May 16, 2025

Today I'm here in partnership with Megi Wellness to talk all about perimenopausal hair loss. Because women, our hair is more than a physical feature - it's part of our identity. And so this can be an incredibly unsettling experience, as it arrives during a life chapter already full of changes. So let's dive in.

Perimenopause is the hormonal bridge between your reproductive years and menopause. It typically begins in your late 30s or 40s and can last several years. During this time, the ovaries gradually produce less oestrogen and progesterone - the hormones that help regulate everything from your menstrual cycle to your muscle mass to, yes, your hair.

Now, this transition is a rollercoaster of fluctuating hormone levels, which can trigger a variety of symptoms: hot flushes, mood swings, sleep disruptions, and, for the purpose of today's discussion, changes to your hair's thickness, texture, and volume. Some key signs that you might be entering perimenopause include:

Irregular periods and changes to the length of your cycle and bleed

Hot flushes or night sweats

Mood swings or increased anxiety

Trouble sleeping

Brain fog or memory blips

Thinning, brittle hair or increased shedding

So why is your hair changing? Well, we've got a few factors influencing this shift. The first being declining oestrogen and progesterone levels. These hormones help keep hair in the anagen growth phase, so as they drop, more follicles shift into the resting telogen phase, leading to thinning and shedding. With less oestrogen to balance them, androgen hormones like testosterone can dominate. Some women are more genetically sensitive to those changes - what we term increased androgen sensitivity - and that can result in androgenic alopecia, a form of thinning similar to male pattern baldness.

All of those hormone changes are stressful, both consciously and subconsciously. Higher perceived levels of stress raise our cortisol levels, which can push hair prematurely into the shedding telogen effluvium phase. God, these are great words, aren’t they?

Fluctuating oestrogen can also impact thyroid function. Even subtle (also known as subclinical) hypothyroidism - low thyroid function - can contribute to hair loss.

And finally, we need to think about the building blocks for our hair: our key nutrients. Hormonal changes affect gut health both directly and through that increased state of perceived stress, which can reduce absorption of the nutrients needed for strong, healthy hair.

So how do we take back control? One of my biggest bugbears is that a lot of women assume they must accept these issues as a given now that they are perimenopausal. That is absolutely not the case.

If you're watching this video having already experienced hair loss, then I have great news: with the right tools, it is possible to regrow and strengthen hair. And if you think you might be entering perimenopause and want to prevent these concerns from arising, then you can pre-emptively add in these measures to avoid ever having to come back from them. Think of it like relining a canoe before holes appear. Why wait to spring a leak when you can avoid ever having one?

This is where Megi Wellness comes in. They are leading the charge in empowering women through this space with science-backed, results-driven formulations that go deeper than surface care. I can personally attest to their efficacy - you'd have no idea that I experienced almost 70% shedding of my hair due to premature failure of my oestrogen production in my early twenties. As you can see, my hair is fully recovered, even though my oestrogen production never resumed.

I adore the fact that the range is created by leading women within the natural haircare industry who were facing these challenges themselves and found there was nothing they could turn to. They truly understand the multi-faceted nature of hair loss, so there is a lot of love, care, and attention, as well as science, within these products.

Okay, so now let's move on to the good bit: let's talk about steps to rebuilding - or just building - your healthiest hair. This is split into three main parts:

The health and vitality of the scalp to support hair growth

Our ability to produce the structural elements of hair properly as we age

The impact of relative hormone levels as a driver for either hair growth or hair thinning

I've broken this down into four steps. Step one: we begin at the root - literally - because we need to build a wonderful foundation by nourishing the scalp, where healthy hair starts.

During perimenopause, scalp issues like dryness, sensitivity, and dandruff become more common, primarily due to the decline in oestrogen, which controls skin hydration. Oestrogen stimulates the production of hyaluronic acid, which holds moisture in the skin, and supports healthy sebum (oil) production from the sebaceous glands of the scalp. It also strengthens the skin barrier - the outermost layer that protects against moisture loss and environmental irritants.

As oestrogen falls during perimenopause, your scalp produces less sebum, leading to drier, more fragile skin. The barrier weakens, causing irritation and sensitivity, and we can also become more vulnerable to dandruff or psoriasis.

