I have been cutting my own hair for two years.

Not because I'm thrifty. I am, but not about this. I cut my own hair because the stylist's chair has two problems, and the second one is worse than the first. The first is the back-of-head mirror she lifts up after she's finished — here, look how it's coming in — and I have to make my face do something in that mirror that doesn't reveal how I feel about what I'm looking at. The second is the ninety seconds before that, when she's wet-combed it all the way down and the part she made is not the part I make. The light is overhead. Wet hair gathers narrow. I am the only person in the salon who has nowhere to look but at the top of my own head.

So I bought scissors. Eight inches, the kind a barber would use. I have a system. I do it in the upstairs bathroom because the light in there is north-facing and forgiving, and I do it on a Sunday because that gives the part six days to settle before anyone but Frank sees it. I pin the sides up. I twist the back. I cut along the twist and let it fall.

That is what I was doing the morning I want to tell you about.

I want to be clear about what kind of woman I am, because the rest of this is going to sound like a confession and I want you to know what you're reading.

I do not believe in supplements. There's a small drawer of them I've bought over the years and most of them did nothing. Influencers don't show up in my feed because I don't follow any. My Instagram is for seeing my niece's kids. I have never written an online review, and the only time I've ever messaged a stranger about a product was to ask my sister-in-law where she got her shoes, and that was a stranger to her, not to me.

I'm writing this because I wish someone had written it to me. I'm writing it once. If you skim, skim. I am 59, my hair is the fullest it has been in seven years, and I figured out something I should have figured out two years ago. The figuring-out is the point. The product is at the end. I'm not going to make you scroll for it.

None of these will be a surprise to anyone they apply to.

I made my part on the left, because my hair sat slightly thicker there. Then I made it deeper, because that made the right side seem to have more to do. Eventually I gave up on parts altogether and combed everything forward — at some point a part is just a road map of what's missing.

I bought the tinted dry shampoo that's sold to be sprayed on the scalp so the scalp looks like hair. I used it on clean days. On the days I washed, I used it before I styled, instead of after. A brown one, then a darker brown one, then a blend.

I bought a wide-brim hat in May 2024 and have worn it outside since. Not to the mailbox. Outside.

At restaurants, I sit with my back to the wall so the overhead light is in front of me, not behind. I take the picture for the table, every time, which means the only photos of me from the last two years are the ones where I'm holding the phone, and in none of them am I in the frame. My granddaughter does not have a photograph of me from this year. Note that. Note it and don't fix it. Note it and order another can of dry shampoo.

I had stopped looking at the back of my own head about two years ago. Not as a decision. As a habit. The hand mirror in the upstairs bathroom drawer had a film of dust on it the morning of the haircut. I noticed because I had to wipe it off.

The thing I had been telling myself about all of this — the part where the explanation lived — was that my mother had thin hair, and her mother had thin hair, and I was 59 years old, and what did I expect.

I expected this.

The fact that I expected it did not make it easier to look at. It did, however, make it easier to stop trying. It's hereditary. It's just my age. When you say those two sentences enough times, they stop sounding like sentences and start sounding like instructions. Sit down. Cover it up. Don't make a thing of it. There is nothing to do.

I told myself that for a long time. I want to tell you what made me stop.

I twisted the back of my hair the way I do, and I cut along the twist, and one section came off too short. I don't know why. I pulled too hard on the twist, or I cut too high. Whichever. The result was that I had to even it out, and to even it out I had to actually see the back of my own head from behind, which meant the hand mirror, which meant turning around and lifting the mirror up to face the bathroom mirror and looking at what I had been not looking at for two years.

I want to describe what I saw, because I think you may know this exact thing.

The shape of my head was visible. Not the hair on it. The shape of it. The wide pale band where my part used to be was a band now, not a line. The crown was a soft spot the size of an orange. I could see the curve of my own skull through it. My hair — the actual amount of it — was the amount you'd have if you were doing a complicated braid and you were halfway through and someone interrupted you and the half you hadn't braided yet had blown away.

I sat down on the edge of the bathtub with the scissors still in my hand.

That was the breaking point. Not a dramatic one. A specific one. There's a difference, and I want to be honest about which kind it was.

I did not order anything that night. I went downstairs and made dinner and got through dinner and waited until Frank was asleep, and then I went down to the kitchen at 11:30 and opened my laptop and started reading.

I read for four nights. I'm going to spare you most of what I read, because most of it was the same thing — articles written by companies that were trying to sell me what they had decided I needed, with a vocabulary I do not use to describe my own life. I read past those. I was looking for two things: an actual study, and a working pharmacist.

I found the pharmacist first. Her name is Karen. She used to run the compounding side of the hospital pharmacy three towns over before she retired, and I've known her since our husbands worked together in 2009. I emailed her. I asked her to be honest with me, and not gentle.

