Menopause & Hair

My Husband Is A Dermatologist. He Couldn't Explain What Filled In My Part.

She was ready to give up her HRT to save her hair. She didn't have to.

My husband is a Korean dermatologist. Last month he asked me, very quietly, if I'd gone back on the minoxidil without telling him.

"I need the truth," he said at the kitchen table. "Did you go back on it? Did someone put you on finasteride?"

I said no. He looked more confused, not relieved.

"Then I can't explain it. You're on estrogen and testosterone, and your part is filling in. In a woman your age, that almost always means a prescription. And I'd know. I'm the one who writes them."

I didn't tell him the rest yet. Because what was filling in my part hadn't come from his prescription pad. It had been sitting on a shelf in his own mother's bathroom for years.

The Trade My Own Husband Could Not Fix

Being married to a hair doctor while your own hair falls out is a strange kind of lonely. His patients get forty minutes with him. I got a prescription slid across the breakfast table.

And it was worse in his family.

Every woman on Daniel's side has thick hair. His mother is 91 and still wears a full bun. His grandmother braided hers every morning until she was 94. At every family photo, I was the one with the see-through part.

Menopause hit me like a truck at 51. Several hot flashes an hour. Joints that ached getting out of the car. Awake at 1 or 2 a.m. every single night. Brain fog so bad I'd lose words in the middle of a sentence. Some nights I'd lie there sweating and think, I hate my body right now.

At 53, my gynecologist finally put me on HRT. Estrogen. Progesterone. And a little testosterone cream so I could function.

It was a game changer. I slept through the night. My joints quit aching. I could finish my sentences. I finally felt stable.

And my hair went.

I was shedding like crazy. It was on my clothes, my pillow, the chair I'd just sat in. The sink looked like someone had gotten a haircut. I wrapped my hair tie four times just to end up with a stringy little ponytail.

"I'm feeling better, which is amazing," I told my sister on the phone. "But my hair is killing me."

My HRT was great for everything else. Just not this.

What He'd Been Telling Me For Years

Long before anything changed, Daniel had explained it.

When estrogen drops in menopause, a woman's testosterone doesn't drop with it. An enzyme right in the scalp turns some of it into DHT. DHT latches onto the follicle and squeezes it, a little tighter every cycle, until the hair that comes back is thinner, shorter, then barely there.

"And in some women," he said, "adding testosterone means more raw material for DHT. Right at the root."

I panicked. I read posts from women who IMMEDIATELY stopped their T cream, terrified their bodies were turning it into DHT and killing their follicles.

"Don't you dare stop your HRT," Daniel said. "It's the best thing that's happened to you in years. I can name the hair problem exactly. I just can't take it down without more pills you'd be on for the rest of your life."

More pills. On top of the pills.

The $4,300 We Spent Trying

We threw everything at it. Daniel paid for all of it.

• Oral minoxidil he prescribed himself (8 months). The shedding stopped. My eyebrows came back. Then I found half-inch fuzz on my lower back. I freaked out, stopped, and it all fell out again. Worse.
• Spironolactone ($40 a month for 6 months). Dry eyes. Dry mouth. My part kept widening.
• Three rounds of PRP at a colleague's clinic ($2,700). Painful. A little better for a few months, then back.
• Nutrafol, biotin, hair gummies, a caffeine shampoo, rosemary oil that ruined my pillowcases ($1,100). Nothing.

I even asked my gynecologist to cut the testosterone in half. Within a month the brain fog was back, and I was awake at 2 a.m. again. My hair didn't care. I went back to the full dose.

$4,300. My part stayed wide, dead still. Every single thing that made me feel better was taking something from me.

And the night before Thanksgiving, standing at our bathroom mirror, I said something to Daniel I had never said out loud. He still brings it up.

What His Mother Showed Me

The next afternoon, I was helping my mother-in-law clean up. She took her pins out, and her hair fell past her shoulders. At 91.

I asked her, half joking, what she'd done that her son couldn't.

She laughed. "His medicine is for after," she said. "We always did it before. We fed the root."

She told me about the pot her mother boiled every Sunday in Daegu. Ginseng. A black mushroom called yeongji. Mulberry root. Worked into the scalp with the fingertips. Never the ends.

Then she patted my hand. "Keep your medicine for the heat. Feed the root for the hair. Why choose?"

