While you are pregnant, you may sometimes wonder about what life will be like after the baby is born. Many things will happen after the baby is born, like getting to know your baby, learning to care for your baby, experiencing what it feels like to not be pregnant any more, and watching your baby grow and change. There are also other, more minor things that may happen too. You may not know about some of them until they happen because they are not really things that people talk about that much.
Postpartum hair loss is an example of something that you may not expect until it happens. I don’t remember whether I lost a bunch of hair a few months after giving birth to my first son, Dylan. I do not think that I did, though. After my second son was born last year, I lost a ton of hair. When I looked for information on the topic of postpartum hair loss, I found that it is completely normal. It was pretty annoying, though, because the hair was all over the house.
Postpartum hair loss happens anywhere between three and six months after the baby is born. Women who experience postpartum hair loss experience a lot of shedding, and sometimes hair even comes out in clumps. During pregnancy, your hair may have seemed thicker and fuller. Your pregnancy hormones were preventing your hair from falling out at its normal rate of 100 hairs per day. Once you give birth, your hormones gradually subside (thank goodness) and your scalp will make up for lost time by shedding more hairs than normal until all of that “extra hair” that you accumulated during pregnancy is gone.
The good news is that you are not likely to end up with thin hair or bald spots. Your hair is simply returning to the way it used to be before you were pregnant. You can keep your hair healthy during this period of heavy shedding by continuing to take your prenatal vitamin, shampooing less frequently, and avoiding heat styling as much as possible. As if you would have time for frequent shampooing and heat styling with a new baby around the house!
Photo by bhailu4 on morguefile.com.