While not all chemotherapy drugs create hair loss, if you’re going to undergo chemotherapy, hair loss may be regrettably in your future.
This side effect of chemo, most people know. I tried, for instance, to get ahead of my hair loss, and that turned into a debacle. But what most women don’t know –
or maybe can’t process at the same time we’re being walloped with the news of having cancer --
is the total extent this “hair loss” really means.
Yes, chemotherapy will knock the hair off your head, but it’s also going to mean the loss of hair everywhere on your body, and that will eventually include your eyebrows and eyelashes.
A quick primer on hair
Each hair on your body grows out of a follicle and has a finite lifecycle. Your follicles are constantly producing hair in various stages of growth. New growth happens below the skin; the oldest hairs fall out naturally.
Normally, cells of hair follicles grow quickly. At any given time, your follicles are in different phases of hair growth, so when old hair falls out, you wouldn’t notice because different follicles have already produced new hair. But when you start chemotherapy, it kills the fast-growing cells that create new hair growth.
That is why the patient’s hair does not fall out in one big radical loss.
It’s really a thinning process where the loss eventually catches up to the lack of new hair growth, and baldness or really stringy or patchy remaining hair is all that’s left.
Losing ALL your hair during chemo
When I was undergoing chemotherapy, I was so focused on my head hair, I didn’t give much thought to the rest of my body hair.
By the time I had my head shaved on Day 40 of my chemotherapy treatment, I still had most of my other body hair. Over time, I noticed the loss of the rest of it: on my arms, legs, under my armpits, “down there,” and even my nose hairs! (This latter loss really took me by surprise. My nose was constantly leaking as a result of having nothing to hold back the liquid!)
Some of the last hair to go, though, were my eyelashes and finally my eyebrows.
Me after shaving my head during chemotherapy.
Though my eyebrows stuck around for quite a while past my head hair loss, they were mostly gone by the time I was done with six months of chemotherapy. I have to say, I think losing my eyebrows was even more demoralizing than losing my head hair.
By the time I lost my eyebrows and eyelashes, I was mentally fatigued from the rigor of chemotherapy and the battle to keep my mindset strong.
I felt naked and unattractive.
My natural eyebrow hair is quite thick, and throughout my life, I’ve always kept my brows full, only plucking out the strays under the natural brow arch. My eyebrows, therefore, have always been a quite prominent feature on my face. After I lost them, though I was using cosmetic substitutions to try to help me improve how I felt, nothing really helped.
Even when I “put on my face” with full makeup, I just never felt I looked like me.
Had I known about “eyebrow wigs”…
One thing I never knew about but wished I had when I was undergoing chemotherapy was “eyebrow wigs.”
A customer wearing our #15 Eyebrow Wigs
A first-of-its kind product originally created by our founder over 25 years ago, reusable eyebrow wigs are real human hair on a clear gel backing placed directly on your skin where your normal eyebrows would be. These handmade brows come in several styles, multiple colors, and have been designed to look like natural hair growth.
I am sure they would have helped me feel more like myself on days when cosmetics just didn’t do the trick. Headcovers has since grown its substitution line of products, also offering temporary eyebrow tattoos and false eyelashes. We have also developed other eyebrow-related products to help style and backfill thinning brows.
To these latter products I say, “Thank goodness,” because one unhappy long-term side effect of the chemotherapy treatment I received has been a permanent “hole” of hair loss on one of my eyebrows
It’s a bummer, but I’m only grousing, not wholeheartedly complaining. I could have had far worse outcomes, and there are viable products to help me fill my eyebrow hole. And besides, I’ve had some other lasting hair loss effects from chemo that I don’t mind, like very little armpit hair and much less leg hair to now shave!
Obviously, having a lasting hole in one’s eyebrow is only a minor inconvenience by comparison to battling cancer and going through chemotherapy.
May your long-term inconveniences also be small.