Hannah explained it over the next hour. She drew pictures on the back of a Christmas card.
"Forget what you think you know about hair loss in women. After fifty, two things go wrong at the same time. And they make each other worse.
That's why most products on the market never really worked for you. They weren't made for perimenopause, menopause, or after."
The first thing that goes wrong is hormonal.
For most of a woman's life, oestrogen acts like a bodyguard for her hair follicles. It keeps them growing. It also keeps a tiny enzyme called 5-alpha reductase under control.
That enzyme turns testosterone — which women have a little of — into DHT. DHT is the hormone that shrinks hair follicles. It's the same hormone behind male pattern baldness.
At menopause, the bodyguard leaves.
Oestrogen drops fast. DHT activity on the scalp goes up.
The same hormone that thinned Jen's father's hair starts working on Jen's scalp too. Just slower. Same fuel, different speed.
"That's why so many of your clients say they look like their dad," Hannah told her. "After menopause, they're under the same attack he was.
They just got the female version — twenty years later."
The second thing that goes wrong is structural.
Around every hair follicle is a tiny ring of collagen.
Think of it like a soft scaffold holding the root in place. In a young scalp, it's soft and stretchy.
After fifty, in most women, that ring starts to harden. It tightens around the root — like a slow-closing noose.
The follicle underneath is often still alive. It just can't grow. Because it's being squeezed shut.
At the same time, blood flow to the scalp can drop by 50 to 60 percent in women over fifty.
Hair follicles need a lot of blood to grow. When that supply drops, growth stalls.
And the tiny protein anchors holding each hair in place start to weaken. Hairs that should have stayed in for years now fall out with a brush stroke. Or on a pillow.
Or in the shower.
That's the shedding Margot had been seeing on her clients' towels for ten years.
"Your follicles aren't dying, Margot," Hannah said. "They're being starved and strangled — at the same time — by two different systems failing together."