I’m standing outside my shower and I don’t want to go in.
I’m not tired or in a rush, simply avoiding the reckoning of how much hair I’ll lose this time. This dread has been my constant companion ever since I lathered up, rinsed and watched handfuls of dirty blonde strands circle the drain three weeks ago. It wasn’t the normal 100 to 150 strands everyone sheds daily; these were thick clumps of something I never imagined I could lose.
I comb the conditioner through gently and come away with more. And more. I feel fragile, terrified to pull my hair up. Even laying my head on my pillow feels like a risk. “This can’t be happening,” I wail, my hands shaking as I feel the unprecedented thinness of my ponytail. My mind searches for answers: Is it the creatine? The estrogen cream? The trendy hair vitamins from Erewhon I’ve been choking down religiously?
Turns out, I’m not alone. More than 85% of men and 33% of women experience hair loss in their lifetimes, but I never thought I’d be one of them. Between aging, stress and the rise of GLP-1s (aka Ozempic) hair loss has never been more common. “I’ve seen more clients experiencing shedding and thinning over the past few years,” says Liz Jung, a Los Angeles-based hair colorist. “It used to come up occasionally, but now it’s part of almost every consultation. I’ve seen confident, radiant women start hiding under hats because they don’t feel like themselves anymore.” Yep, that was me.
My panic began with ChatGPT, where I diagnosed myself with everything from hormonal imbalances and thyroid issues to iron deficiency. Then I spent hours scrolling Instagram studying posts from hair-obsessed influencers like @hairlossgirlboss, @Sofiahairhealth and @AbbeyYung. I doubled down on biotin, Amazon-Primed pumpkin seed oil supplements and surgically applied Epres bond repair treatment three times a week. When the fistfuls of hair persisted, I tore through Los Angeles for someone, anyone, who could tell me why this was happening and how to make it stop.
I saw three doctors in five days. Each came highly recommended, yet their prescriptions couldn’t have been more different. The first prescribed an oral pharmaceutical blend with minoxidil, the gold standard for hair growth, that I’d need to take for life. The second championed three sessions of a buzzy noninvasive treatment that uses a handheld device to send ultrasound waves and air pressure to stimulate dormant follicles. The third swore by the big guns: PRP (platelet-rich plasma) injections combined with exosomes — tiny vesicles derived from stem cells that deliver growth factors directly to the roots, essentially telling them to wake up and grow. Desperate for a solution, I was drawn to the aggressive approach, but I chose the third doctor for a more telling reason. He was the only one who required my blood work first.
The chosen one, Dr. Jonathan Shalom, a Beverly Hills-based board-certified physician and hair transplant surgeon also known as Dr. Hair 90210, was all business as he withheld a diagnosis until I was in his chair with his trichoscope in hand — think high-powered magnifying glass for your scalp. Unlike genetic or hormone-driven loss, I had a textbook case of telogen effluvium, or stress shedding. Sigh.
“Good news,” Shalom said as he finished his examination. “Your hair isn’t dying, it’s just sleeping. We can wake it up, but we need to be aggressive.” Evidently, telogen effluvium happens when the body undergoes emotional, physical or hormonal shock and pushes more hairs than usual into the resting phase. What I didn’t realize was that hair doesn’t fall out because of what happened yesterday, it’s what happened three months ago (a markedly stressful time in my life) — which is why the massive loss completely caught me by surprise. It can last three to six months but the silver lining is that telogen effluvium can be reversed.
“Just know that reversing hair loss is a long game,” Shalom said. “We’re talking six months minimum.” Oh, hell no was my gut reaction. After a litany of stressful events, I couldn’t handle more handfuls of hair. If I could speed this up with some modern-day medicine, I was game.
Since my hair was “stuck” in a resting phase, my treatment was designed to reset the scalp environment and nudge the follicles to grow again. I reclined in the exam chair as Shalom parted my hair into sections and cleansed the area with an antiseptic liquid. The first step was injecting my scalp (many times) with PRP created from my own blood, which contains growth factors the body uses for healing. Shalom swears by his double-spin, double-chamber PRP system, which he says yields a cleaner, higher-concentration product. My scalp was a little bloody, but thanks to a few pokes of lidocaine, the injections were relatively painless. But fair warning, the temple area can be a little spicy.
Next came stamping my scalp from hairline to crown with a medical-grade microneedling device, creating microchannels (or mini-tears) to stimulate collagen and blood flow while increasing absorption of the hero ingredient: proprietary exosomes. Shalom rubbed the liquid, stored in a small vial, into my scalp with his gloved fingertips. Once treatment was complete, my hair looked wet with a faint blood-red hue and felt a bit sticky, but it was nothing a baseball cap couldn’t hide. Aftercare instructions were simple: Don’t wash for 24 hours and stick with the ketoconazole shampoo, which I’d already been using three times a week to prevent further thinning. “PRP and exosomes are one of the most advanced regenerative combinations we have in hair restoration right now,” Shalom said. “It’s minimally invasive, biologically natural and designed to help the scalp function optimally.”
But exosomes come with caveats. They aren’t FDA-approved for hair loss, and the research consists mostly of small studies involving just a few patients. The issue isn’t safety, but uncertainty. Experts don’t fully understand what is in exosomes or what causes their effects. With treatments running upward of $1,500 per session (which is what I paid), some critics call it an expensive gamble. Still, frantic and fearful, taking action outweighed the risk. I was willing to try anything.
So, did it work? Nothing happens overnight in hair restoration, so all I could do was wait. A week later, the shedding slowed to half. Two weeks in, my hair felt stronger — and so did I. For the first time in months, I wasn’t afraid to pull my hair back or run my fingers through it without counting what came away. At my one month follow-up, Shalom pointed to his trichoscope screen. Baby hairs. Lots of them sprouting up all over my scalp. The hair was coming back. And with it, the confidence I thought I’d lost.
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