"I'm too old for the pot now," she said. She went to her bathroom and came back with a little green bar. "Same plants. My niece found it. I've used it for years."

It was the Korean Herbal Root Rescue Bar, from a company called Nutrion. It had been in her cabinet the whole time I'd been crying in mine.

I showed Daniel that night. He rolled his eyes.

"Mom's herbs," he said. "I spent eleven years in school so people wouldn't have to rub roots on their heads."

Then he said a sentence I wrote on a sticky note and stuck to my bathroom mirror. I'll tell you why.

But first, the reason he didn't argue longer. It was what I'd said to him the night before, at that same mirror:

"I'm going to stop the testosterone, Daniel. I'd rather be tired than bald. I know it's crazy. I finally feel like a person again, and I'm about to give it back just to save my hair."

He'd held me for a long time and didn't say anything. He's a doctor. He didn't have a prescription for having to choose.

My 12-Week Log

I kept a careful log, because I knew who'd be reading it. Same bathroom light. Same photo angle. Every week. Same HRT doses, nothing changed.

And in week ten, something happened that I never wrote down in it.

Right above the log, on the sticky note, was what Daniel had said after "Mom's herbs":

"Although, yeongji is Ganoderma. There's lab research where it slowed the enzyme that makes DHT. And ginseng helped follicle cells keep growing with DHT added. If something did that right at the scalp, every wash, without touching your hormones, that's exactly what we'd see. I just don't believe a bar can."

14,653 reviews. 4.7 stars. No pill. Nothing that goes through my body. I ordered one, mostly to prove him right.

Readers’ own before-and-after photos.

Week 1 to 2: Sixty seconds on my part and crown, every wash. My scalp tingled and felt clean. For the first time in two years, I wasn't afraid to wash my hair.

Week 3 to 4: I counted the drain. 31 strands, down from a handful. Then 14.

Week 5 to 8: Short new hairs standing straight up along my part. Dozens of them. On my head. Not on my back.

Week 9 to 12: My part looked half as wide in the photos. My hair tie went around twice, not four times.

That was the week Daniel asked who'd been writing me prescriptions.

What His Own Eyes Showed

He didn't trust my log. He took me into his office on a Saturday and put me under the same scope he uses on his patients.

"The new hairs aren't the thin, wispy kind," he finally said. "They're coming in thicker. And you're still on everything."

"I told you years ago what the problem was," he said. "I just never had a fix that held without another pill. Something here did."

I handed his own explanation back to him. DHT is made at the root. So you work at the root. And leave the hormones alone.

And at his mother's 92nd birthday, he said something to her in Korean that made her cry.

But that week ten moment first. The one that isn't in the log.

I drove to the pharmacy to refill my testosterone cream.

A year earlier, I'd sat in that same parking lot and cried, holding the bag, feeling like I was choosing against my own hair.

This time I picked it up, got back in the car, checked my part in the visor out of habit, and laughed.

I didn't have to choose anymore.

A Few Months Later

At the birthday, I danced with his mother. Then his aunts. Then his nieces. Past midnight. Me, the woman who used to be awake at 2 a.m. staring at the ceiling.

Rested. Clear-headed. Hair down.

When we lined up for the family photo, Daniel walked me to the front row, next to his mother, and said something to her in Korean. She covered her mouth, and her eyes filled up.

Later, in the car, I asked him what he'd said.

"I told her you didn't have to choose. You kept everything."

The Truth After 31 Years Married To Him

31 years next to a hair specialist taught me one thing.

Being close to medicine doesn't save you. My husband could name the exact thing taking my hair and still couldn't stop it without taking something else from me.

The women in his family never had to choose. They took care of the root, where the problem starts.

For us, it came back in a little green bar that did what $4,300 and his own prescriptions could not. I'm still on every hormone I started with.

Now, when a woman on HRT sits in his chair and asks if she has to give it up to save her hair, he tells her no. He tells her the first step is something she can do herself, in the shower, in sixty seconds.

Click below to see the Korean Herbal Root Rescue Bar. No pills. Nothing that touches your hormones. 14,653 reviews. 4.7 stars. 90 days to try it, or your money back.

Keep everything your doctor prescribed. Use the bar every wash. Count your hair-tie wraps and photograph your part under the same light every 2 weeks for 12 weeks. Your photos will tell you.