I recently heard from a young woman who was noticing disturbing problems with her hair texture. I was pretty sure she was suffering from telogen effluvium or TE. About six months before the hair loss began, he had been on a severe and restrictive diet and felt that this course of events was leading to the drastic fall he was seeing right now.
She had read that you can see changes in the texture of your hair while experiencing TE, but now that she was seeing some new growth, she noticed that the texture of the regrowth hair looked a bit odd as well. She asked me, in part, “When should I see the texture changes? Should they occur before shedding, after shedding, or during both? Does the fact that I keep seeing these changes mean that something is wrong with me? Or that I don’t have telogen effluvium after all? “I’ll try to address these concerns in the next article.
Changes in the texture and appearance of the hair can occur before it is shed due to telogen effluvium or other conditions: You have to understand that your hair goes through several phases before it falls out. In the growing phase, it is nurtured regularly and is often when it looks best and grows quickly. It will also enter a resting phase and, eventually, a molting phase. Over time, when it is preparing to fall, it no longer takes nourishment from the follicle, so it can appear a bit dull or loose.
And, if what you are dealing with is normal hair cycles and normal loss, then there are generally not enough hairs in this phase at the same time for you to notice any changes in texture. But, when you experience TE or other conditions in which many follicles change at the same time, these changes in the appearance of your hair can become much more noticeable.
Changes in texture after hair begins to grow back: (most often seen in androgenic hair loss or AGA) The person who emailed me was very disappointed because he hoped that when the loose hair would finally fall out and then be replaced with “normal” hair, he would hopefully start to see drastic improvements in the appearance of his hair. But, as she examined her regrowth, she was very disappointed to see that it was thin and thin. He basically said that the hair before his fall looked unruly and in the air way, but the hair that was growing backwards also looked sickly and was not thick enough to look better.
Occasionally hair thickens as it grows back. So if it was too short, this may have been what was wrong. But, if the hair is long enough to be examined, then ideally it should look relatively normal and have a normal diameter. When not, this may be an indication that there is some miniaturization and / or inflammation at play. What usually happens is that the follicles are negatively affected by androgens or inflammation and therefore the resulting hair does not grow back normally. In essence, androgens choke and shrink healthy follicles.
So hopefully this article has shown you that you may notice texture changes both before and after experiencing hair loss. What you see often will depend on what is causing the loss or shedding in the first place and how the follicles are affected along the way. Treatment often depends on identifying what problem you are dealing with and then dealing with the trigger (in the case of medical hair loss or TE) or the androgens and inflammation (in the case of androgenic or inflammatory hair loss) . times when conditions like TE give rise to other conditions like AGA that could have happened somewhere down the road anyway, but were accelerated by the drastic hair loss that happened all at once.
