Most women notice it in one of two places: the parting looks a little wider in the mirror, or the ponytail feels a little thinner in the hand. What almost nobody mentions is that this particular kind of hair loss is the kind that responds best to treatment.
Why female hair loss looks so different
Men tend to lose hair in shapes you could draw around: a hairline creeping back, a patch opening at the crown. Women much more often lose density everywhere at once. The hairline stays exactly where it always was, and the parting starts to look wider, because a little more light is getting through.
That pattern has a name, female pattern hair loss, and what makes it look that way is happening down at the follicle. The follicles are still alive down there. They are simply shrinking, so each growth cycle sends up a hair a little finer and a little shorter than the one before, until what is growing there no longer gives the cover it used to. Doctors call that miniaturisation, which is a very long word for a very small thing.
So picture a garden thinning out rather than a lawn dying in patches. The plants are all still rooted, still growing, still yours; they have simply grown smaller, so the soil starts showing between them. Nothing has left the ground.
Why that difference is genuinely good news
Because a follicle that is still alive can be encouraged, while a follicle that has gone has to be replaced, and those are two completely different jobs. One is a season of feeding and watering. The other means lifting turf from the thickest part of the lawn and laying it where the ground is bare.
You see, that is exactly why the treatments we most often recommend to women are not surgical ones at all. When the follicles are still working, the useful thing to do is wake them up.
The two treatments that suit thinning hair best
The first is PRP, which stands for platelet-rich plasma, and it is your own blood put to work. We take a small sample, concentrate the platelets in it, and put them back into your scalp exactly where the hair is thinning. Why platelets? Because repair is what they already do all day. Put them in concentration around follicles that have been winding down, and they work against the very shrinking we just described. The sessions are painless, there is no downtime afterwards, and each one is £250.
The second is red light therapy, which you will see written as photodiode therapy. You sit under a specialised light, and it breaks up DHT, the hormone behind pattern hair loss, right across the scalp. Take the pressure off a follicle that DHT has been shrinking, and it can get back to growing the fuller hair it used to. Painless again, no downtime again, and £500 for a course of six. It does good work on its own and it does good work alongside PRP, so you can have it either way.
Both figures are published here on purpose, because a price you only hear in a meeting is not a price you can compare.
The honest word on hair transplants for women
Women do have hair transplants, and for some women it is exactly the right answer. It is worth knowing what makes it the right answer, though, because it is not quite the same thing that makes it right for a man.
A transplant asks two things of you. It wants a settled pattern, because the surgeon is rebuilding defined areas. It also wants strong donor hair at the back and sides, because that is where the moved follicles come from, and that area has to still look full once they have gone. Where thinning is spread evenly across the whole head, those two conditions are harder to meet. And where the follicles at the front are still alive and still working, moving more in solves a problem you may not actually have.
When both conditions are met, it is a genuinely good option, performed in a single surgical day at our CQC-registered Leeds clinic. The fuller answer is in our piece on hair transplants for women.
The everyday causes worth a word with your doctor
Thinning does not always come down to genetics: iron levels, thyroid and the shedding that can follow a stressful year are all worth a quick word with your own doctor, because what is behind it changes what you treat.
The best treatment is the one that matches your hair
Which is why we are not going to tell you which one is yours in a blog post. What we will do is look at your hair with you properly, and it costs nothing: around thirty minutes on video, any evening from 6pm, with the team that would treat you.
They will assess your pattern and your donor density, answer every question you have, and tell you honestly which path suits your hair, including the path of leaving it alone for now if that is the truthful answer.
Book the free consultation and bring all the questions you have been typing into a search bar late at night. Half an hour, and you will know exactly where your hair stands.