21 Female Celebrities Who Opened Up About Their Battles With Hair Loss

Hair can be a deeply personal part of our bodies and appearances, which can make dealing with hair loss extremely emotionally taxing. By the time they turn 40 years old, 40 percent of women experience hair loss, according to the American Academy of Dermatology, and hair loss is often linked to perimenopause and menopause — which all women go through when they hit early middle age. That’s a staggering number of women that experience hair loss, especially considering how little it’s talked about. There’s not much of a stigma around male pattern balding, but many women battle hair loss in silence, which is why it’s so important for celebrities such as Jada Pinkett Smith, Tyra Banks and Keira Knightley to open up about their experience and show others they’re not alone.

Hair loss in women can be caused by a number of factors, but what it comes down to is stress. “Changes like delivery, breastfeeding, sleep deprivation and hormones place a stress on the body,” dermatologist Dr. Lindsey Bordone told SheKnows previously. “In response, the body works to conserve energy and resources from areas of low priority, such as hair growth, in favor of supporting other more critical changes taking place.” When that happens, the body starts shifting hairs in to the “shed phase” of the hair cycle, Bordone explains. Autoimmune disorders like alopecia, intense illnesses like COVID, and even simple genetics also come into play when it comes to female hair loss.

No matter the cause of hair loss, we know one thing for sure: With lush heads of hair or not, everyone is beautiful, and these celebrities are here to prove that. Though there are a lot of ways to combat hair loss, from hair products and treatments to over-the-counter medications like minoxidil, sometimes it’s unavoidable and genetic — and sometimes those options are too costly or inconvenient anyway. To inform yourself about hair loss, we collected 21 empowering stories from female celebrities who experienced and opened up about their hair loss.

A version of this story was originally posted February 2018.

This article was originally published on sheknows.com.