How do you know that you are going bald ?
It is important that you answer this question if the treatment is to be successful. To help you, we have elaborated this description which will let you know for sure:
- Whether your hair loss is really problematic.
- And how your hair is going to develop. Will you be completely bald? Half bald? Or will you simply have white hair?
These are the precursor signs of badness, which shoud pace you on your guard.
a) Most frequently it is an abnormal hair loss which indicates that something strange is going on:
- You find an abnormal quantity of hair on your pillow, in the shower (a clump of hair is blocking the drain).
- Sometimes, you just run your hand through your hair and find several abnormally fine strands of hair.
Before starting to worry, you should first consult a doctor in order to eliminate a possible medical cause (alopecia acrata ; infection; emotional shock; poisoning…). Once these have been eliminated, you can take an inventory of the arguments that will let you know if you are going bald due to a hereditary disposition.
b) Your hair is losing its vitality:
- The top hair grows more slowly than the side hair.
- The top hair is becoming increasingly fine, like a baby’s hair.
However, when:the area of the temples recedes,the top of the skull becomes bald, the frontal hairline recedes, the hair becomes thinner and thinner until it is possible to see the underlying scalp, then you have already embarked on the irreversible balding process.
Now the whole problem is to know whether you are going completely bald or only half bald. The next paragraph will help you to determine this.
Have you embarked on an irreversible balding process?
What is hereditary and thus inevitable, is not actual balding. Heredity merely determines the way in which your hair will evolve. Roughly it can do so in three ways:
- Either you will go completely bald.
- Or you will lose only half your hair.
- Or you will never go bald, but your hair will go completely gray.
A) Either you will go completely bald in one of the following ways:
In general baldness appears by a progressive evolution in several stages.
“Hamilton classification”
First the area of the temples recedes progressively, then the top of the head gradually goes bald, finally leaving only a side fringe and a bald skull.
(see first case images)
* However, sometimes the top of the skull becomes increasingly sparse and finally leave the skull entirely bald.
B) Or you will go only half bald in one of the following ways:
* Either the front half goes bald, leaving only a frontal tuft which will disappear progressively, leaving a half-smooth skull.
* Or there also exist minor signs of baldness (with receding hair at the temples and a small bald area on the crown) which will evolve only very progressively, or not at all.
In order to know whether you belong to this category and not to the first (those who will become entirely bald), look at the crown of your head. In this case, the baldness is not very pronounced, even non-existent. You should also know that people often start going bald in their thirties, sometimes before, and there is often a family predisposition (often the father and/or the grandfather and/or the brother are also bald).
C)If your hair maintains its vitality and does not fall out, and if after age thirty you show no signs of baldness, then you have every chance of never going bald. On the other hand, when you reach your forties, you hair will go completely gray.