For many women, hair is a source of pride and confidence – something integral to your identity that helps you feel beautiful. That’s why experiencing hair loss as a woman can be incredibly distressing. Thankfully, there are many effective hair loss treatments for women, from medications to clinical treatments. In this post, we’ll explain what causes female hair loss, and the best ways to address it without surgery.
What Causes Female Hair Loss?
Women can lose hair for a variety of reasons, both internal and external. It’s important to identify the underlying cause of your hair loss, in order to treat it in the best way. Here are the key reasons:
Hormones: In women, hormonal fluctuations, and especially the onset of menopause, are the most common reason for hair loss, as are hormonal conditions like PCOS. This is called androgenic alopecia or female pattern hair loss, and it presents as a general loss of hair density that is often most visible where you part your hair. The precise hormones responsible aren’t 100% clear, but for women, oestrogen seems to play a bigger role than androgens, which are usually responsible for male pattern hair loss.
Post-pregnancy: Many women experience a type of hair loss called telogen effluvium after pregnancy. During pregnancy, hormones impact the hair’s normal growth cycle, often prolonging its growth.
Then, as the hormonal balance shifts after pregnancy, it results in losing a lot of hair at once. It’s normal to experience similar hair loss because of medications, during periods of stress, or after experiencing accidents or surgeries.
Alopecia areata: This is an autoimmune condition where the body attacks the hair follicles, leading to shedding. Traditional hair loss treatments often don’t work for alopecia areata, but advanced treatments like PRP can help!
Hairstyles: Wearing tight hairstyles consistently can put pressure on the hair follicle, leading to traction alopecia. The damage to the follicles can be quite profound, so addressing this type of hair loss requires changing your styling approach as well as the right hair growth treatment.
Nutritional deficiency: Certain nutritional deficiencies, and especially deficiencies in B vitamins, can also lead to excessive shedding, as the body struggles to produce new hair. It’s important to undergo testing to figure out what your body is missing and supplement accordingly.
Best Hair Loss Treatments for Women
So without further ado, here are the best hair loss treatments for women, from medications to procedures. We’ll even cover what kinds of hair loss they can help address!
Hormonal Treatments
If you’re experiencing androgenic alopecia, it makes sense to start with hormonal female hair loss treatments. Consult your doctor first and confirm that you’re experiencing pattern hair loss because of hormonal changes. Your doctor may order some testing, and then recommend medications that address that underlying imbalance, like spironolactone or estrogen.
Hair Growth Medications
There are a lot of medications known to improve hair growth by stimulating hair follicles, but unfortunately, many of them are only recommended for men. The one exception is minoxidil, which is commonly sold under the brand name Rogaine. In women, minoxidil was found to improve hair density specifically in cases of hormonal pattern hair loss, although it wasn’t as effective for other types of hair loss like alopecia areata.
Microneedling
Microneedling is a treatment that triggers the body’s own self-repair mechanisms. It’s powerful as a skin rejuvenating treatment, to reverse the look of fine lines, wrinkles, and scarring. It’s also surprisingly effective for stimulating the repair of the hair follicles and improving how well hair growth treatments can penetrate the skin.
Microneedling treatments like SylfirmX can make a difference on their own. Others, like the DermaPen or V2 Beauty Boost, double as delivery systems, ensuring that other hair growth treatments penetrate to where they can effectively stimulate the hair follicles.
PRP and PRF
Platelet-rich plasma (PRP) and platelet-rich fibrin (PRF) are two incredibly exciting treatments for hair restoration. These treatments utilize your body’s own growth factors to correct hair follicle function and increase the growth cycle, to boost hair density. Research shows they can help with both hormonal hair loss and alopecia areata.
Because of their mechanism of action, which is based on triggering the body’s own self-repair mechanisms, there’s good reason to believe they can also help with hair loss due to other causes!
PRP and PRF are both best injected with microneedling, which ensures a precise and targeted depth of penetration. That said, we can also combine them with JetPeel, an innovative, non-invasive treatment that relies on air pressure to ensure targeted, painless delivery.
DE|RIVE
If you’re not a fan of the idea of using your own biomaterial to stimulate growth, DE|RIVE is an alternative source of growth factors with similar efficacy. This plant-based material is biomimetic, helping to stimulate a dynamic signaling cascade that supports optimal scalp health and improved hair density. It’s an effective remedy for several types of hair loss that impact women, including hormonal, autoimmune, and more.
Hair Loss Treatments for Women at Discovery Laser
At Discovery Laser, we offer a variety of hair loss treatments for women and men. You can dramatically boost your hair growth with non-invasive yet effective solutions of varying levels of intensity. From PRP to DERIVE, these procedures present a wonderful alternative or complementary treatment to other female hair loss solutions like minoxidil or surgical hair restoration.
If you’re not sure which service is right for you, don’t worry! Get in touch with us, and we’ll help you discover the hair treatments that’ll give you the best results.
