Natalia is 20 years old.
She did a permanent straightening treatment and after a short time suffered from hair loss.
A little while ago, she sent me this message.
Hi Carina
I’m desperate.
I’ll tell you what happened to me and I’ll see if you can help me.
I had a lot of hair.
It was down to the middle of my back.
Since I was a child, people have complemented me on my hair.
I would walk into a place and they asked me if my hair was natural or if I had extensions. When I told them that my hair was natural, they had an amazed look that didn’t fit on their face.
The problem is that maintaining all that hair was always difficult for me because it is curly. Sometimes, I had so much frizz that it would drive me crazy.
I never put anything in my hair. I never used treatments, or flat irons or heat.
But 10 days ago while talking with a cousin who is a hair stylists, she convinced me to do a straightening treatment with keratin.
The worse mistake of my life.
Now my hair is falling out in chunks. Every time I bathe, I lose a ton of hair. Every time I brush it, even more. It’s unbearable. I don’t know what to do.
I’m very sad and worried, which is why I’m coming to you to see if you can help me.
Do you want to know if it is normal for your hair to fall out after a straightening treatment?
Is there a way to stop the hair loss?
I’ll looking forward to your answer.
Natalia
Every day I receive comments from women that have had the same thing happen to them as Natalia.
They went to a salon to do a straightening treatment, a Japanese straightening treatment, botox, or any other hair treatment and a few days later, their hair started to fall out.But it isn’t a slight hair loss with just a few hairs. If it were that, it wouldn’t be so bad.
We are talking about a scandalous amount of hair loss. That’s why it’s so despairing.
Is it normal for this to happen?
Is there a solution to this type of hair loss?
Tabla de Contenidos
Is it normal for a straightening treatment to cause hair loss?
First, I want to be very clear on this point.
Straightening treatments shouldn’t cause hair loss.
No hair treatment should cause hair loss.
No one goes to a salon to spend a fortune so that after a few days, their hair starts to fall out like what happened to our friend Natalia.
People go to a salon to do a treatment because they want their hair to look beautiful, to straighten it, or to get rid of frizz. But no one goes to the salon so that they ruin their hair. Even less so that they cause hair loss.
That would be like going to the doctor for a routine visit and the doctor making up some illness that we didn’t have before.
If you have gone to a salon and now your hair is falling out, that’s not good. It’s not normal and it shouldn’t happen.
Nonetheless, it sometimes happens. Like it happened to Natalia.
The question is, Why?
Why Natalia’s hair fell out after doing a keratin treatment
Most of the time that your hair falls out after doing a hair treatment, it has to do with two reasons.
1- The treatment applied was of poor quality.
2- The treatment was applied poorly and damaged the hair and/or scalp
The third reason would be a combination of the two previous ones. A poor-quality treatment was applied and at the same time, it was poorly applied.
I talked an infinite amount of times about the dangers of using products of doubtful quality.
Unfortunately in this case, the most secure option is to use brand-name products.
Always use brand-name products.
When someone goes to a salon to do a keratin treatment or whatever other one, you have to check what product they use on the hair. If the product that they offer doesn’t have a brand then it’s best to look for another salon.
Why do some salons use generic brand products?
Salons use generic Brand products to cut costs and be able to offer more affordable treatments. That way, they sell more and everyone is happy.
Why do you think that the same treatment in some salons is offered for 300 dollars and in others it’s offered at 50 dollars.
I’m going to tell you why.
Because it’s not the same treatment.
The one that costs 300 dollars in general is a good quality treatment. They use brand-name products and it is done by professionals that have done the treatment hundreds and hundreds of times.
And then, there is the treatment that is offered for 50 dollars. To offer the treatment at this ridiculous price, they use the worst-quality products possible. Products that I don’t recommend even to my worst enemy (luckily, I don’t have enemies to recommend these products to).
In the best case, using generic brand products will have no consequences. The results are what you hoped for and everyone is happy. But Natalia didn’t have the same luck.
In the second message that she sent me, she said that she had done a keratin straightening treatment, but that she didn’t know what products they used in her hair.
When I ask people, “What brand of product did they use on their hair,” and they don’t know the answer, that’s not a good sign. I can almost 100% say that they used a generic brand product on their hair.
The treatment that Natalia did, from what she told me, they gave her on sale.
On sale?
There is no such thing as a keratin treatment that’s on sale.
You should know that keratin treatments are expensive.
The products that are used to do it are expensive and the application process is so delicate that a professional that is trained on the subject has to do it. That’s why there is no way that this hair treatment can be cheap like they offer in some salons.
The second reason that hair treatments fail and cause hair loss is poor application
This is much more common than what people think. For some reason, the idea spread that doing a keratin treatment was as easy as hard boiling an egg. That couldn’t be further from the truth.
Doing a keratin straightening treatment is not easy. I’m not saying that you need to have a university degree to apply keratin, but it’s also not simple.
