The Menopause Symptom I Still Have Not Solved: Years of Trying Things for My Hair

Hormone therapy gave me my brain back. It stopped the hot flashes, stopped the night sweats, eased my joints, and lifted a low mood I had stopped noticing because it had been there so long.

It did nothing at all for my hair.

That is the honest state of things after years of working on this. Almost everything on my symptom list has an answer now. One thing does not, and it happens to be the one I look at every single morning.

I started noticing it in my mid-forties. More hair in the brush, more in the drain, and a part that seemed slightly wider than it used to be. I told myself I was imagining it, which is what most women do first. By the time I stopped being able to tell myself that, I could see scalp in places when I pulled my hair back.

Since then I have tried supplements, powders, shampoos, conditioners, serums, and a complete change in how I eat. I want to walk through all of it honestly, including the parts where I spent money on something for months and got nothing, because almost everything you will find when you search for this was written by a company selling a serum. This is the other kind of article. I am still in it, and I have not solved it.

What it actually looks like

Female pattern hair loss does not look like the hair loss people picture. There is usually no bald patch. What happens instead is that the part widens, the hair overall gets thinner and finer, and the scalp starts showing through at the crown.

For me the clearest test has always been pulling my hair back. Down, it looks more or less normal. Pulled back, I can see scalp in places I could not see it ten years ago. My part went from a line to something wider than a line.

The other thing worth saying out loud is how much of this is not about vanity. I am 58, I work from home most days, and I am not trying to look 30. It still gets to me, and I think we mostly do not admit that because it feels like a small complaint next to everything else menopause does. It is not a small complaint. Researchers have found it associated with lower self-esteem in otherwise healthy postmenopausal women, which is a clinical way of saying what every woman going through it already knows.

The part nobody warns you about

It is not only the hair on your head.

My eyelashes and eyebrows have nearly disappeared. Not thinned. Nearly gone. And in all the reading I did, in all the appointments, in all the conversations with other women, nobody ever mentioned that this happens.

I keep a running list of the things nobody warns women about, and this one is near the top, right alongside dry skin that no moisturizer touches. If you are standing at a mirror wondering why you suddenly have to draw your eyebrows on, you are not imagining it and it is not just you.

Why menopause does this

The short version is that estrogen appears to protect hair follicles, and when estrogen drops, that protection goes with it.

A review of what causes female pattern hair loss published in BioMed Research International lays out the pattern clearly. Androgens drive the follicle shrinking that produces thinner, finer hair, but most affected women have perfectly normal androgen levels. What changes is the balance. Women carry much higher levels of an enzyme that converts testosterone into estradiol, and the authors describe that as playing a protective role.

The age numbers in that same review make the point better than any explanation. Three percent of women aged 20 to 29 had female pattern hair loss. Twenty-nine percent of women aged 70 to 89 did. As the review puts it, the condition occurs the most following menopause.

Then there is the study that made news in 2022. Researchers looked at 178 women seen at a menopause clinic and found that 52.2 percent of them had female pattern hair loss. I want to be careful with that number rather than just repeating it, because it is a small cross-sectional study, and women who are already at a menopause clinic are not a random sample of all women. Dr. Stephanie Faubion, medical director of The Menopause Society, described the finding in exactly those measured terms. Take it as a signal that this is common, not as a precise percentage.

What I tried, and what each one did

Here is the honest inventory. I am going to disappoint you with the ending, so I will say it now: none of this made a noticeable difference to my hair.

Supplements and powders

I have a custom powder blend that goes into my shake every single morning, and several of the ingredients went in specifically for my hair. Biotin, which is in nearly every hair supplement sold. Ashwagandha, for the stress angle. Saw palmetto, because it comes up constantly in the context of androgens and hair. Reishi and a broader mushroom blend. Rose powder, ginkgo biloba, and amla round out the blend.

I want to be fair to all of these, because several of them earned their place in my morning routine for other reasons and I still take them. The ashwagandha and the mushrooms do things for me. What none of them did was change my hair.

Shampoos, conditioners, and bars

I have been through a lot of these. I use Kitsch shampoo and conditioner bars now and I like them, but I like them because they work for my hair and because they cut a large amount of plastic out of my bathroom. Not because they grew hair. No shampoo I have used has changed my part or my crown.

This is worth saying plainly. A shampoo is on your scalp for about two minutes. How it would reverse follicle shrinking in that time is not obvious, and the products marketed this way are usually careful to say fuller and thicker looking, which describes how hair behaves when it is coated, not how much of it there is.

Serums

I tried several topical serums over the years, the kind sold specifically for thinning hair. I used them consistently, which is the part most people get wrong, and I gave them months rather than weeks. Nothing I could see.

