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November 24, 2005
Coping with hair loss
We all have bad-hair days, but 20 per cent of women have bad-hair lives —- going bald because of cancer, alopecia, and even compulsive hair-pulling. Anna Moore visits a unique salon dedicated to restoring hair crowning glory
It’s a busy street opposite Tesco on the wrong side of Hammersmith, and from the outside it seems to be a six-storey house. Inside, it’s part salon, part surgery, part James Bond. Women sit before mirrors with stretches of scalp exposed, while ‘technicians’ and ‘stylists’ work away with mesh and paste and thread and spray.
Some people are screened away. There are bald heads everywhere, some real, some mannequins. On trolleys, chairs and mirrors are long, glossy tails waiting to be ‘locked’ to their owners. MTV plays and there’s a snack bar (most clients are here all day).
On one floor, Cheryl Tweedy from Girls Aloud is having extensions attached. Beside her is a woman with alopecia, here to have her bare head covered. Though celebrities come to Lucinda Ellery wishing for ‘bigger hair’ — Jordan, Michelle from Liberty X, Mutya from the Sugababes — the majority of clients come simply wanting hair.
About 20 per cent are women with cancer who have had chemotherapy (ironically, Kylie had extensions here before her diagnosis), while others have trichotillomania (compulsive hair-pulling), alopecia areata (Gail Porter, a recent sufferer, has just been invited in) and female-pattern baldness. All these conditions are thought to be on the rise.
At Lucinda Ellery’s, clients have instant access to a network of fellow sufferers and, if their GP is less than sympathetic, they can be referred to two GPs specializing in hair loss, as well as a clinical psychologist. Clients may be tested for iron and vitamin B deficiency, and offered HSN tablets — entirely herbal, imported from America and the only ones Lucinda believes make any difference.
Those with trichotallomani have a 24-hour helpline to ring when they get the urge to pull, a buddy system and secure website. The jewel in Lucinda Ellery’s crown, though, is the ‘volumiser’ treatment in which hair is attached by a complex plaiting system. Once on, it’s like any other head of hair. You sleep in it, swim and shower in it, and get split ends like everybody else.
The technique was developed 20 years ago by Lucinda Ellery herself, gorgeous and glam (think Ab Fab’s Patsy and open-topper sports cars), who knows more than most what it is to be a woman without hair. At nine, after her father’s death, her hair fell out and she spent most of her life in wigs.
“We were living in Africa and within eight weeks I’d lost everything. The home, my family, my school, my nanny, my animals, my friends,” she says. Ellery was taken back to the UK — her hair loss had already started, so her head was shaved on the boat — and put in a convent in Wales. She recalls using boot polish on her head and children moving away from her in church. At 15, she got her first wig.
“There are so many millions of ways that add up to why hair is so important to a woman,” she says. “It’s hugely powerful. Women were shaved as a punishment, tarred and feathered, they cut it off when they give it up for God. It is a symbol of fertility, virility, sexuality and longevity. It’s got sexual connotations, social, financial, cultural –– it’s massive. So if you wake up with half your head on the pillow, it stops you dead. It feels pathetic, sobbing to your doctor, but how can you carry on? We all know a “bad-hair day”. Try a “bad-hair life”.”
Ellery’s bad-hair life stretched into her mid-thirties, when she finally devised undetectable extensions, after being inspired by Daryl Hannah’s waist-length mermaid hair in Splash. “Until then, I spent every penny on wigs,” she says. “I wore them 24 hours a day, 365 days a year –– I don’t think I got a decent night’s sleep for 20 years. It was the little things. Not being able to go swimming, or out in the rain or the wind. Noticing every Timotei ad, standing in a queue feeling eyes boring into my head, worrying about my wig every time someone hugged me. Once, in Marks & Spencer’s, my wig got caught on someone’s bracelet. We were on the escalator, I was going down, she was going up. I was shaking, so shocked and traumatized, I couldn’t go back to that shop for seven years.”
When Ellery started the business in her kitchen (she was then a head-hunter and mother of three), her clients came purely for glamour. After a couple of years, someone came with a bald patch. “Until then, I’d never seen another woman with a bald patch,” she says. “I’d never, ever talked about it. I remember my daughter saying, “I never knew you were bald!” I was so shocked at that and said, “Didn’t you think it was strange that mummy had 120 different wigs?”
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The jewel in Lucinda Ellery’s crown is the ‘volumiser’ treatment in which hair is attached by a complex plaiting system. Once on, it’s like any other head of hair. You sleep in it, swim and shower in it, and get split ends like everybody else.The technique was developed by Ellery herself who knows more than most what it is to be a woman without hair. At nine, after her father’s death, her hair fell out and she spent most of her life in wigs |
Now, her client profile has changed. They are getting younger and younger and balder and balder. Around 20 per cent of women in the UK now have clinically significant hair loss. Two-thirds have female pattern balding, overall thinning caused by hormones, ageing and genetics, while the other third lose hair for other reasons, including alopecia areata, an auto-immune disease linked to stress, which can happen in patches or all at once. In some cases, the hair grows back, in others, it never does.
On top of this, there’s temporary hair loss as a result of chemotherapy (both breast cancer and lung cancer are rising among women) and trichotillomania, which affects up to three per cent of the population. The term trichotillomania was first coined in 1889 by a French dermatologist who had noticed the compulsion in many of his patients. Within psychiatry, it is often grouped with other obsessive-compulsive disorders, and can come with eating disorders and self harming. Like anorexia, hair-pulling is overwhelmingly female, thought to be triggered by puberty and typically develops in adolescence, sometimes following a trauma.
Though exact statistics don’t exist, many experts believe more women are losing more hair. Dr Sarah Riley, a GP and one of Ellery’s medical advisors, is one of them. “Even my experience as a GP suggests this,” she says. “In my surgery the other day, four women came in with female-pattern hair loss. I see at least once a week.”
Why would this be? Again, there are no clear answers. Some studies link it to yo-yo dieting, others to pollution and stress. “I’m sure stress will come out as a contributory factor,” says Dr Riley. “We all know that women nowadays are trying to fit a lot more in. They’re trying to have jobs and be mothers and good members of the society and good wives. We’re trying to do it all, and I’m sure that somewhere along the line that increases the stress hormones.”
While current medical treatments are patchy and inconsistent — many doctors have never heard of trichotillomania –– some of Ellery’s clients are lucky enough to see her on the NHS. For those that can’t, it’s expensive, averaging at about 1,500 pounds a year. For this reason, Ellery and Dr Riley are launching the Hair Management Academy, which aims to offer the Ellery treatment as the last-stop NHS option for women with clinically significant hair loss. (The best such women can hope for now is a wig on the NHS, then they are left to get on with it.) Ellery’s vision is to spread her service to a series of salons around the UK.
Until then, her treatment is limited to a lucky few. Many of these find that, when the daily horror of wigs and worry have been banished, their stress fades, the vicious circle is broken and their hair grows back. The others have a beautiful disguise. The letters in Ellery’s office show how grateful they are — though some could still break your heart. “It’s so strange waking up not having to decide whether to wear a hat or a wig,” says one. “Thank you so much for giving me so much confidence — but not too much. I won’t forget what I really look like.”
— Dawn/Observer Service
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