Since people think that doing keratin is easy, then they do it by themselves and they do something even worse.
They go to salons where people work without experience in applying these types of treatments.
Between applying keratin with a stylist that has no experience and applying it yourself, there really is no difference.
In the best case, doing a treatment with an inexperienced person doesn’t have negative consequences. But a lot of the times, falling into the hands of a novice has negative consequences. Like what happened to Natalia.
Anyone could think that Natalia had bad luck. She had bad luck because she not only went to a salon with novice stylists, but on top of that, they used horrible quality products on her hair.
In my opinion, she didn’t have bad luck. Because we can’t pretend that a “pseudo hair stylists” or a stylist that plays with the health of people, uses high-quality products.
What happens when you use poor-quality products and on top of that, they are applied by bad stylists?
The consequences of these straightening treatments show up little by little.
First, the hair seems pasty or straw-like as if someone had thrown a boat of glue on our head. But this is just the beginning of the nightmare.
Soon after, the hair starts to break and fall out.
It’s starts out with just a bit. At first, it’s just a few hairs while we shower. And some when we brush our hair. Not much different from normal hair loss.
But in a few days, things start to get worse. The few hairs we have turn into full chunks. Full chunks come out of our heads as if it were a horror movie.
But it’s not a movie.
It’s the cruel truth.
The bathroom becomes overrun with hair that not that long ago was in your head.
Natalia told me that every day she checked her hair in the mirror and every time it had less volume.
I was afraid of ending up bald.
She told me.
Every time I had less and finer hair. Little by little my scalp started to show. It was despairing.
How long will my hair fall out for? If I continue, will I end up bald?
She thought.
Could Natalia finally stop her hair loss?
In her desperation, Natalia started taking Biotin.
One afternoon I searched on Google, “How to stop hair loss.” Many sites recommended biotin. I brought myself to test it out. I was taking biotin for a month.
But nothing happened. My hair kept falling out. And to make things worse, Biotin hurt my stomach.
Finally, I did something that I should have done in the first place. I talked to a dermatologist.
I suppose I didn’t do it at first because I was embarrassed. And scared.
Scared of what the dermatologist was going to tell me. Maybe he would say that there was no solution. Maybe he would say that I was going to end up bald from doing a straightening treatment. That’s why I didn’t bring myself to talk to a doctor.
But now it was a matter of life or death. So, I decided to visit a dermatologist.
What did the doctor tell me?
Is hair loss permanent after a straightening treatment?
The first thing the doctor said was that hair loss after a straightening treatment was completely normal.
She told me that I wasn’t the first person that came in with that problem, which relaxed me a lot. I thought I was the only person in the world that this had happened to.
The doctor explained to me that a lot of time hair falls out due to stress.
It can be stress at the emotional level, but also stress at a physical level. That’s something that I already knew.
What I didn’t know is that hair treatments like keratin can also cause stress. It’s a different stress because it starts at the roots of the hair.
The most important thing that the doctor explained was that this type of hair loss isn’t permanent.
The difference from other types of hair loss like pattern hair loss, is the that the hair loss produced after a keratin treatment isn’t permanent.
It’s clear that the hair that falls out we aren’t going to get back. But it doesn’t mean that new hair won’t grow.
What happens is that obviously, the hair falls out much faster than what it grows. Hair falls out in a few instances. However, it can take months for it to grow back to an appreciable volume.
Also, you have to understand that we are losing long hairs. The ones that give us a lot of the volume in our hair. For new hairs to reach the same length, you have to wait months, even years.
But the important thing is that you won’t end up bald. Your hair is growing.
So, you’ll have to be patient, my friend Natalia.
Conclusions and what happened to Natalia’s hair?
After the straightening treatment, it is convenient to change the shampoo for a sulfate-free one, like Shea Moisture, check price on Amazon.
It seemed interesting that Natalia herself hold us how her hair was today.
Is it still falling out?
Could she stop it from falling out?
From the first message Natalia sent, about a year has passed more or less. So, it’s a good time to know what state her hair is in today.
I asked Natalia if she could briefly tell us the end of the story of her hair.
Hi
I’m Natalia.
About a year ago, I sent a comment to Carina telling her that my hair started to fall out after doing a keratin treatment.
I was really worried.
I couldn’t find a solution.
Carina told me not to worry and recommend that I visit a dermatologist.
Luckily, I listened and she was right. I didn’t need to worry.
The doctor explained to me that it was normal for hair to fall out after doing a treatment.
Now, almost one year after doing the treatment that caused my hair to fall out, little by little I’m starting to see new hairs. They are still small, but it’s progress. I’m starting to slowly get back the volume.
There’s still a long way to go to get back the volume that I had, but I’m on my way.
During this time, I’ve been caring for my hair with high-quality products without sulfates as recommended by my doctor.
That’s everything.
Thank you so much, Carina, for opening my eyes. If it weren’t for your recommendation, I never would have visited a dermatologist.
Sincerely,
Natalia