Worth noting: most over-the-counter serums are not minoxidil, which is the one topical with real evidence behind it. If a serum does not name an active ingredient with published research, it is a cosmetic product.

Food

I went vegan about four years ago and eat organic whole foods as much as I can manage. That change did a great deal for me. My joints, my energy, my inflammation, my skin in some respects.

My hair did not respond. I include this because “fix your diet” is the most common advice a woman gets when she raises hair loss, and my diet is genuinely good, and it was not the answer.

What hormone therapy did and did not do

If estrogen protects hair follicles, you would reasonably expect that replacing estrogen would help. It did not, at least not for me.

Hormone therapy resolved my brain fog completely, stopped the hot flashes and night sweats, and helped my joint pain and my mood. I have written separately about what the FDA label change means for that conversation with your doctor. It is the single intervention that changed the most for me.

And my hair kept thinning right through it. So did my dry skin, and so did the eyelashes and eyebrows.

I mention this because I do not want a woman reading this to conclude that hormone therapy is the answer to hair loss and be disappointed, or to conclude that hormone therapy failed because it did not fix everything. Both would be the wrong takeaway. It did an enormous amount. It did not do this.

What I am trying now, three months in

I am currently taking Nutrafol, and I am three months in.

I did not try it for years, even though it kept coming up, because it was not vegan. That was the whole reason. When they released a vegan formula, the reason I had been saying no went away, and I started.

Here is where I am, and I am going to be careful with this because three months is early. I think I am seeing something. When I pull my hair back, I do not see as much scalp as I did. My part does not look as wide to me. That is my own eyes in my own mirror, not a measurement, and I know perfectly well that wanting something to work is a good way to start seeing it work.

What keeps me honest about it is the timeline. The company itself says it takes three to six months to see results, with fullness and volume changes in that three to six month window and more visible change after that. So I am at the very front edge of when anything is supposed to be visible. I am genuinely anxious to see what my hair looks like in another three months, and I will come back and write that up whichever way it goes.

What I would ask a doctor about

Everything above is what you can do on your own. The treatments with actual research behind them mostly require a prescription, and I am putting them here as questions to bring to an appointment rather than as recommendations from me. I am not a clinician and this is not a treatment plan.

The American Academy of Dermatology’s page on female pattern hair loss is the best plain-language starting point I have found, and it names the main options: minoxidil, prescription medications including spironolactone and finasteride, laser devices, platelet-rich plasma, and hair transplants.

One more thing that shaped how I think about timing. Female pattern hair loss is progressive, meaning women tend to keep losing hair without treatment. That is a reason to ask sooner rather than to wait and see, which is what I did for too long.

What years of this has taught me

A few things, none of them the tidy ending I would prefer to write.

Consistency is the part almost everyone gets wrong, including me at first. Six to twelve months is the honest timeline for anything that works. I abandoned at least two things at the eight week mark because I saw nothing, and eight weeks was never going to be enough to tell.

One person’s miss is another person’s hit. The supplements did nothing for me. I know women they helped. Menopause does not run one way, and my list of failures is not a list of things that do not work, it is a list of things that did not work for me.

The honest answer is sometimes that you have not found it. I could have written this article as a success story about the vegan supplement I am three months into, and it would have performed better. It would also have been dishonest, because I do not know yet.

Do not let anyone tell you it is vanity. Every woman I have talked to about this has apologized for caring, somewhere in the first two sentences. You do not have to.

Your turn, and I mean it

This is the article where I most want the comments, because I do not have the answer and some of you might.

What have you tried? What did nothing? Did anything actually work, and how long did it take before you could tell? Are you on minoxidil or spironolactone, and what has that been like? Did your doctor take it seriously when you brought it up, or did you have to push?

Tell me the failures too. Those are the ones nobody publishes, and they are worth as much as the wins, because they save the next woman a year and a few hundred dollars.

I will be back in about three months with an honest report on where the Nutrafol experiment landed. Whichever way it goes, you will get the real version.

Sources

• Thinning Hair and Hair Loss: Could It Be Female Pattern Hair Loss?, American Academy of Dermatology.
• More Than Half of Postmenopausal Women Experience Female Pattern Hair Loss, The North American Menopause Society, February 16, 2022, reporting a study published in Menopause.
• The Female Pattern Hair Loss: Review of Etiopathogenesis and Diagnosis, Vujovic A and Del Marmol V, BioMed Research International, 2014.
• Safety and Tolerability of Low Dose Oral Minoxidil Monotherapy in Female Pattern Hair Loss, JAAD International, 2023.
• Improving Efficacy and Maintaining Safety in the Treatment of Alopecia With Low-Dose Oral Minoxidil and Spironolactone Combination Therapy, JAAD International, 2024.
• Nutrafol Vegan Hair Growth Supplement, Nutrafol, for the company’s own stated three to six month results timeline.