What a hair loss breakthrough could mean for women like me

ShareSaveAdd as preferred on GoogleVictoria DerbyshirePresenter for NewsnightBBCI vividly remember the moment my hair began to fall out. I was kneeling over a bath, washing it in a hotel room one Saturday evening, getting ready for my friend's 40th birthday celebration. Seventeen days earlier, I'd had the first of six chemotherapy sessions to treat my breast cancer, but days had gone by with no hair loss. I'd convinced myself I might be one of the lucky ones. But as I held the shower over my head, suddenly the stream of water turned dark, as long strands of brown hair began coalescing around the plug hole in front of my eyes. And there was nothing I could do to stop it. "Oh wow," I said to myself, because I honestly hadn't expected it. During chemotherapy, I had been wearing a cold cap – the freezing helmet designed to help preserve hair during treatment. I was told it didn't work for everyone. It may sound dramatic, but for me, losing my hair was worse even than losing a breast through a mastectomy. Why? Because without my hair, I wasn't me. I had no idea until I started losing it that my hair was part of my identity. Now, scientists in Japan believe they may be a step closer to changing the reality of hair loss for millions of people. In what researchers are calling a "major breakthrough", a team, led by Prof Takashi Tsuji, say they have managed to recreate the full cycle of hair growth in mice - meaning hair could grow, fall out and grow back again naturally. While transplanted hair can already grow, recreating follicles that can behave like the natural hair inside the body - repeatedly growing, shedding and regrowing over time - has proved far more difficult. For women living with hair loss - whether through cancer treatment, alopecia or ageing - breakthroughs like this hint at something once thought impossible: that hair loss can be reversed. It affects millions of people worldwide, with studies suggesting around one-third of women will experience hair loss at some point in their life. So why is the emotional impact of hair loss still often underestimated and what does our reaction to losing it reveal about our identity, sense of control, and the way we see ourselves? Across history, hair has rarely just been hair. In Ancient Egypt, pharaohs and noblewomen wore embellished braided wigs to show power, and in the Middle Ages, women's long hair became associated with femininity and virtue. Men in the 17th century wore the "periwig" - long, voluminous artificial curls - to denote wealth and high social status. And by the 1920s, women with bobbed hair came to represent female independence and rebellion. "Hair shapes our identity", says psychiatrist Sylvia Karasu. "It is a biological, physiological and social marker of stages of our life." And of course it can be the first thing we notice about other people. "It's a way you can often tell gender, race and religion. It's so much tied with identity that it ends up being quite significant in terms of how we categorise people," she says. Hair is also linked to our dignity. The forcible removal of hair has often been used to strip away identity and humanity. In German concentration camps, Jewish people had their heads shaved and their clothes replaced with prison uniforms. After France's liberation in 1944, thousands of women accused of collaborating with German occupiers had their heads shaved publicly as a form of punishment and humiliation. One of the most famous images, Robert Capa's The Shaved Woman of Chartres, shows a young mother walking through a jeering crowd with a swastika painted on her forehead. If hair can hold so much social and emotional meaning, it seems no surprise scientists have spent years trying to understand why losing it can feel so devastating, and whether it may one day become reversible. I've interviewed women about their relationship with their hair for my podcast with the Future Dreams charity, And Then Came Breast Cancer. Again and again, women told me the same thing: it was nothing to do with being vain. Nicky Elkington, a hairdresser, told me she was determined not to lose her hair when going through chemotherapy. "It's not a vanity thing… and I think people think that, but it's your identity and I didn't want to look like I had cancer," she says. For her, the worst thing anyone could say to her was, "It's only hair, don't worry about it". School nurse and mother of two, Natasha Anderson, said she loved messing about with her hair while growing up - "one week having a big afro, then having hair extensions," she remembers. "It wasn't just hair, it was my culture." Faced with the prospect of losing it through chemotherapy, she asked her brother to shave it off for her. "I felt liberated when it was being shaved," she says. "I had taken control of the situation… it was more painful and upsetting seeing it just falling out." One of the hardest parts of cancer is how little control you have over any of it - the

What a hair loss breakthrough could mean for women like me

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