She wrote back the next morning. Two pages, single-spaced, no preamble. I'm going to paraphrase, because two pages won't fit here, but I'm going to give you the parts that mattered, and the parts that mattered are the two rules she made me write down at the top of my notebook.

There's a study from 2010, done at a medical school in Malaysia, on adults with thinning hair. They gave one group 100 milligrams of mixed tocotrienols a day, and the other group a sugar pill. After eight months, the tocotrienol group had a hair count 34.5 percent higher than where they started. The placebo group had lost a little.¹

I read it three times. I read it because I had spent two years assuming there was no such study. The study has a name — Beoy, 2010 — and it's in a journal called Tropical Life Sciences Research, and you can read it on the internet for free. I am not going to make you take my word for any of this. The bibliography for everything in this piece is at the bottom of the page.

This was the part that made me sit down and look at my own cabinet.

I had been taking 10,000 micrograms of biotin a day for two years. I bought it at the chain pharmacy. It cost $13.49 a bottle. I took it every morning. I had never taken vitamin B6 in my life, because no biotin bottle I have ever picked up had told me I needed to.

That is the sentence Karen wrote. I am quoting it because I have not been able to stop hearing it.

The night after Karen's email, I went looking for the bottle that had both things in the right amounts. I wanted mixed tocotrienols at the dose the study used, which is 100 milligrams. I wanted biotin at the dose that's been studied for hair, which is 5,000 micrograms — not 10,000, which is more in the bottle to make the label look bigger. I wanted B6 paired with the biotin in the same pill, so I didn't have to remember.

There were two real options.

I want to be careful with the next sentence, because it matters. The Radiant bottle is not cheaper because it is worse. It is cheaper because it has six ingredients instead of twenty-three, and the six are the ones I had just spent four nights reading studies about. The other seventeen are the ones that cost the money. Nutrafol has the same key ingredients in it. It also has a lot of other ones, and the other ones are on the price tag.

I ordered the three-bottle box, because three at $60.30 was almost thirty dollars less than three single bottles, and because three was three months and I didn't want to think about it for a while. I also ordered because the page said no subscription, and a refund if it did nothing, and I have learned to read those two lines first.

I read a lot of advertorials before I wrote this one, and most of them lie about timelines, so I'm going to give you mine the way it actually went.

I didn't do anything. I put the mirror down. I went and made coffee. I sat at the table with the coffee, and I did not check my hair in the reflection of the toaster, which is something I had been doing every morning for two years and had not realized I was doing until the morning I didn't.

I'm eight months in now. The Beoy study went eight months — that's the marker I had in my head, and I'm hitting it. My hair is fuller than it has been since 2019. Not the hair of my 30s — I'm not selling you that. The hair I had in my early 50s, which I had assumed was gone, and was not.

The hat is in the closet. I wear it outside if it's sunny. Not as armor.

There was a picture taken at the wedding. Frank's sister sent it to me on a Tuesday, and I looked at it. I am in it. I am not the woman holding the phone. There's a back-of-head shot in there too, an accident — someone was photographing the cake table behind me — and the back of my head is in the corner of the picture, and it's fine. It's just a head.

I'm writing this from the kitchen table where I read the studies, on a Tuesday morning, while Frank is at the hardware store. I'm writing it because I wish someone had written it to me.

This will not work for every kind of thinning. The kind I had is the kind a lot of women have after menopause — slow, diffuse, especially at the crown and the part.³ If your hair is coming out in patches, or if it came out fast over the course of a few weeks, you have something else going on, and you should call a doctor. I am not a doctor.

You'll see the nails in week two. You'll see the drain in week five. The eight-month mark from the study is real — if you stop at three months because nothing has happened yet, you've stopped before the part of the eight months where things happen. I almost did that. I made myself wait. The math on the three-bottle box at $60.30 is what made the waiting easier — three months at a time, then reorder. I went through three boxes to get through the eight.

It is one gummy a day. It tastes like a gummy. I take it with my coffee. I do not take it sublingually, or with a tincture, or as part of any practice. I take it the way you take any vitamin.

There is no subscription. Radiant Labs doesn't run them at all. I checked, because I always check. One purchase is one purchase.

The refund is real. I called the number on the bottle, before I had decided to write this, to ask if it was real. A woman named Patricia picked up. She told me they refund a return at any point within ninety days, you keep what you've taken, you don't have to send anything back. I have not used the refund and I doubt I will, but I wanted to tell you it was real before I told you anything else.

I sent an earlier version of this to a small group of women I know, and one of them passed it on. The notes that came back are below, lightly edited and posted with permission. I am leaving them alone. You can read them or skip them. They are not testimonials. They are women.

I do not want to be messaged about this. I'm not a creator and I will not respond to a comment. I'm writing this once because there's a version of me, two years ago, sitting at the bathtub edge with the hand mirror and a pair of barber scissors, and if this finds her, that's why I wrote it.

The hand mirror is back in the drawer. The dust is off it. I take it out now and then. It's just a mirror.