Why Women Lose hair in Autumn

by OWEN LI April 3, 2013

The wind and rain are bad enough, but autumn’s return has another sting in its tail: you’ll lose more hair, say Swedish researchers.

In a study published in the journal Dermatology, the scientists followed more than 800 healthy women over six years and found that they lost the most hair in the autumn months.

To understand why, you need to know something about normal hair growth.

A human hair grows for between two and six years. At any one time, 90 per cent of our hair is growing, while the remainder is in a resting state (known as the telogen stage) for between two to six months, before it falls out.

The hair follicle itself then rests for three months before the whole process is repeated (with the exception, of course, of balding men).

The Swedish researchers found that women had the highest proportion of resting hairs in July — with the telogen state in most of them ending around 100 days later, from October onwards.

Hair cells are the second-fastest produced cells in the body (after bone marrow), so hair is often the first thing to suffer from any bodily upset