Let's start from the beginning. I have always had very fine, extremely sparse hair. From a very young age, I figured out that my hair was very different than most people's hair. We're talking newborn baby style hair. I was always told that it would thicken up eventually, mostly by my mother who has nice, thick hair. "It'll happen. Just give it time and stop dying it every two months." Okay fine. So I stopped dying it for the longest time. Stopped doing pretty much everything to it except getting regular hair cuts. That's a whole other issue. Do you know how few hair stylists truly know how to cut baby fine hair on adults? Let's just say I've only met a handful and I've talked to a lot of them. Razor cutting the ends of baby find hair is definitely not what you want to do. It will only make it fray and look frizzy or dried out.
Pretty much every hair cut I've ever had in my life has been the same one with a few variations. My hair would only grow so long, perhaps shoulder length tops before it just started looking sad and fly away. Putting it up in pony tails would only get me chastised by hair stylists because doing that would break my hair. We're talking a pony tail no thicker than the average pinky finger. I kid you not. My hair was that thin. I couldn't use clips or barrettes in it because they simply wouldn't stay. Not even bobby pins. To make my hair look as thick as possible I kept short, maybe an inch or two longer than my ears.
I thought it would always be that thin, but I was really wrong. It was going to get a lot worse.
Perhaps around the end of undergraduate college and graduate school is when I started noticing problems. Maybe it was the stress, maybe it was the life change and maybe it was none of those things all together. My already high forehead was getting higher. My temples were receding and the crown of my head was getting much more sparse. My grandmother commented to my mother after not having seen me for awhile, "What is going on with her hair? It's really looking thin and something is going on." My grandmother used to be a hairdresser about 20-30 years ago, so she notices these things. Nobody had any answers for me. At that point it really wasn't affecting me that much mentally. Or at least I wasn't letting it affect me. I wasn't yet "bloomed" in terms of my sexuality so I didn't think much of my hair as playing into it.
As law school progressed, it became more and more noticeable. Almost shocking. I started trying all the standard things I could think of. Treatments. Rogaine for Women. Topix stuff you sprinkle on your hair to "fill in" the sparse spots. Absolutely nothing was working and I was just getting more and more disheartened. Finally I began wearing wigs in an attempt to both cover up the sparse spots and give myself full, nice, long hair. After all, that's been my dream since I was a very little girl. I've always wanted very long hair, maybe to the middle of my back.
It was only recently that I went to my dermatologist and asked him what was going on. He looked at my scalp and did some basic tests. He looked me in the eye and said, "You have progressive female pattern hair loss. It cannot be cured and is only going to get worse. Don't bother with treatments to regrow your hair because they won't work. Maybe if you'd started them when you were 10 you could have slowed the loss, but it's going to happen with or without those treatments." To say I was devastated is an understatement. There I was, a 24 year old woman losing my hair in a similar fashion to an old man.
Since then I've looked into the alternatives. I've considered hair transplant surgery, but the problem with that is I don't have hair in other areas to transplant to my balding areas. It's just sparse all over. So I've been wearing wigs every day for awhile and that's all well and good, but that only goes so far. At some point those come off and you're left with the same head of hair. Plus as good as wigs are, they're still wigs. They're bulky and most of the time it feels like I'm wearing a thick, scratchy hat. Good quality ones are simply out of my budget right now. I have one nice human hair wig, but it's a short bob. My dream is to have long hair. I literally covet people's nice long hair now. I would even go as far as saying it's one of the reasons I'm in to women as well as men. I lust after their hair.
At this point, I need some kind of miracle. Or a benefactor. I've seen hair extensions that can be bonded to bare skin, but they're absurdly expensive. I simply can't afford $5000 for chin length hair that needs touching up every 6-8 weeks. I'm jealous of people who can afford it (or even people who put that on credit without a care in the world.)
If anybody has any ideas of what I can do or where I can go to work on my hair, please let me know. I spend so much time stressing over my hair that I think it's making it worse. If someone would like to donate to me, please please contact me. I'm not above begging for long hair. As women, a lot of our sense of self is tied to our hair, whether we recognize it or not. I'm a sensual person who loves kink and advocates self esteem and loving yourself. But right now? My self esteem is taking a major hit thanks to this very unsettling problem.
