Hair Breakage Around Hairline
Beautiful and healthy hair enhances your personality. It boosts up your confidence and self-esteem. When you see your hair falling out, you feel upset. However, mild to moderate hair fall is natural and is not an alarming issue at all. In fact, on an average, your scalp loses as many as 100 hair strands per day and is replaced with new hair growth. It becomes a problematic issue when hair falls off at a faster rate than the rate of growth of new hair. Hair breakage along the forehead bothers you more mainly because thinning hair in this part of the scalp is easily visible.
Causes
Tight hairstyles such as braids, buns or pony tails put a lot of stress on the hair roots near the hairline as the hair is pulled away from the scalp. This causes damage to the hair follicles present in the area and prevent normal hair growth. It is known as traction alopecia. Excessive pulling of wet hair while brushing can weaken the hair roots and cause breakage.
Those with curly hair suffer from hair loss after using hair relaxer excessively for relaxing their natural curls. Here, the damage is caused by harsh chemicals present in hair relaxer. Heat from hair dryers or curling irons can weaken the hair roots along hairline and cause hair fall.
In some people, hair loss from the hairline can be due to pattern baldness. It is a hereditary condition where the hair roots become weaker after every growth cycle. Thus you get a receding hairline that creates a bald spot at the front part of the scalp after some time. If any of your family members have pattern baldness then you may get it too.
Physical and emotional stress can adversely affect normal hair growth cycle. In normal condition, barely 10 to 20 percent of the hair is in resting stage, but the percentage may go higher due to stress or health disorders. This is a temporary condition that creates receding hairline and is known as telogen effluvium. Trichotillomania is a psychological problem because of which people feel a strong urge to pull out the hair from the hairline region.
In women, hair loss around hairline could be due to hormonal imbalance triggered by pregnancy, birth control pills, menopause, thyroid problems and so on. In these conditions, if the hormonal imbalance is associated with production of male hormones androgen, then the hairline area is particularly susceptible to breakage. Other causes include autoimmune diseases where the immune system attack the healthy hair follicles, scalp infection, side effects of medicines, poor nutrition, etc.
Tips to Prevent Hair Breakage
There are medicines for treating the receding hairline problem. Some of them are topical and others require oral administration. However, these medicines do not show effective results for everyone and some of them may have side effects too. Then there is surgical procedures like hair transplant to cover up the bald spots. These treatments are expensive and gives a lot of pain. For all these reasons, most people prefer natural treatment to prevent any further hair breakage. Here are a few useful tips in this regard:
- Avoid applying heat on your hair. Do not use hair dryer for drying the hair after shower. Air drying is a better option. To ensure faster drying, soak up maximum water with the towel. If you want to have curls on your hair, use hair curlers and no curling irons.
- Do not expose your hair to harsh chemicals. Such chemicals are present in hair relaxers, hair color dyes, etc. You must stop using them as long as you have brittle hair which breaks off easily.
- Try to keep your hair in untied condition as much as possible in order to ease off the unnecessary stress from the hair follicle around the hairline. While tying the hair, make sure you do not make it tight. There are some special varieties of hair clips that do not cause hair breakage, use them for to tie your hair.
- Hot oil treatment once or twice a week is an excellent hair breakage treatment. Take a few teaspoon of virgin coconut oil or olive oil in a bowl and heat it in a microwave. Massage it well into the scalp and hair roots with special attention to the hairline area. Cover up your head with shower cap and wait for an hour. Then wash off with a good quality shampoo suitable for your hair type and then apply conditioner.
- Daily shampooing is not good for your hair when it is falling out. Various ingredients of shampoo strips off natural oils from the hair and make it dry. Shampoo your hair only when it is dirty. You should not wash your hair more than three times in a week. Shampooing should be followed by conditioning of the hair. Always use good quality hair care products. Do not change the brands too frequently.
- Never comb your hair when it is wet. Run your fingers through the hair to de-tangle and then use a wide toothed comb on your hair. Comb your hair with a gentle hand so that it is not subjected to unnecessary jerks and pulls.
