Many cases of TE have been caused by COVID-19 infection itself, according to Esther Freeman, a dermatologist and an epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School and the principal investigator for the COVID-19 Dermatology Registry, which collects reports of COVID-19’s effects on skin, nails, and hair. The pandemic has manufactured trauma at an astonishing clip. That, in time, knocks them straight off your head. ![]() Any kind of intense physical or emotional stress can push as much as 70 percent of your hair into the “telogen” phase of its growth cycle, which halts those strands’ growth and disconnects them from their blood supply in order to conserve resources for more essential bodily processes. It’s caused by the ordinary traumas of human existence in all of their hideous variety. TE, as it’s often called, is sudden and can be dramatic. But one type of loss is responsible for the pandemic hair-loss spike: telogen effluvium. Hair loss, I eventually learned from my diligent Googling, can be temporary or permanent, and it has many causes-heredity, chronic illness, nutritional deficiency, daily too-tight ponytails. The actual mystery, instead, is why almost no one has that understanding in the first place. The pandemic was a near-perfect mass hair-loss event, and anyone with the most basic understanding of why people lose their hair could have spotted it from a mile away. This story isn’t about a medical mystery. In hindsight, the products feel more like a warning. Some of them had had COVID-19, but others, like me, had not.Īt first, the fire hose of products I’d been sprayed with felt like a very American type of reassurance-not only was my problem apparently common, but it was also widespread enough to be profitable, and therefore maybe it had a solution. First there were a few, but then there were thousands. They showed up in Facebook groups about hair loss, in subreddits dedicated to regrowth, and in the waiting rooms of dermatologists and hair-restoration clinics. Only a few months into the pandemic, around the same time when I first thought I might be losing either my hair or my mind, people whose hair was indeed falling out by the handful started to come forward. What I didn’t know at the time was that I had just started a quest for answers that many, many others had also undertaken in the previous year. I pressed on to gather whatever reliable-looking information I could find, itself full of terms I didn’t fully understand- effluvium, minoxidil, androgenic. Well below them, the real results weren’t much better-WebMD, a bundle of Reddit threads, medical journals whose articles would cost me $50 a pop, factually thin blog posts, natural-health grifters touting hair-growth secrets that doctors didn’t want me to know, product reviews that weren’t labeled as ads but for which someone had almost certainly been paid. At the very top of the search results, a colorful carousel of vitamins, serums, shampoos, and direct-to-consumer prescription services appeared a so-small-you-could-miss-it disclosure in one corner signaled that these products weren’t real search results, but advertising. I did what everyone does: I Googled my symptoms. When I looked at it, the panic became sharp. Feeling a sense of dull panic at the no-longer-refutable idea that something might be wrong, I tipped my head forward to take a picture of my scalp with my phone’s front-facing camera. I still had enough hair, but notably less than I’d had before the pandemic. One day, after washing and drying my hair, I looked at my hairline in the mirror and it was thin enough that I could make out the curvature of my scalp beneath it. The second time it happened, a little more than a year later, I was sure-not because of what was in the shower drain, but because of what was obviously no longer on my head. Or at least I thought it was-how much hair in the shower drain is enough to be sure that you’re not imagining things? Now my hair was falling out for no appreciable reason. ![]() ![]() I wasn’t okay, necessarily, but I was fine. I hadn’t gotten sick in New York City’s terrifying first wave of the pandemic. This was the summer of 2020, and although the previous three months had been difficult for virtually everyone, I had managed to escape relatively unscathed. When I first suspected that I was losing my hair, I felt like maybe I was also losing my grip on reality.
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