From Shedding to Slow Growth: How the Hair Cycle Shapes Your Concerns

If you’ve ever looked at your brush and thought “Wait… is this normal?”. We’ve been there too! Hair has its own rhythm, and while it might feel like it’s doing whatever it wants sometimes, there’s a cycle each individual hair follicle is following.

Whether you’re noticing more shedding than usual, wondering why your hair feels different after a big life change, or just trying to make sense of how long it takes for new growth to kick in, it all comes back to the hair growth cycle.

This post is not here to turn you into a trichologist (though we love their work). It’s here to help you understand what’s normal, what’s not, and why the timing of changes to your hair might not be as random as they seem. Once you know what’s happening beneath the surface, everything starts to make a bit more sense. 

** Note**

Let us introduce our style.

Our blog is written by Ella, our Co-Founder and Cosmetic Formulation Scientist, who shares the science behind your hair.
Maisie, our other Co-Founder, adds the ‘hair for dummies’ translations (in italic call-outs) to keep things understandable and easy to follow. 

Hair for dummies:
1. to understand your hair, you must understand the hair cycle

2. each individual hair follicle/ strand is on its own timeline through the cycle

The Hair Cycle

So, if we’re going to talk about the hair cycle, then I suppose we should really start at the beginning. There are three key phases to the hair cycle, or depending on who you ask, some say four phases, but technically the fourth stage is actually the last step in the third phase. But I’m getting ahead of myself…

Anagen (Growth)

Let’s start with the anagen phase also known as the growth phase (or the active phase, if you prefer). This is when your hair follicles are hard at work, producing the entire length of each hair strand you see. The length of time your hair stays in anagen determines how long it can grow. So, if this phase is cut short, your hair will be too. Whereas a longer anagen phase allows for longer hair growth.

On the scalp, anagen typically lasts somewhere between 2 to 8 years, depending on factors like age, genetics and hormones. There’s typically around 85 to 90 percent of your scalp hairs in this phase at any one time. But not all body hair is the same. For example, eyebrow hairs only stay in this phase for about 2 to 3 months (which, to be fair, is probably for the best).

The anagen phase is where all the growth happens, and how long your hair is depends on how long this phase lasts. There are many factors that influence the length; some genetic, some controllable

Catagen (Transition)

Next up we’ve got catagen. The short but important transition phase that acts as a bridge between growth (anagen) and rest (telogen). It usually lasts around two weeks, and only about 1-3 percent of your scalp hairs are in catagen at any one time. During this phase, the hair follicle starts to shrink back and detach from the dermal papilla. That’s the little structure at the base of your follicle that feeds the hair and helps it grow (you’ll see this bit labelled in the infographic.) At the same time, the hair fibre itself can get slightly thinner, losing about one sixth of its diameter, and something called a club hair forms. A club hair is, you guessed it, a tiny club shaped bulb at the root of the strand that signals the hair is no longer actively growing.

Now, if a lot of your follicles enter catagen at once and go on to form club hairs, they’ll be shed around the same time. That is what can make hair feel noticeably thinner or look like it’s falling out in clumps.

There is a transitional phase between growth and shedding, where the hair detaches from the root’s power supply. For your hair to grow longer, you need to avoid hairs from entering this phase prematurely

Telogen & Exogen (Shedding)

Finally, we’ve got telogen. The last of the three main phases in the hair cycle. This one is the resting phase and usually lasts around two to three months. At any given time, roughly 9 - 14 percent of your scalp hairs are in this phase. Interestingly, that number jumps to around 40 - 50 percent when we are talking about body hair, like on your tummy.

While your old hair is resting in telogen, a brand new hair quietly starts growing underneath it. That new strand slowly works its way up, getting ready to take over and push the old one out.

Then comes exogen, which is really just the final stage of telogen and the moment where that individual hair completes its cycle and resets back to anagen. This is when the new strand keeps pushing up through the follicle, and the old one is finally shed. Each follicle follows its own course through the hair cycle, so this process is happening all the time across different parts of your scalp.

Once the old hair detaches from the power supply, a new hair starts to grow. Naturally, at some point, this pushes the old hair out and it sheds. The new hair growing is part of a completely new cycle.

Fun facts:
1. A single follicle can go through 20+ hair cycles in its lifetime
2. A normal baseline is losing 50-100 hairs every day

So, why does this actually matter? Well, it’s because when your hair starts doing things that feel out of the ordinary, whether it’s shedding more, growing slower, or just not feeling like it used to, it helps to know it’s not always as big a problem as you might think.

This is not about diagnosing or fixing your hair overnight. That kind of quick result just isn’t how hair works unfortunately. It’s about understanding the pattern it follows so you can stop second guessing and feel more confident making choices that support your hair’s natural growth cycle.

Whether you’re navigating postpartum changes, hormonal transitions, or just noticing your hair is not quite as it was, understanding your hair cycle means you can stop blaming yourself for every little change and start feeling more in tune with what your body is going through. Hair moves through phases, just like we do. 

There are no quick fixes with hair, due to how the cycle works but understanding your hair cycle is the first step to understanding changes you may be seeing with your hair.

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