From the founders of HALO Hair
My thyroid is treated. My bloods are normal. My hair is still going.
It took me 4 years to find out why. Two different things take your hair when your thyroid goes wrong, and levothyroxine only sorts one of them.
I was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s at forty-six, after about three years of being told I was tired because I was busy.
So now I take levothyroxine first thing, on an empty stomach. I keep my iron four hours away from it. I get my bloods done and they come back in range.
And my hair kept going.
I asked about it twice. Both times I was told my levels were fine — which they were — and that was the end of it.
You’ll know that feeling. You’ve done everything right, the number says so, and something is still visibly happening to you.
So I did what everyone does. I decided it must be something else, and I went shopping.
Here is what nobody told me
Two completely different things take your hair when your thyroid goes wrong.
One of them sheds it. The other one thins it.
They feel the same in the shower. They happen for different reasons, and only one of them has anything to do with the tablet you take every morning.
That’s the whole page. The rest is me explaining both properly, because nobody explained them to me and it cost me 4 years.
The shedding, which is the one everybody knows about
A slow thyroid slows everything. Your heart, your gut, your temperature, your thinking. And your hair, because hair is just another thing your body makes.
Hair grows in rounds. It grows for a few years, rests, falls out, starts again. A slow thyroid makes the growing part shorter and the resting part longer, so more of it lets go at once.
This is the one that comes out everywhere. The sides. The back. The plughole. The pillow.
And the tell that gives it away isn’t on your head at all.
The outer third of your eyebrows, nearest your ears. If they’ve thinned or gone, that’s the shedding. Not age, and not plucking them in 1998.
Levothyroxine sorts this one properly. That’s what it’s for. Mine settled within about six months and the handfuls stopped.
So there I was. Bloods in range, shedding stopped, and a parting that was still getting wider every year.
I went round the houses on my dose, like everybody does. Was I in range but not optimal. Should I be pushing for T3. Did that Teva switch do something. All reasonable, none of it the answer.
YOUR PRESCRIPTION SORTED HALF OF ITThe shedding is handled. The thinning was never in the box.
The thinning, which is the one nobody mentions
This took me 4 years to find and about 90 seconds to understand.
You’ve testosterone in your blood. Every woman does. It’s normal and you need it.
Most of it isn’t doing anything, because it isn’t free to. Your liver makes a protein called SHBG whose whole job is to hold on to it. Handcuffs, basically. Cuffed testosterone does nothing. Loose testosterone goes to work.
And your thyroid sets how many handcuffs your liver makes. A slow thyroid makes fewer.
You’ve not made any more testosterone. The same amount is there. More of it’s just walking around free.
Which is why a testosterone blood test doesn’t catch this either. It measures cuffed and loose together, and the total hasn’t moved. So that one comes back normal too.
Loose testosterone goes to the roots on the top of your head, gets turned into something stronger called DHT, and tells them to come back a bit smaller next time.
Only the roots on the top of your head do that. The ones at the back and the sides get exactly the same blood going past them, and they don’t react to it at all. They never have and they never will.
That’s why a hair transplant works. They take roots from the back of your head, move them up to the top, and those roots carry on ignoring the DHT in their new spot.
And it’s why this kind of hair loss never comes out in handfuls. There’s nothing to find in the plughole. Each root just comes back a little thinner than the one before, year after year, and you only notice it when your parting starts to show.
And levothyroxine does nothing about the thinning.
It isn’t failing. It replaces the thyroid hormone you stopped making, and that’s the entire job. Nobody ever said it would go and clear up what loose testosterone had been doing all those years you were undiagnosed.
Which brings up the obvious question, and it’s the one I asked. If a slow thyroid took the handcuffs off, doesn’t treating the thyroid put them back on?
Mostly it does, and that stops it getting any worse. But it doesn’t undo what already happened.
All through those years, the roots on top of your head were being told to come back smaller, and they did as they were told. A root that’s already halfway down that road carries on down it. Nothing about a thyroid tablet turns it round.
That was the bit that floored me. Four years treated, and I’d been assuming treated meant undone.
So the shedding gets sorted. The thinning carries on underneath it.
And your bloods keep coming back normal, because a thyroid blood test measures thyroid hormone and nothing else. It tells you the shedding is handled. It has never had a word to say about the testosterone.
DEAL WITH THE HALF NOBODY TREATEDTreated is not undone. This goes after the bit your tablet was never given.
And that’s true whatever kind of thyroid you’ve had
The handcuffs come off while you’re running slow. Not when you’re diagnosed. Not when you start the tablet. While you’re slow. So find yourself here.
- Hashimoto’s, or plain underactive. You were slow for years before anybody tested you. Almost everyone is. That’s the stretch that did it, and it was over before you ever got a box of levo.
- Graves’, or overactive and treated. While you were fast you had more handcuffs, not fewer. But if you had radioiodine or your thyroid taken out, you’re on levothyroxine now — which means you went slow in the middle while they got your dose right. That’s your stretch. This page is about you too.