I also want to highlight that the effects of external factors become more pronounced with these hormonal changes that influence the scalp barrier. Things like frequent washing with sulphate shampoos, lots of blow-drying or heat styling, and exposure to harsh weather conditions (very cold, windy, or dry indoor central heating), as well as poor hydration or nutrient deficiencies - all things your scalp could easily withstand in your 20s and 30s - start having a much bigger impact.

That's why all of the Megi products are infused with scalp-nurturing ingredients to promote a healthy foundation for hair growth, as well as promoting repair to the hair and encouraging strength and shine.

We’ve got niacinamide and ACB Bio-Chelate 5 PF, a fermented blend of five essential minerals: zinc, iron, silicon, copper, and magnesium. These address scalp dryness, sebum imbalance, dandruff, and psoriasis all in one. From the moment you start using them, you are directly enhancing scalp barrier function, which supports and feeds the scalp microbiome.

Now, you might have heard of the gut microbiome - the bacteria and microorganisms that populate our digestive tract and are key to our health. Well, our scalp has one too. It’s very specialised and stabilises the barrier, leading to more growth, less inflammation, and more energy into the hair follicles. Hooray!

ORMAGEL XPU then boosts moisture content by about 18% in chemically damaged hair. So if you’ve beaten your hair up over the years like I have, it'll sort all of that out too, as well as improving shine and lustre - all the good hair vibes.

Sym-Hair Restore is your deep hair repair. It comes from smart wheat protein, going in and repairing split ends, preventing easy breakage, and giving back manageability and shine. We can often lean on styling to try and make weaker hair look better, but in this situation, that's going to make the problem worse. These ingredients sort out the hair itself so you can go back to the au naturel, air-dry style with confidence if you like - or blow-dry without worrying it will damage your hair more.

My favourite ingredient, though, is probably Phytantriol - and not just because I haven’t mastered saying it. In one application, it reduces split ends by 35%. 35%! It also helps keep moisture in the scalp and strengthens damaged hair ongoing, which is why I still use these products even now.

So we’re supporting the hair and scalp structurally at a foundational level. But then, step two: we’ve got to consider its functional capacity. This means turning our attention to blood flow, as those perimenopausal hormone changes impact this too.

Firstly, we see reduced microcirculation to the skin all over the body - hi ageing skin - but more notably, weaker circulation to the scalp. Less fresh blood means fewer nutrients and less oxygen reaching scalp cells, leading to poor scalp vitality and slower turnover of healthy skin cells. This then exacerbates dryness and flakiness, and drives hair loss.

In my mind, I’m picturing a lawn after a very hot summer. You know when the soil becomes crumbly and can’t hold grass or support water? That’s basically what’s happening. The use of caffeine in the topical Megi products actively stimulates blood circulation in the scalp, delivering oxygen and nutrients directly to hair follicles. It combats that issue directly. It can also counteract the effects of DHT, a hormone linked to hair thinning that I’ll talk more about in a sec, and promotes stronger, thicker hair with consistent use.

You’ve also got maca root extract, a powerful adaptogen that helps balance hormones, reduce stress-related hair loss, and increase blood flow to the scalp, enhancing nutrient delivery to the follicles. It can even revitalise dormant follicles, meaning if you’ve been suffering hair loss for a while, you don’t need to worry that those follicles are dead and gone. They’re just resting - and maca will kick them back into gear.

Now, we could go another layer deeper into the chemistry and talk about the decrease in oestrogen during perimenopause causing a decrease in the production of nitric oxide, which is a compound that causes our blood vessels to relax.

It’s also the lowering of nitric oxide levels that contributes to an increased risk of cardiovascular disease as we move through perimenopause and into menopause. But because it's more integral to that tale, I’m going to save that science lesson for when we dive into that topic another day.

At a more functional level, what we need to know is that the outcome of lower nitric oxide is that blood vessels will constrict - so close down more easily - and we're going to see the impacts of that more significantly in peripheral areas like the scalp, where you've got teeny-tiny blood vessels called capillaries bringing all the vital bits to those cells.

If you compare that to a big old artery, where a small amount of constriction isn’t great but it’s also not going to have as much of an impact - because the “hose” the blood was flowing through was bigger to start off with - when we're talking about one-cell-wide capillaries, even a 1 to 2% squeeze is going to be a really big problem.

So in summary, we’ve also got a whole tangle of things potentially reducing nutrient and oxygen delivery to hair follicles - which, you guessed it, means a lessened ability to grow healthy hair, but also a lowered ability to nourish and hold onto existing hair strands.

