Starting to Lose Your Hair in Your 20s? Here's the Shortcut I Wish I'd Had

My hair loss started in my 20s.

Not gradually announced, not a single “aha” moment — just weeks of finding more strands than usual, and that low hum of anxiety every time I looked at the shower drain. If you're in your 20s and starting to notice the same thing, I want to save you the years I spent guessing.

The myriad-of-solutions phase is real

When hair loss starts young, you don't have a playbook. Nobody around you is losing their hair yet — your friends are worried about breakouts and finals, not their part width. So you turn to the internet, and the internet gives you everything, all at once, with none of it ranked by what's actually worth your time.

Rice water rinses. Onion juice. Biotin gummies. Rosemary oil because TikTok said so. “Just destress.” A different miracle serum every few months. I tried a version of almost all of it, in no particular order, with no particular plan, for longer than I'd like to admit.

None of it was wrong, exactly. Some of it genuinely helps. But trying things randomly, one at a time, with no structure, is the slowest possible way to figure out what your hair actually needs. And when you're losing hair, slow has a cost.

Why timing matters more than anyone tells you

Here's what I didn't understand in my 20s: hair loss caused by DHT sensitivity doesn't sit still while you experiment. It's a progressive process — follicles gradually miniaturize over time, producing thinner, shorter, weaker strands with every cycle, until eventually they may stop producing visible hair altogether.

That means every year spent trial-and-erroring random remedies is a year those follicles are still shrinking in the background, whether you're addressing it seriously or not.

This is also why age matters. It's not just follicle miniaturization — the hair growth cycle itself changes over time, and the longer you wait to build real structure into your care, the more those changes compound. I've since learned about clients in their 40s and 50s whose hair is healthy but simply won't grow the way it used to, partly because of decades of changes nobody addressed early. That's not a scare tactic. It's biology — and exactly why I wish someone had handed 24-year-old me a plan instead of a TikTok algorithm.

Skip the guesswork — borrow the Unhinged Routine

If I could go back, I wouldn't try to reinvent the wheel. I'd go straight to a structured routine and adjust from there, instead of testing single ingredients for months at a time with no way to measure whether they were actually working.

That's exactly why we published the Unhinged Routine. It's intense, and you don't need to adopt it at 100% intensity on day one. But it exists because hair loss doesn't respond well to minimalism — it responds to systems that hit multiple angles at once: scalp stimulation, inflammation, circulation, and consistency. Even borrowing the first layer of it — consistent scalp oiling, a daily leave-in, and actual blood work instead of guessing — will get you further in three months than a year of random remedies will.

Start with data, not another product

Before you buy anything else, get blood work done. This is the single biggest thing I wish I'd done in my 20s instead of spending money on serums. Iron, vitamin D, thyroid, and a hormonal panel will tell you more in one blood draw than a year of Pinterest boards will.

The bottom line

If your hair loss is starting in your 20s, you have something most people managing this in their 40s don't: time. Use it. Skip the phase where you try seventeen single-ingredient remedies over three years hoping one sticks. Get the blood work. Build a real scalp routine — even a simplified version of the Unhinged Routine — and stay consistent with it for a full growth cycle before you judge whether it's working.

I can't get back the years I spent guessing. But you can skip them entirely, starting today.