JournalHair5 June 20265 min

Hair fall: what a salon can help with, and when to see a doctor

Much of what gets called hair fall is breakage, which is fixable in a chair. The rest is not, and should not be treated as though it were.

Draft — written for Laa Vidaa, not yet approved by the salon. Not indexed by search engines.

Sample

It is the most common thing anyone raises at the basin, and the one where salons most often overpromise. So it is worth separating the part a salon can genuinely help with from the part it cannot.

Shedding and breakage are not the same

Look at the strands you are losing. If there is a small pale bulb at one end, the hair has come away at the root — that is shedding. If both ends are simply broken, and the strands are shorter than the length of your hair, that is breakage.

The difference decides who can help. Breakage is a hair problem. Shedding is usually a body problem.

What a salon can actually do

Cut off damage that is splitting upward and taking length with it.
Stop the cause — over-processing, a lightener taken further than the hair could hold, heat used daily without protection.
Change how colour is done: away from the scalp, gentler formulations, longer between appointments.
Treat the scalp, which is skin and behaves like skin.
Point out traction. A tight braid or bun worn every day thins the hairline over years, and it is exactly the kind of thing nobody notices about themselves.

When to stop booking treatments and see a doctor

Shedding that is spread across the whole scalp, sudden, or accompanied by a widening parting is not something a salon treatment will fix, and repeated spa appointments only delay the conversation you should be having. In India the common causes — thyroid, low iron, low vitamin D, PCOS, post-partum shedding, and the months after a serious illness — are found with a blood test and treated medically.

Post-partum shedding in particular alarms people badly, and it is normal: hair held on to during pregnancy comes out afterwards, usually settling within a year without any intervention at all.

What to be sceptical of

Any treatment sold as regrowing hair. A salon can improve the condition of the hair you have and the scalp it grows from, which often makes hair look considerably fuller. It cannot restart a follicle that has stopped, and a course of anything priced as though it can is worth walking away from.