is 89 and Has More Hair Than Me”

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My dermatologist told me my thinning hair was genetic. My grandmother is 89 and has more hair than I do. So I drove forty minutes to Maryville and asked her how often she washed it. Her answer is the reason I have hair today. And I don't think it's the answer you're expecting. My name is Christine. I'm 52. I live in Knoxville, Tennessee, with my husband Mark. Our son is 24 and lives in Nashville. I've been a loan officer at a credit union for nineteen years, which means I spend my days explaining interest rates to people and watching small numbers turn into big ones over time. That's going to matter. My hair started thinning when I was about 48. At first it was a little more in the brush. Then my ponytail got skinny. Then my part started to spread, especially in the back, where I couldn't see it. My hairdresser was the one who told me. She was blow-drying me, and she held up a hand mirror behind my head, the way they do, and her face changed. She said, "Has your crown always been this thin?" and then she said "I'm sorry" right away, like she'd said something rude. It hadn't always been that thin. After that, I couldn't stop seeing it. In the elevator at work, which has mirrored walls and a light right over your head. In the car window. In every photo where someone was standing above me. And I knew where this was going, because I'd watched my mother go through it. My mom, Linda, is 73. Her hair started thinning in her late fifties. By sixty-two she was wearing a hair topper, one of those little clip-in pieces that sits on top of your head. She's worn one every day for over ten years. She won't leave the house without it. I helped her pick it out. So when my crown started showing, I was scared, and I spent money the way scared people do. I'm a loan officer. I'm going to show you the math. Nutrafol, the one for women over 45. $88 a month for eight months. $704. Women's Rogaine foam, because the dermatologist said to. Six months at about $47 a box. $282. A salon "thickening" shampoo for thinning hair. $38 a bottle. Five bottles. $190. Collagen powder. Three tubs. $119.97. And one session of PRP at a med spa in West Knoxville, where they draw your blood, spin it, and inject it back into your scalp with a needle, over and over. $650 for one session. They wanted me to book three. It hurt so much I cried in the chair, and I never went back. Total: $1,945.97. I explain compound interest to people every day. I know what $1,945.97 would have grown into if I'd put it somewhere else. The dermatologist was very nice and very quick. She looked at my scalp with a light and said, "This is female pattern hair loss. It's genetic. Does your mother have thinning hair?" I said yes. "Then that's likely it," she said. "Stay on the Rogaine. It's the best we have." I sat in my car afterward and thought: so that's it. I'm going to end up like Mom. Clip-in topper. Every day. For the rest of my life. And then I thought about Grandma. My grandmother Ruth is my mom's mother. She's 89. She lives by herself in a little brick house in Maryville that she won't leave. She still drives to church. And she has thick hair. Not "thick for her age." Thick. White, heavy, soft hair that she still wears pinned up in a bun, and when she takes the pins out at night, it falls past her shoulders. If this is genetic, I thought, and it comes from my mom's side, then why does my mom's mom have the best hair in the family? It bugged me. I'm a numbers person. When the numbers don't add up, I can't let it go. So the next Sunday, I drove to Maryville. I sat with Grandma at her kitchen table, by the window, with her coffee and the paper, and I asked her about her hair. What did she use? What did she do? She laughed. "Nothing, honey. I go to the beauty shop." I asked her how often she washed it. "Once a week," she said. "Friday morning at nine, at Faye's. Faye washed it and set it and I sat under the dryer. Then you don't touch it till next Friday. You sleep in a scarf." She shrugged. "That's what everybody did." She got up and went to a drawer and came back with a photo. A little square print with a white border, all faded and orange. It was her in 1962, about twenty-five years old, sitting under one of those big hood dryers at Faye's Beauty Shop, smiling. Her hair was so thick it looked like a hat. "Every Friday," she said, "for sixty-four years. Faye retired, and then I went to her daughter." I asked her if she had ever washed her hair every day. She looked at me like I'd asked if she'd ever robbed a bank. "Why on earth would I do that?" I drove home and did the math. I couldn't help it. My grandmother has washed her hair about once a week since she was a teenager. Call it 3,800 washes in her whole life. My mother washed once a week at the beauty shop until her early thirties. Then, sometime in the '80s, like every woman in America, she started washing every morning in the shower. Over forty years of that. Around 15,000 washes. Me? I've washed my hair every single morning since I was thirteen. Thirty-nine years. Over 14,000 washes, and I'm only 52. Grandma: about 3,800 washes. Thick hair at 89. Mom: about 15,000 washes. Wearing a topper since 62. Me: about 14,000 washes. Thinning at 48. Earlier than Mom. If it was genetics, why was it getting worse with