License to Shed

Claire Stern explores when daily hair loss is totally normal (almost all the time)—and when you should stress about it (almost never).

- EMILY BURNS

I’ve been a champion hair shedder for as long as I can remember. A small girl with a disproportionately large mop of hair, I recall repeatedly breaking my mom’s fine-tooth combs and meekly asking my dad if he could snake the drain. Again. And while stylists would often tell me how lucky I was to have such thick hair, I felt anything but.

My shedding only seemed to intensify when I became an adult. It is now constant and incessant. Whenever I brush my hair or blow it dry with my Dyson Supersonic, I’m greeted with a fistful of my own tresses. Countless roommates—and a few significant others—have been moved to comment on my abundance of strays, impossible to miss as they’re strewn across the bathroom floor.

There’s a reason some men, in particular, are startled by the volume of strand shedding. Women tend to have longer hair than men, and if you have longer strands, “it can feel like there’s more shedding happening because the hair ball looks bigger,” says Ronda S. Farah, MD, a dermatologist based in Minneapolis. New York City dermatologist Joyce Davis, MD, concurs: “Circling in the drain, one long strand of a woman’s hair is going to look like more than three short hairs from a guy’s scalp.” (It should be noted that there are a number of men who prefer that their significant others have long hair, so why judge them for shedding it? Hypocrisy at its finest.)