- On NDT, or T4 with T3, or still fighting for a higher dose. None of it changes this. The dose fight matters for how you feel, and I spent eighteen months on it. But whichever tablet gets your levels right, it sorts the shedding. It was never the fight that was going to save your hair.
- Overactive right now and not treated. Then this probably isn’t your problem and getting the thyroid right should do most of the work. I’d rather say that and lose the sale.
It is not your dose. It is a different hormone, and your tablet was never aimed at it.
Which one is yours? Three places, ten seconds.
The outer ends of your eyebrows. Thinned or gone? That’s the shedding.
Your parting, against the sides of your head. Parting wider while the sides are still fine? That’s the thinning.
And a third one, which settles it completely.
Your chin. If something coarse and dark started turning up on your jaw in the same few years, that’s loose testosterone. It grows hair there and takes it off the top. Same hormone, opposite jobs.
If more than one is true, you’ve had both going on at once. And only one of them has ever been treated.
SEE THE FORMULA AND THE PRICETwo softgels a day · Nothing goes on your head · Nothing changes about your levothyroxine
So the only thing left is to stop the DHT
You can’t put the handcuffs back on. Your liver makes them, your thyroid sets the number, and that was decided years ago.
But here is the thing I hadn’t understood. The loose testosterone isn’t what shrinks your hair. DHT is.
The testosterone arrives at the root. The root converts it into DHT. And it’s the DHT, not the testosterone, that gives the order to come back smaller.
So there’s a switch inside that root that turns one into the other.
Block that switch and the order never gets given. The testosterone can turn up all it likes — if it isn’t converted, nothing happens.
That’s the target. One step, inside the root, and the only part of any of this you can actually reach.
You can’t reach your thyroid, it’s already treated. You can’t reach your liver. You can’t reach the testosterone, and you wouldn’t want to — you need it. The switch is the one thing left.
And two things go for that switch
Cold-pressed pumpkin seed oil, and saw palmetto.
Those are the two on that shelf that have ever been aimed at the conversion step rather than at feeding the root. That’s the whole reason the bottle is built round them and not round a vitamin.
Everything else in the hair aisle is food. Biotin, collagen, keratin, iron, bamboo silica. All of it is building material, for a root that was never short of building material. You can’t argue with an order by sending more food.
And why not go to the doctor about it? Because there isn’t anything to go for. There’s no NHS test for this, no clinic, and no appointment where somebody looks at your parting and does something about it. I know, because I asked twice. That’s the honest reason my sister and I ended up making this ourselves.
STOP FEEDING A ROOT THAT ISN'T HUNGRYYour hair is not starving. Something is shrinking it. That is a different job.
What we put in it, and how much
Before we made anything, we bought 30 bottles and turned every one over. Big numbers on the front for the cheap ingredients, small numbers on the back for the expensive ones. Every single one was feeding a root that isn’t hungry.
If you’ve got one in a cupboard, go and turn it over now. I’d rather you found this on your own bottle than took my word for it off mine.
1,000 mg of cold-pressed pumpkin seed oil. Cold-pressed is where the active part actually is. Ground-up seed powder is cheap, it looks the same on a label, and it isn’t the same thing — which is exactly what everyone else cuts.
320 mg of saw palmetto, standardised to 85–95% fatty acids. Standardised is the whole point. Without that word on a label, saw palmetto can mean almost anything from one batch to the next, and usually does.
Both of them go for the same switch, from two directions. That’s why they’re in one capsule instead of two bottles.
- Zinc, 10 mg. Contributes to the maintenance of normal hair, and it’s involved in how your body handles testosterone — keeping it where it should be, not pushing it up.
- Selenium, 55 µg. What your body uses to switch thyroid hormone on, the T4 to T3 step you’ll have read about. A normal amount, because with selenium more isn’t better.
- Copper, 1 mg. Contributes to normal hair colour, and it works alongside the zinc.
- Vitamin B6, 1.4 mg. Contributes to the regulation of hormonal activity.
- Biotin, 100 µg. Twice what a day needs, not 200 times. Enough to count, too little to bend your test.
- Vitamin E family, 50 mg. Protects cells from oxidative stress, and stops the oil going off in the capsule.
Two softgels a day. Take them at a different time from your levo — levo wants an empty stomach, these want food. Mine go with lunch. Nothing in here is iodine and nothing in here is a hormone.
SEE EVERY AMOUNT ON THE LABEL£24.99 for a month · £49.99 for three · 90-day money-back guarantee
Now look at what I’d been buying instead
Everything in that cupboard was food. Not one of it went anywhere near the switch.
By the time I worked that out I’d spent £604.
Not one of them is a hormone, because I’d already decided hormones were handled. And every one was built on the same idea: that my hair was starving and needed feeding.
It wasn’t starving. Look at what’s growing on my chin. A body that’s run out of what it takes to build hair doesn’t grow a thick dark one overnight and then do it again a fortnight later.
There’s plenty to build with. It’s just being put in the wrong place. The root was never hungry. It was taking orders. And you can’t argue with an order by sending more food.
