I recently received an email from a woman who said she had very long hair. For the last few months, her hair had been falling out much more than was normal for her. She had read on some forums that sometimes the weight of her long hair can pull out the hair shaft and cause hair loss. Therefore, she wanted to know if cutting her hair much shorter could stop her hair loss. I have a definite opinion on this based on my own experience and research. I will share it in the next article.
The difference between traction alopecia and hair loss: There are cases where wearing hair in very tight braids or ponytails can cause hair to break or pull out. This is called traction alopecia and is well documented. Usually, if you examine the hair, you’ll see how much of it has come off. You will see short, irregular little strands that indicate breakage.
However, sometimes the weight is so heavy that instead of breaking, the hair is pulled out. If you were to take one of these worn hairs and examine the tip, you would probably see that at the end (at the bulb coming out of its follicle) the dark colored sheath is still in place. If this is difficult to imagine, take a strand of your hair, grab it tightly and pull. Then examine the ending. Since the thread was pulled out with force, the sheath that is supposed to protect it will still be intact.
If your hair is falling out and falling out due to traction alopecia, then in theory you should see this same sheath when you examine the strands that have come out (without pulling) from stopping too much weight practice.
Hair loss usually falls out instead of being pulled out: If your hair is falling out due to conditions like telogen effluvium (TE) or AGA (androgenic alopecia), you will often see a bulb that looks somewhat different. Since the strand is coming out because something is bringing the hair into the shedding phase of its life cycle, instead of seeing the sheath, you’ll usually see a white bulb. It has to do with the alteration of the phase of growth and rest in the cycles of your hair.
It is true that there are people who use that their shedding improved once they cut their hair. I had a respite from a few days of shedding in the days after I cut my hair. But I suspect this has more to do with the fact that the beautician was manipulating the strands a lot during the cut. And so the strands that were going to come out in the next few days ended up on the living room floor instead of your own floor. So after this you will see less hair and you can assume that it is the cut that helped it fall out. Unfortunately, as time goes on, many people see the same volume of shedding eventually return, which was always the case for me.
Now, if your loss is due to the weight of your hair, then yes, getting a haircut might help in this situation. But, it seems to me that this is the exception and not the rule. And if this is the case, you can sometimes see a difference in what you’re seeing at the end of the thread. However, in general, this type of loss does not usually result in the high levels of loss that we see with shedding.
Cutting your hair can certainly help improve your appearance. A good cut can make you feel better and can give the illusion of more volume. So it can definitely be worth going for a tune up. But making drastic style changes isn’t likely to stop some of the common causes of detachment like TE and AGA.