every generation, and starting earlier? Genes don't change that fast. Habits do. I didn't know what it meant. But I knew the dermatologist's answer didn't explain the numbers. So I went looking for somebody who would. Not another dermatologist. Somebody who only does hair and scalp. That's how I found out there's such a thing as a certified trichologist. I found one in Atlanta, a woman named Paula, who does video consultations. $175 for forty-five minutes. After everything I'd spent, I figured one more appointment wasn't going to break me. It turned out to be the only $175 I spent on my hair that was worth a penny. I told Paula everything. The thinning. Mom's topper. The dermatologist. And Grandma, the beauty shop, once a week for sixty-four years, and my wash-count math. When I finished, she was quiet for a second. Then she said, "Christine, are you near your bathroom? Go get your shampoo." I was on my laptop in the laundry room, which is the only quiet room in my house. I went and got the salon thickening shampoo from my shower and came back. "Turn it around," she said. "Read me the second ingredient." "Sodium Laureth Sulfate." "Okay. Is there a bottle of laundry detergent near you?" There was a jug of Tide sitting on the washing machine, right beside my laptop. I turned it around. I read down the list. Sodium Laureth Sulfate. I looked at the camera. Paula nodded. "Your thickening shampoo," she said, "shares a key ingredient with your laundry detergent. It's a sulfate. It's a detergent. Its job is to grab oil and strip it away. That's exactly what you want it to do to the stains on your husband's work shirts. It's not what you want it to do to your scalp every morning for thirty-nine years." Then she explained it, and she explained it the way I'd explain a loan to somebody who'd never had one. I'm going to try to tell it the way she told it. Your hair is made of a protein called keratin. What makes keratin strong is sulfur. The bonds that hold every hair together are sulfur bonds. Your scalp makes its own sulfur, and your follicles use it as the raw material to build new hair. A sulfate strips it. That's its job. It doesn't know the difference between a grease stain and the stuff your scalp needs. "Now think about your grandmother," Paula said. "She stripped her scalp once a week. Then her scalp got six days off to rebuild. Every single week. For her whole life. Her scalp was always caught up." "Your mom changed that in her thirties. She started stripping it every morning. Her scalp never got a day off again." "And you started at thirteen." It was the interest-rate thing. Small damage, every day, compounding for decades. I explain that to people for a living. I'd just never thought about it happening on top of my own head. I asked her about genetics. Wasn't the dermatologist right? Wasn't it in my family? "Some women are more sensitive to it," she said. "That part can run in families. But sensitive isn't the same as doomed. Your grandmother has the same genes as your mother. The difference is that her scalp got six days off every week." Then I asked about everything I'd been taking. The Nutrafol. The collagen. Even the PRP. "Think of a bathtub," she said. "The faucet's running, the drain is wide open. Everything you swallow is the faucet. Your shampoo is the drain. You can turn the faucet up as high as you want. It won't fill. You can't out-pill a drain." I'd spent $1,945.97 turning up the faucet. I asked her the obvious question. "So should I wash my hair once a week? Like Grandma?" She laughed. "You can try. Most women won't. You live in Tennessee. You sweat. You work out. You're not going to sleep in a scarf and get it set at Faye's every Friday. And even if you did, washing less doesn't put back what you've already lost. You've got thirty-nine years of starving up there." She told me two things, and she said the order matters. First, close the drain. Get rid of anything with Sodium Lauryl Sulfate or Sodium Laureth Sulfate. "Then you can wash as often as you want, because you're not stripping it anymore." Second, feed what's been starving, right on the scalp. Not in a pill. She told me about onion. "Onions are loaded with sulfur. You're putting back exactly what got stripped, right where it got stripped." There's a study in the Journal of Dermatology where people put onion on their scalps, and most of them had visible regrowth within weeks. She told me rosemary oil on the scalp did about as well as minoxidil over six months in one study. Nettle has been looked at for blocking DHT, the hormone that shrinks follicles as women get older. Peppermint gets the blood moving. She said she couldn't sell me anything. "But read the back of everything. Most of the onion shampoos on the market are sulfate shampoos with an onion on the label. They're doing the same thing to you as your thickening shampoo, and charging you more for it." I hung up and sat in my laundry room next to the Tide for a long time. Then I did what loan officers do. I read the fine print. Paula was right about the onion shampoos. I went through about thirty of them. Most had a sulfate in the first five ingredients. Most didn't say how much onion was in there. The ones that did were tiny amounts. Decoration. I found one that was different. It's made by a small family business, not a big company. The very first ingredient on