There’s something about female hair loss that seems to add a second stigma, almost, to the already considerable pain of encroaching baldness. In part, that’s probably a simple factor of the rarity of female baldness †it’s far less likely for a woman to go naturally bald than for a man. That, in turn, is a function of the known cause of all natural hair loss, which is an excess of a male hormone in the scalp. Obviously, men are more likely to have this hormone in abundance because they are male. When a woman finds herself going bald, it’s more of a shock simply because it doesn’t happen so much. Female hair loss also, obviously, suffers from a cultural connotation. For centuries, women in Western and Eastern cultures have been identified by the lushness and length of their hair. Try thinking of a legend, fable or old story in which a central female character does not have long, luscious hair, and you’ll see what we mean. There’s a reason Rapunzel had masses of golden hair; just as there’s a reason that, until recently, sweethearts in Western cultures would routinely carry a lock of the loved female’s hair with them wherever they went. No wonder, then, that female hair loss, when it happens, carries such a freight of shock and embarrassment with it. When a man loses hair, he is not losing anything culturally associated with manliness or manhood. When a woman loses hair, part of her cultural identification as a woman is falling away. So †what can be done about it? These days, fortunately, quite a lot. In the past, dealing with hair loss in a man or a woman was possible up to a point, but usually futile because it looked so unnatural. Modern treatments for hair loss can produce a quite convincing head of hair †particularly when the patient opts for FT, or Follicular Transfer, a mild surgery based technique that encourages individually implanted hair to grow on a balding site. Female hair loss is as likely to receive successful treatment in this vein as male hair loss †and the success rate in men, to date, has been astonishing. Where previous methods of hair replacement pretty much relied on an extremely painful skin grafting procedure (actual areas of skin, with hair still growing in it, were culled and implanted), FT removes living hairs from a donor area and implants them individually in the natural skin of the bald spot. The idea is that each hair should be chosen for the way in which it grows †the closer its direction, on the natural site, to the desired direction on the bald site; the better it is as a candidate. Because female hair loss is caused by the exact same thing as male hair loss, and because FT works so well on men, there is no reason to suppose that it can’t work on women. Indeed, to date there has been every success with females undergoing the treatment. Female baldness may well be more distressing than the male counterpart †but at least the treatments for it are equally successful.
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