Although hair follicles are considered singular units, they can produce more than one strand of hair per follicle - usually between two to five, depending on the natural thickness of your hair. But as we see blood flow fall, you'll see that number decrease down to one to two strands per follicle quite quickly.

And that’s why many women will say their hair feels limp or fluffy, or needs washing regularly to try and increase that sense of volume.

The Megi Range contains six active ingredients, clinically proven to stimulate growth and prolong the hair’s anagen growth phase to combat all of those issues. The most well-known being AnaGain, from organic pea sprout extract, which in three months showed a 74% increase in anagen–telogen ratio (which is how long the hair stays in the growth stage).

This combines with Capilia Longa, which reactivates dormant hair follicles and nourishes the scalp - and in a similar timeframe, reduced hair loss by up to 89%, whilst increasing hair density by up to 52%.

And with that, we then slide into step three, which is to consider the changes to our ability to produce two key proteins: collagen and elastin.

We're actually not very good at producing these from about the age of 30 onwards, and they are vital - not just for our hair, but for our bones, joints, muscles, the gut lining, and other key structures.

We love our hair, but it’s lower on the pecking order than most of those - so our body will prioritise if it’s low on stock of the building blocks it needs to make all of them.

By the time we're heading into perimenopause, we need to be actively supplementing and supporting their production to avoid having to spread reserves too thinly. Pre-emptive support is even better, if possible. Don’t let those levels get down to critical before you dive in.

Plenty of dietary protein and managing your stress response, as well as supplementing key co-factor nutrients, is the best option here - and the Megi Hair Growth Supplement covers every one of your bases in that respect.

Step four is then the final couple of pieces to the puzzle, which are the shift towards androgen hormone dominance.

As oestrogen and progesterone fall, we get others like testosterone and DHT having more of a main part in our overall hormone picture - and this also ties into an activation of the stress response, because hormonal fluctuations are hugely stressful.

Both of these cause hair follicles to get smaller and further reduce the amount of capillaries that are bringing nutrients and oxygen to them.

Although I’m only touching on the androgen and stress response elements briefly at the end of my list, these are key in terms of hair thinning and shedding - but also in terms of all perimenopausal symptoms, whether that’s anxiety, sleep issues, digestive changes, weight issues, hot flushes, hair, skin and nail changes, or a mix of them all.

But I’m not going to get distracted, because we can talk about all of those on another day.

What I do really want to loop back around to, though, is an integral and yet often overlooked - or maybe just undervalued - element of perimenopause.

It’s not just about the therapeutic benefits of the Megi range. I love the process of using them together as a way to give back a sense of investment into those parts of ourselves that make us feel like ourselves.

Because a huge amount of these transitional years can feel pretty overwhelming - in a way similar to puberty - you’re suddenly having to get used to living in a new skin. One that doesn’t behave in the way it has done for as long as you’ll likely remember.

The seemingly small inclusion of massaging the serum into your scalp and taking the supplement every day - having those “just for me” products in the bathroom - these will give a sense of being in charge of something, in a sea of things that can feel quite out of our control.

We cannot change the perimenopause itself - it’s going to happen - but we can definitely influence the tone of those changes on our wellbeing, sense of self, self-esteem, and confidence. Micro-investments build resilience.

I actually read Anya Hindmarch’s memoir a few years ago, and the title always stuck with me, because it’s If in Doubt, Wash Your Hair.

Because fresh hair - maybe a lick of mascara if that’s your thing - those are our armour. The things that make us feel our best, like we can walk out into the world and be the person we want to be.

I may be rambling at this point, but when I discuss health, it is so much more than how we eat and how we exercise - it’s all of these factors tied together.

So with that, I’m going to conclude by saying: yes, perimenopausal hair loss is common - but that doesn’t mean it’s inevitable or irreversible.

I hope I’ve been able to show you that with the right support, you can stop the shedding, spark regrowth, and restore your hair’s natural vitality.

Megi Wellness literally exists to help you reclaim that confidence, with formulations founded in clinical research and real-world results.

This chapter of life might be full of changes, but with me and Megi on your side, I hope you now feel confident in knowing your hair doesn’t have to be one of them.

And more information on all of my clinical services can be found at lieblinghealth.com. I will see you next time

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