STOP SPENDING ON THE WRONG PROBLEM£604 on food for a root that was not hungry. This goes after the order, not the appetite.
And one of them may have been messing with my blood test
This is the bit I wish somebody had told me years ago.
Most hair supplements have 10,000 µg of biotin in them. A day needs about 50.
All that extra biotin doesn’t just sit there. It gets into the blood test and changes the number that comes out.
And it changes it in one particular direction. It makes your results look like you’re taking too much levothyroxine, when you’re not.
So the danger isn’t being told you’re untreated. It’s being told you’re on too much, and having your dose taken down when it never needed taking down.
And you know where that ends up. A dose that gets cut when it shouldn’t have been puts you back to running slow. Which is when the handcuffs come off.
So there I was. Swallowing 10,000 µg every morning, then going in for the blood test my dose gets set by. Nobody at the pharmacy said a word. It isn’t on the front of the tub and it isn’t on the back.
I’m not saying your dose is wrong. I’m saying you don’t know whether the number it was set from was really yours.
And don’t take my word for it, because I sell a hair supplement and you’ve no reason to trust me on this one. Search “biotin interference thyroid function test” and read anybody but me.
Stop any hair supplement 3 days before your next blood test, and tell whoever takes the sample. Some labs want longer at very high doses, so ask them. That one is theirs to answer, not mine.
And it’s why ours has 100 µg in it and not 10,000.
KNOW YOUR NUMBER IS ACTUALLY YOURS100 µg biotin, not 10,000. Too little to bend your blood test.
The first five weeks are dead quiet
I nearly stopped at week four, so I’ll tell you what actually happens.
A root has to finish the round it’s in before it can start a better one. There’s no quick version, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling you something worse than we are.
So count the turns tonight and write the number down. And here’s why that number moved in the first place, because it isn’t what you think. Nothing has fallen out. Each root came back a fraction smaller every round, and halve the width of a hair and there’s about a quarter of it left. Same number of hairs in your hand. A quarter of the handful.
What women with a thyroid say about it
Outer ends gone on both sides, and I’ve been blaming that on plucking them in the nineties for about a decade. Then I looked at my parting and my sides and they were completely different from each other. Nine years diagnosed and nobody had ever told me those were two separate things.
Both of them
Two years on 10,000 micrograms of biotin and my TSH had been sitting at the bottom of the range the whole time. Told the nurse. She said she’d heard of it but nobody flags it. I now know my number is actually mine, and that isn’t nothing after four years of being told fine.
The biotin thing
Graves’, then they took it out, then levothyroxine ever since. I assumed all of this was for the underactive lot. It was the bit about the gap while they get your dose right that made me stop — that was about eight months of my life and I’d never thought of it as a stretch of being slow. Bobble has gone from four turns to three since February.
Graves’, treated
Seven weeks and the count hasn’t moved. Four stars because the softgels are big and I’ve to take them with a proper meal. Not marking them down for the timing because they say up front that weeks one to five are dead quiet, and they were. Writing this so somebody at week six knows flat is normal.
Still earlyIf the bobble has not moved by day ninety, email us and we give you your money back.
What it costs
| 1 bottle · one month | £24.99 |
| 3 bottles · £16.66 a month | £49.99 |
| 5 bottles · £15.00 a month | £74.99 |
Most people take the three
Three months, because that’s how long a root takes to do anything. One bottle tells you whether you can swallow them. It tells you nothing about your hair.
It isn’t a subscription. Nothing renews.
90-day money-back guarantee. If you don’t get on with it, for any reason, email us and we give you your money back. No number to hit, no photograph to send.
I WANT TO STOP CHECKING MY PARTING£49.99 for three · 90 days · No subscription · Keep taking your levothyroxine
What to do tonight
- Do the three checks. Eyebrows, parting against your sides, chin. Ten seconds in the bathroom.
- Put your hair up and count the turns. Write the number on your phone. In eight weeks you’ll want it.
- Turn over any hair supplement you take. If the biotin says thousands, tell whoever does your bloods before your next test.
- Keep taking your levothyroxine, and go after the thinning. It’s doing a job nothing on this page does. This is the job it was never given.
— Beth
DEAL WITH THE JOB YOUR TABLET WAS NEVER GIVEN90 days · Free UK delivery on 3 and 5 · No subscription
Hashimoto’s at forty-six. Read the thirty labels, did the sums, and is the reason there’s a standardised extract in the bottle instead of a blend.
Beth’s younger sister. Went on HRT at forty-seven and hit the same second problem from the other direction.
P.S. Two different things take your hair when your thyroid goes wrong, and your prescription was only ever written for one of them. Normal bloods mean the shedding is handled. They’ve never had a word to say about the thinning.
P.P.S. Food supplement. Not a medicine, and not a replacement for anything you’ve been prescribed. Don’t change your levothyroxine because of anything you’ve read here. If you’re pregnant, breastfeeding, on prescription medication or being treated for a thyroid or hormone-sensitive condition, speak to your GP or pharmacist before starting — and tell them about any supplement you take before a blood test.