the label is 15% concentrated onion hydrosol. That's not decoration. Then rosemary oil. Peppermint oil. Nettle extract. Aloe vera juice. Hydrolyzed vegetable protein. Biotin, on the scalp where it can be used. Glycerin. No sulfates. No parabens. No silicones. There's a matching conditioner with onion hydrosol, castor oil, argan oil, pumpkin seed oil, lavender oil, biotin, and panthenol. I ordered two sets. One for me, and one for my mother. My one worry was the smell. I sit across a desk from people all day, close enough to shake hands. I could not smell like the onion rings at Calhoun's. When the box came, I opened the shampoo on the kitchen counter and smelled it before I did anything else. It smelled like a spa. Herbal, clean, a little minty. No onion at all. I learned later they ferment the onion and extract it cold, and that takes the smell out. Mark walked in and said, "What's that? Smells nice." Twenty-eight years of marriage. First comment on my shampoo. Here's what happened. I'll give it to you plain, the way I'd want it. Week one. My scalp stopped feeling tight after the shower. It had felt tight every morning for as long as I could remember. I thought that was what clean felt like. It's not. That's what stripped feels like. The lather was lighter, too. Paula had warned me. "Foam is the detergent. You don't need it." Week two. Less hair in the drain. Less in my brush. Not none. But a lot less. Week four. Baby hairs. Little short ones standing straight up along my part. I saw them in that mirrored elevator at work, under that light, and I turned my head both ways to make sure. A woman from the mortgage department got on and asked me if I was okay. I said I was better than okay. Week six. My hairdresser. Same one who held up the mirror and said she was sorry. She held the mirror up again behind my head, and this time she said, "Christine. What are you doing? Your crown is filling in." I told her the whole story. She went quiet. Then she asked what shampoo I used, so she could write it down. Week nine. Mark. We were sitting on the porch and he put his hand on the back of my head and said, "Your hair's thicker." He's not a hair noticer. That's twice in nine weeks he's said something about my hair. Before that, twice in twenty-eight years. Week twelve. I drove to Maryville. Grandma was at her kitchen table by the window, same as always. I sat down, and she reached over and ran her hand down the back of my head, the way she used to when I was little. She held a piece of my hair between her fingers for a second. "There's my girl's hair," she said. That's all she said. I had to go stand in her kitchen for a minute. It's been about six months. I'm not going to tell you my hair is what it was at 25. I'm 52. It isn't. And I won't promise your hair will do exactly what mine did, on my schedule. I'm one woman with a spreadsheet, not a study. What I can tell you is my crown is covered. My part is a line, not a stripe. I can stand in that mirrored elevator under that light and not think about it. And the only thing I changed was my shampoo and conditioner. I stopped the Nutrafol. I stopped the collagen. I stopped the Rogaine. I never booked PRP sessions two and three. My salon thickening shampoo? It's in the laundry room. Right next to the Tide, where it belongs. If you've read this far, I want you to do one thing tonight. It's free. Go get your shampoo. Turn it around. Read the second ingredient. Then go read the back of your laundry detergent. If you find the same word on both, you've found the drain. Everything you're swallowing is going into a tub with the drain wide open. You can't out-pill a drain. Close it first. Then feed what's starving. The shampoo and conditioner I use are made by that small family business. 15% concentrated onion hydrosol, rosemary, peppermint, nettle, biotin, aloe. No sulfates, no parabens, no silicones. It smells like a spa. They come with a 30-day money-back guarantee. If you try them and you don't love how your hair looks and feels, you get your money back. I'm a loan officer, so here's how I see it. Of my $1,945.97, I got back nothing. Subscriptions, opened bottles, a non-refundable needle in the scalp. Every one of those deals put all the risk on me. This is the only one where the risk was on them. If someone brought me those terms at work, I'd tell them to sign. My grandmother figured this out in 1955 without knowing it. It took me until 52. Christine P.S. Grandma let me borrow the photo of her under the dryer at Faye's in 1962. I took a picture of it with my phone, and I look at it when I need a reminder. The answer to the "genetic" hair loss in my family was sitting in a drawer in Maryville the whole time. And for the record, my mother has been using the second set for four months. She's 73 and her part is filling in, slower than mine. Some days, for the first time in eleven years, she leaves the topper in the drawer. P.P.S. About the smell, since I know you scrolled back up to check. It's herbal and a little minty. No onion. Mark noticed it and liked it. My customers haven't noticed anything, which is exactly what I wanted. Grandma says it smells like Faye's. I don't know if that's true, but I'll take it.

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Grandma Is 89 and Has More Hair Than Me

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