Losing my hair sucked. Trying to regrow it has been even worse.

I never appreciated how much I aspired toward conventional hotness until I got cancer and lost all my hair. As I underwent 12 rounds of chemotherapy in 2023 to treat advanced-stage Hodgkin lymphoma, I became measurably “uglier”: bald, muscle-free and inflated by steroids, with only three eyelashes to my name. The Mitski lyric “But if I gave up on being pretty, I wouldn’t know how to be alive” comes to mind.

Ironically, as my hair fluttered to the ground like falling leaves during those early days of treatment, I realized that the wild, oft-frizzy hair I’d spent my whole life tussling with was central to my look. I tried my best to hold onto it.

During my first few rounds of chemo, I opted to try a relatively new process called “cold capping,” which is what it sounds like. The patient wears an ice-cold cap before, during, and after chemo, and for some, it can reduce the amount of hair loss during treatment by up to 50 percent. (New York recently became the first state to mandate insurance coverage of scalp cooling; I had to sink a chunk of my GoFundMe to afford it.)

The cap is, unfortunately, a torture device. Just 15 seconds into my first treatment with the freezing helmet latched to my head and with six more hours to go, the cold was unbearable. I took more Advil and Tylenol, and requested more Ativan, too. An hour later the nurse returned with the benzos and began pumping me with four types of poison, as I shivered on the most depressing floor in Murray Hill.

Once I experienced the brutality of chemo, it became unimaginable to elect additional discomfort. The moment I stopped capping, the hair loss quickened, thinning out my wavy bob. Every day I asked myself: Is today the day I shave it? Would classic bald look better at this point? How much longer can I cling to hair normalcy?

When I found clumps of hair caking the pillow on my hospital stretcher, I asked the emergency room doctor to buzz it.

During the treatment, losing my hair was upsetting, but I had bigger problems, like cancer and sepsis. The post-chemo hair regrowth process — slow, uneven, patchy, lonely — has been more gutting because I’m supposed to be normal now.

More than 80 million people in the US experience hair loss. In addition to affecting cancer patients, hair loss is also a common but rarely talked-about side effect of perimenopause and childbirth. While baldness, thinning, and hairline woes are more commonly associated with men, female pattern hair loss is estimated to impact 40 percent of women before age 50. Hair loss in women is more likely to be caused by medical conditions, medications, or psychological distress. Across the board, it has a significant impact on a patient’s quality of life, but women are more likely to experience psychosocial problems as a result.

“Hair is deeply tied to our identity, confidence, and even how we just move through the world,” Dr. Asmi Berry, a board-certified dermatologist in Los Angeles, says. “Our hair is one of the first things that people notice. So when a patient or anyone experiences hair loss, especially after something life-altering like chemo or pregnancy or a severe illness, it’s not just physical. It could feel like you’ve lost a part of yourself and that has an emotional impact.”

People often get “chemo curls” after cancer treatment: Their hair grows back thicker and curlier, sometimes in a different color. My alleged curls sprouted up unevenly on my head, as I was now expected to find work, love, and normalcy.

After I begged, my oncologist finally referred me to a dermatologist at the cancer hospital who prescribed me minoxidil (Rogaine), spironolactone (a heart medication that can help treat female pattern hair loss), a scalp solution, and a military-grade anti-fungal shampoo that turns hair into straw. Neither the anti-fungal shampoo, which is also used to treat athlete’s foot and ringworm, nor the topical solution are FDA-approved for hair loss, but have shown promise as adjunctive therapies and are among many tools a dermatologist may use to help a patient.

Unfortunately for me, the growth process has remained slow-going. I’m grateful, though, that the dermatologist was willing to help me try — that she took my distress seriously.

“It’s just hair,” people with an abundance of it tell me. “You’re rocking the short look!” Imagine if the most traumatizing thing that ever happened to you were visible on your body, and people made upbeat comments about it. When I finally worked up the courage to post a wig-free photo on my Instagram Stories, after over a year of hiding, someone told me I looked like Stockard Channing’s Rizzo from Grease — the famously mid-30s actress playing a high schooler whose hair I hate.

Unfortunately, there are few solutions for hair regrowth that are guaranteed to be effective. “My advice is just to look for treatments that are backed by science and clinical data,” Berry says.

When people ask Lindy Segal, a beauty writer and author of the Gatekeeping newsletter, what hair growth products are “worth it,” Segal’s answer is always the same: minoxidil, also known as Rogaine. “It’s still the only FDA-approved ingredient for hair growth in those assigned female at birth,” Segal wrote in an email. Finasteride (Propecia) is the other FDA-approved medication to treat hair loss and pattern baldness, but only for men. “There’s some research that red light therapy could boost hair growth, but a $45 bottle of Rogaine is a safer financial bet than a $500 device,” Segal says. “Girl math!”

