It started at the corner of my hairline. And for a long time, I told myself I was imagining it.
I wasn't. It wasn't just the corner either. It was the wash. The brush. My hands. That quiet pile you don't want to look at but can't stop counting.
Here's the part women rarely admit, so I will. I never said it out loud to anyone. Because saying it made it real, and real was the thing I wasn't ready for.
If that's where you are right now, reading this on your phone and not telling a soul, know this before we go further. You're not imagining it, you're not vain for caring, and you're not too late.
This started with my own hairline, my own mirror, and a lot of mornings I didn't talk about.
First, why is my hair shedding so much?
Some shedding is normal. We lose around 50 to 100 hairs a day and never notice. So when it suddenly feels like so much more, your body is usually telling you something has shifted.
It might be stress. It might be hormones, postpartum, perimenopause, coming off the pill. It might be low iron stores, which catch so many women out. Often it's more than one thing at once. There's even a name for the diffuse, all-over kind: telogen effluvium, where more hairs than usual rest and let go at the same time. It's incredibly common in women, and it's usually a response to something, not a life sentence.
I'm not a doctor and I'll never pretend to be. If your shedding is sudden or severe, get your bloods done and talk to your GP. That genuinely matters.
But there's a part of this you can take into your own hands today. That's what I want to share.
The thing almost nobody tells you about shedding
Here's what I wish someone had explained to me first, because it changes everything about how you read your own hair.
The hair falling out in your hands today didn't start falling today. With the most common type of shedding in women, there's a delay of around two to three months between the trigger and the fall. A stressful few months, an illness, a crash diet, having a baby, coming off the pill. The shock happens, your hair quietly decides to let go, and then it waits, sometimes a whole season, before it actually sheds.
Two things follow from that delay, and they matter enormously.
First, the cause is often already behind you. By the time you panic, the stressful thing may be months gone. That's oddly comforting.
Second, and this is the one that catches everyone, the shedding can keep going for weeks after you've fixed the cause and started doing everything right. That isn't failure. That's the backlog clearing. So many women start a good routine, see hair still falling at week three, decide it isn't working and quit, right before it would have settled. Please don't be her.
A few more things that surprised me
More shedding when you start oiling or massaging is often just the loose hairs leaving. Those hairs were already done. Disturbing the scalp brings them out a little sooner. It looks alarming, it's usually not new damage.
Skipping washes doesn't save hair. I hear this constantly. The hairs you find on wash day were already shed, they were just held in place until the water moved them. Wash less and you don't lose less, you just collect them into one frightening clump that scares you more.
The way you tie your hair to hide thinning can quietly make it worse. The tight bun or the same hard parting you adopt to cover a thin patch puts constant tension on the hairline. Over time that tension has its own thinning effect, called traction. Loosen it, move your parting, give the edges a break.
What I went back to (and it wasn't a shelf of new products)
When I finally stopped panicking and did something, I didn't reach for the newest thing being advertised at me. I went back to what the women in my family always swore by. Scalp first. Slow.
Here's the why, and it's a touch deeper than "the scalp is the soil." Every hair is built at the very base of the follicle, in your scalp, not along the lengths you can see. The lengths are already grown, already gone, really. So the one part of your hair that's actually alive and working is the part most of us ignore. That's the part worth your few minutes.
The ritual is simple, the opposite of a 10-step routine:
- Skip the faff if you want. You don't have to warm the oil. Strong Roots is light enough to work at room temperature. Warm it gently if you like the comfort, never hot, but it's a nice-to-have, not a must.
- Work it into the scalp, not the lengths. Pads of your fingers, small slow circles, a few minutes. The massage is genuinely the calmest part of my week.
- Leave it on, then wash gently. No tugging, no scrubbing, no rough towel.
- Repeat, and be patient. Hair is slow. It grows about half an inch a month and not a millimetre faster, whatever anyone sells you. Remember the delay, give it real time before you judge whether it's working.
Scalp first. Slow. The same way the women before me did it.
The inside half matters just as much
I won't pretend the oil is the whole answer, because it isn't.
This is the 360 approach I keep coming back to. The outside is your scalp and how gently you treat your hair. The inside is your nutrition, your stress, your iron stores. A hair oil looks after the outside half beautifully. It does not touch the inside half. If your shedding is driven by low iron, no oil on earth will fix that, and I'd never tell you otherwise. That's exactly why I wrote a separate piece on the one blood number so many women get told is "normal" when it isn't quite. If shedding is your worry, read the ferritin one too. It's the other half of this exact story.
Both halves, given real time. That's the whole thing.
My own hair, before and after. Not one product, not one fix. Both halves, given real time.
If you want the ritual I actually use
The oil I go back to is our Strong Roots Hair Oil, an Ayurvedic blend of eight oils made for the scalp and strands. It carries my late father's knowledge in it, a story for another day.
To make it a proper routine rather than a one-off, the Strong Roots Ritual Trio is how I'd start. The oil is the deeper weekly treatment you massage in before a wash. The serum is the lightweight daily one you leave in, so the habit sticks between oil days. That daily-plus-weekly rhythm is what makes the difference, far more than any single bottle.
Start with your scalp tonight. Be gentle, be consistent, give it the time it needs.
Your glow starts here.
Parul x
This article is for general education and is not medical advice. If your hair loss is sudden, severe or worrying you, please speak to your GP, particularly to check your iron and ferritin.
