Your hair is now behaving completely differently. It fades away on your head and grows where you don’t want it. It’s common enough to find extra hairs growing on your upper lip and chin, your legs and even on your chest during or after menopause. Remove it by plucking, waxing or shaving if it disturbs you. (This may cause the hairs to grow more thickly and coarsely however)

Sick of the stray hairs on your chin? Bleach them with lemon juice.

There must be millions of women from the 1960s in various stages of menopause who have rarely, or never, removed body hair. . But times change, and our bodies change, and no one is going to cry ‘anti-feminist’ if we shave. Seriously, does anyone else besides yourself really care?

Please note – if you experience a sudden drastic growth in hair, please consult your health care provider to eliminate any other physical causes.

Now we come to the stress of our other hair changes. When you think of someone balding, you think of a man, but we lose our hair too. When hair loss occurs it’s certainly stressful and gives our ever-diminishing body image satisfaction a hefty punch. Figures show that roughly half of all women experience some hair loss during their menopausal years, and two-thirds of post-menopausal women deal with thinning hair or bald spots.

Bald spots? Help! We rarely become bald in the true sense, but as we get older we experience overall thinning and a reduction in hair shaft diameter, a pattern that starts at around age 40.

As we reach our midlife years, low thyroid function, common among menopausal women, causes changes in our hair. There are many other causes like physical or emotional stress, medications, scalp or dermatological issues and heredity.

Any time you experience sudden hair loss, you have to take into account those events which took place up to three months before. Did you start taking medication then? Did you experience divorce, or another significant event? Did you suffer a loss, like the death of a loved one?

Please note – If you suddenly develop a rapid drastic loss of hair, please consult your health care provider to eliminate any other causes.

We all know what balding men look like. They display the typical male pattern hair loss in a receding hairline and hair loss on top of the head. It’s typically genetic. But there’s also a genetic female-pattern hair loss which can first appear in our late twenties.

Female-pattern baldness starts with the replacement hairs becoming progressively finer and shorter, usually where the hair is parted. Did you wear a ponytail as a child? You can often find thinner groups of almost transparent hairs at the temples where your hair has been constantly scraped back and pulled up tightly. But our hair loss is far less prominent than it is in men. And we don’t suddenly develop a receding hairline

What can you do ?

• Remember to be gentle. Don’t tug, pull at, back-comb or even use a comb on your hair. Use a soft brush from now on
• Put your blowdryer away and style your hair with your fingers
• Cut down the number of times you wash your hair.
• Alternate your shampoos
• Don’t bleach or perm your hair at home and avoid harsh ingredients of blonding creams and perms. if you must use these on your hair, go to the hairdresser for professional application A colour is usually more gentle
• Softly massage your scalp for a few minutes once a day. Try using rosemary essential oil in the massage, it’s beneficial to hair and also looks, feels and smells lovely.
• If you haven’t already augmented your diet with fish oil, at least get some to improve your hair.

Susun Weed recommends several essential oils which improve hair growth and reduce hair loss. Lavender oil, lemon oil, thyme oil, sage oil or carrot seed oil. You can mix 10-20 drops of any of these into four ounces of cold-pressed olive oil or jojoba oil

As you can see, there’s a lot of leeway, and it’s not really much help to draw a line at a particular age and state that to be the age of menopause.

It’s a lottery.

Some women experience menopause in their thirties, and some won’t reach that stage until their sixties. You can blame your grandmothers if you wish, the average age of menopause onset will be related to when your mother reached menopause. The perimenopause stage is one year to several years before menstrual periods stop.

Most of us begin experiencing symptoms of hormone imbalance anywhere from our early thirties to our late forties. You can get a fair idea by finding out your mother’s age at menopause, and the folktale of ‘late start – early finish‘ seems to hold true. Of course there are other factors related to environment but you get the gist.

Menopause symptoms can range from mild hot spells at night to constant dripping sweats all day and night. My mother used to ’smell heat’ and I get ‘heat in my head’, whatever imagery may be expressed you can be sure it’s the internal thermostat misfiring.

smokers reach menopause earlier…

Some women spot for a few months, others bleed heavily for years. These symptoms are mostly caused by different hormonal combinations as we approach the time of the Change. A list has been drawn up by a collective of menopausal women, find your information in 35 Symptoms of Menopause

The severity level of your menopausal symptoms is very much connected to your stress level, your diet, the amount of exercise that you get, and the environmental toxins you’re exposed to on a daily basis. Smokers show an average age of menopause several years earlier than their non-smoking sister

Surgical menopause

Women who have both their ovaries removed surgically experience an abrupt menopause, and are so often experience more severe symptoms than are those who experience it naturally. The risk of heart disease is higher, hot flushes may be hotter (!) and more frequent, and women have a higher chance of suffering depression.No one knows why this is, and it becomes even more confusing. When only one ovary is removed, menopause usually occurs naturally. When the uterus is removed in an hysterectomy but the ovaries remain, menstrual periods stop but other menopausal symptoms usually occur at the same age that they would naturally occur. And not every woman is the same.

As I said, it’s a lottery.