And the girl math can add up: There are myriad supplements and hair products boasting ingredients like biotin, collagen, and zinc on the market, and they’re not all bogus. Oral biotin, for example, is quite safe to ingest and studies show it could help prevent hair loss — though there’s not enough research to show that it encourages growth.

When I first saw my dermatologist, she first had me do a ton of bloodwork, to try to identify any other root causes of both hair loss and slow regrowth (aside from, you know, 12 infusions of the most toxic substances on Earth.) I was very low in zinc and vitamin B6, both of which are important for hair growth, so she prescribed me supplements for those, along with all the other pills and potions we tried.

“I think what’s really important in the whole conversation of hair loss is a root cause approach,” Berry says. “Figuring out, is the hair loss hormonal? Is there a nutritional component? Stress-induced? Getting a comprehensive evaluation by a dermatologist can really help with avoiding wasted time, money, or even hope on the wrong path.”

Frustratingly, hair loss is also something that some doctors outside dermatology are quick to dismiss, regarding it as a problem of vanity. After giving birth to her 2-year-old son, my friend Alicia, a 35-year-old in North Carolina, watched in dismay as much of her hair came out (Vox is only using Alicia’s first name so she can freely discuss a sensitive medical issue). When she brought the shedding up to her primary care physician, the doctor said, “Oh, it looks fine to me!” and failed to refer her to a dermatologist.

“It was just a constant self-esteem bummer,” Alicia told me via text message. “I just felt like no matter how I tied it back or what I did, I couldn’t get it to look good. And there’s no makeup or anything you can do for your hair.”

The regrowth process was long, demoralizing, and expensive. “I gave a lot of my money to Vegamour,” Alicia says. She thinks the Insta-friendly hair serum that contains turmeric, caffeine, and biotin helped, to some extent. Other well-advertised solutions that she bought seemed less effective for her hair, including growth supplements that contained biotin and acerola extract — a Brazilian fruit containing vitamin C that is supposed to help boost collagen production.

That’s the big problem in the wild world of hair regrowth: Most stuff can’t hurt. But most probably can’t help. One website selling Acelora as a hair supplement cites a 1954 study on scurvy, the vitamin C deficiency that can cause hair loss. I’m assuming, today, most people’s hair loss is no longer scurvy-induced.

Like mine, Alicia’s algorithm is plastered with hair growth ads boasting dubious claims. Indeed, it seems we are living in a time of unprecedented claims about hair. “There’s a lot of noise out there and people market in ways that are really psychologically triggering,” Berry says.

Segal has also observed a distinct uptick in the noise. “I’ve definitely noticed more products, brands, and general coverage targeted to hair growth for women in the last few years,” she says. She suspects some of it is related to the pandemic. Indeed, studies have indicated that roughly 20 percent of people who had Covid-19 later developed temporary hair shedding, usually starting a few months after recovering.

I’ll admit that, out of desperation, I’ve tried well-marketed hair regrowth products that aren’t what you might call “vetted.” Herbal oils, turmeric scalp elixirs, collagen powders, “density” shampoos and conditioners, serums. I’ve lived in constant fear of more hair falling out, so I carefully ration hair brushing and washing, terrified to detach any more strands than inevitable.

A year and a half after finishing treatment, I worked up the courage to get my first blowout, which would involve brushing, washing, scrubbing, and hair blowing. The stylist showed me her comb and her hands after massaging my head. “See? Only a couple hairs came out, which is normal,” she said. I’d expected a wig’s worth. The blowout looked pretty, if thin. The varying lengths, caused by uneven regrowth, looked like cool, choppy layers.

Patrice Grell Yursik, creator of the hair and beauty blog Afrobella, was diagnosed with multiple myeloma in January 2024. After bone marrow biopsies and weeks of hospitalization, she had a stem cell transplant, followed by chemotherapy, and she lost all her hair.

Yursik is also in the regrowth phase. I asked her if she’d tried anything to encourage the process.

“My oncologist is very wary of the wellness industry and doesn’t recommend any additional supplements or hair growth medicines for me at this time,” she wrote in a message, adding that she couldn’t cold cap because her type of cancer is located in the bone marrow, “so we didn’t want to basically refrigerate my skull while I was trying to heal.”

“I’ve tried a few topical products, specifically scalp oils intended to stimulate growth,” she says. “My hair is growing back super thick and coily at the roots, and it is absolutely fascinating. For someone who made so much of her name and identity around hair, it has been an unexpected education in learning to love myself at every stage of my new journey.”

For the rest of my life, I’ll have fewer hairs than I did before I got sick. No product will change that, and maybe that’s just fine. But I’ll keep searching, just in case.