For all its joys and exciting moments, pregnancy comes with a lot of difficult side effects. You don’t have to have ever been pregnant to know about many of the common ones like nausea and vomiting, but there’s also swelling, hemorrhoids, headaches and many more draining things that result from the flood of hormones pregnant women experience. There is one oft overlooked but amazing side effect of pregnancy, however. Many women find that their hair becomes shinier and thicker and might even grow faster. Unfortunately all that beautiful growth reverses itself postpartum and many women find that all that hair that was growing while pregnant sheds en masse.
“Hair loss is normal for many postpartum moms and is driven by a hormonal change and drops postpartum, especially if the mother’s hair got significantly thicker and more lustrous during pregnancy,” says Jada Shapiro, a doula, lactation consultant and the founder of boober, a marketplace for expectant parents and new families to find classes and on-demand care providers for pregnancy to postpartum. “Mothers should maintain a healthy diet and be sure they have sufficient support with caring for their baby, especially as they continue to grow to minimize stress when possible.”
As for breastfeeding, according to Shapiro it doesn’t have an apparent effect on hair loss. “Some people think that because their postpartum hair loss happens at the same time that they are nursing that the two are related, but that’s not the case – it’s related to the hormone changes after pregnancy.”
