Why Does Hair Growth Slow Down With Age?
If it feels like your hair simply doesn’t grow the way it used to, you’re probably not imagining it.
Maybe your hair once grew long without much effort, and now it seems to stall at a certain length. Maybe your ponytail feels a little thinner, your scalp feels drier, or you’re noticing more hair in the shower.
These are incredibly common changes as we get older, and a big part of the explanation comes down to something called the anagen phase.
First, a Little Hair Growth 101
Every hair on your head moves through its own growth cycle. There are several stages, but the one we care about most when we’re talking about longer, fuller-looking hair is anagen.
Anagen is the active growth phase.
During this period, cells within the hair follicle are actively producing the hair shaft, allowing the strand to continue getting longer. On the scalp, the anagen phase can normally last anywhere from about two to six years.
Think of anagen as your hair’s growth window.
The longer a strand remains in that window, the more time it has to grow.
Eventually, the follicle transitions out of anagen and into a short transition phase called catagen, followed by the resting and shedding phase known as telogen. Then, ideally, the cycle begins again.
So What Changes as We Get Older?
Hair follicles age right along with the rest of us.
With age, hormonal shifts and changes within the follicle can alter the hair-growth cycle. The active growth period can become shorter, while follicles may spend proportionally more time in resting phases.
In other words, the window for growth can shrink.
A strand that once had years to keep growing may enter its resting and shedding phases sooner. Over repeated hair cycles, this can contribute to some of the changes many women begin noticing in midlife:
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Hair that doesn’t seem to grow as long as it once did
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Less overall volume and density
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Finer-feeling strands
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Increased shedding
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More visible scalp
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Hair that feels weaker or breaks more easily
And there’s another piece of the puzzle that doesn’t get nearly enough attention: the scalp itself.
Your Scalp Ages, Too
We spend a lot of time talking about aging skin on our faces, but the scalp is skin, too.
As we age, the scalp can become drier and its protective barrier can become less resilient. Changes in moisture retention and the skin’s natural lipid composition can affect the environment surrounding the hair follicle.
And ceramides are an important part of that story.
Ceramides are naturally occurring lipids that help support the protective barrier of the skin and hair cuticle. Within the hair fiber, they also help maintain cohesion between cells, supporting stronger hair and helping reduce breakage.
When hair and scalp aren’t functioning at their best, you may notice dryness, dullness, brittleness and hair that simply doesn’t have the same bounce, shine or vitality it once did.
That means healthy-looking hair as we age isn’t only about making hair grow faster.
It’s about creating the conditions that allow more hair to remain in its active growth cycle while supporting the strength and quality of the hair that’s already growing.
Can You Support the Anagen Phase?
This is where hair science gets particularly interesting.
Researchers are looking at nutritional compounds that may help support the hair-growth cycle itself, rather than simply supplying the basic vitamins and minerals traditionally associated with healthy hair.
One of those compounds is phytoceramides.
And it’s one of the reasons we formulated HairRx differently.
The Science Behind HairRx
HairRx contains CERAMOSIDES™, a patented nutritional ingredient derived from wheat and highly concentrated in phytoceramides.
Unlike a traditional beauty vitamin, CERAMOSIDES™ has been studied specifically for its effects on both hair and scalp, including its ability to stimulate the anagen hair-growth phase.
In a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trial involving 66 women ages 18 to 65 with brittle, thin hair and acute telogen effluvium, researchers began seeing significant results after just 56 days of daily CERAMOSIDES™ supplementation.
After 56 days, CERAMOSIDES™ significantly increased the density of hairs in the anagen phase by 6.3% compared with placebo. Researchers also observed a significant reduction in the density of hairs in the telogen, or shedding, phase.
By 84 days, the study reported 12.5% greater hair growth compared with placebo, along with approximately 11,000 additional hairs in the anagen phase.
The women noticed the difference, too:
- 91% felt their hair grew faster.
- 85% reported more hair volume.
- 85% said they were losing less hair.
CERAMOSIDES™ was also associated with improvements in hair elasticity and resistance to breakage, another important piece of maintaining fuller, healthier-looking hair.
Give Your Hair More Time to Grow
We can’t stop our hair follicles from getting older. But we can support the biology behind healthier-looking hair.
That’s exactly how we think about HairRx.
Rather than simply packing another supplement with a long list of traditional hair vitamins, HairRx was formulated to support the hair-growth cycle itself, including the phase in which growth actually happens.
Because when it comes to growing longer, fuller, healthier-looking hair, sometimes the goal isn’t simply to make hair grow faster.
It’s to give your hair more time to grow.