Everybody hopes for sunny weather. But I’m sure no one has ever longed for it as desperately as me.
The sun, you see, meant I could wear a hat without looking out of place. And when you’re a woman afflicted by severe hair loss, wearing a hat is a lifeline.
On windy days, by comparison, I couldn’t leave the house, worried the gusts would expose the bald patches I had spent hours concealing. Rainy days were the same; wet hair exposed too much of my scalp.
When my daughter, now nine, first started learning to swim she begged me to join her in the pool. But the thought of all those people seeing me with my painfully thin hair plastered to my head made me feel physically sick. Instead, I endured her disappointment.
While there’s much discussion of male hair loss, you hear far less about what it’s like as a woman – probably because, like me, female sufferers are so crippled by shame and self-loathing. Hair is so intrinsically linked to our perception of femininity that to lose it is emotionally devastating.
I first started experiencing stress-related hair loss in my teens, but it got worse as I went through pregnancy and perimenopause.
Katie O’Callaghan has ‘thick, lustrous hair’ after undergoing a transplant
The follicle surgery lasted 11 hours
For a decade, my hair came and went like a cruel game. I’d think it was back, only for it to thin again. Every lost strand felt like it took more of my confidence with it.
I tried everything to try to ‘fix’ it: special shampoos, vitamins, serums, as well as spray-on hair and shake-on powders. I even bought hats with fringes sewn in. None of it truly worked.
Until finally, three years ago, I found a solution that did – a hair transplant. I only wish I’d known this was an option for women sooner.
Now, for the first time in my life, I have thick, lustrous hair that fills me with confidence. And I’d urge any woman struggling like I was to consider this option – and not be put off by the stereotype that hair transplants are only for the likes of Wayne Rooney.
My hair health has always mirrored my life’s struggles. Whenever I experienced stress or trauma, it’s like my follicles felt it, too.
Until my parents’ divorce when I was six, being at home never felt safe due to my alcoholic father’s mood swings. My body found a way to release my stress when, aged six, I lost all my eyelashes over the course of a few months and developed eczema. I would cry all the time about it but it was a vicious cycle; the more stressed I became, the worse things got. I got bullied terribly at school and just wanted to hide away.
By my mid teens my eyelashes grew back . . . but then I started experiencing hair loss.
It was confusing and painful, and I was constantly paranoid about what people would think. While my friends talked about getting boyfriends, I could never imagine anyone fancying me.
When I went to the doctor, he just said it was hormonal and shrugged it off with a suggestion I try the contraceptive pill.
Within weeks of the procedure Katie’s hair began growing back, much to her delight
Eventually things improved, and from my late teens and throughout my 20s my hair was healthy.
When I became pregnant with my daughter Rosie, my hair was great – long and luscious. But just weeks after giving birth at 31, I noticed the front and sides were becoming very thin.
Everyone told me it was normal and would get better after I stopped breastfeeding. But even when I did, it still didn’t recover.
I’d split from my partner, and while being a new mum is stressful enough, doing it alone was overwhelming. Rosie didn’t sleep through the night until she was 18 months old, and my poor mental health again took it’s toll on my hair.
Hats became my armour and mirrors were my enemy. Looking at myself brought feelings of loss, grief and shame. I spent so much on trying to find solutions – around £30 a week, adding up to more than £1,500 a year – only for them not to work, which made me feel guilt on top of everything else for ‘wasting’ the funds.
While I went to several doctors, they never took my hair loss seriously. Most of my appointments were with men who brushed it off as ‘cosmetic’.
But things only got worse. In 2018, when I was 34, my mum’s partner Terry, who was like a dad to me, died of a heart attack aged 72, leaving me battling devastating feelings of grief.
Then two years later, at just 36, I started going through early perimenopause – which can cause hair loss in itself due to declining oestrogen levels.
Both of these things hit me like a train, and my hair loss became worse than ever. It was taking me an hour to get my hair to a place where I felt happy enough to leave the house for my job as an arts for health consultant each morning, layering a hairpiece, up to 40 hairclips and a headscarf to cover my increasingly large balding patches.
Katie was told that her hair follicles had died and a transplant would be her only option
But as Rosie got older I wanted her to see her mum as a confident woman who was living life fully. So I took the step of paying for private specialists. The turning point came in 2022 when, aged 39, I met the doctor who went on to do my hair transplant.
Having examined my scalp, she told me my hair follicles had died and would never grow back – the only option was a transplant.
I was scared at the prospect, and struggled to find testimonies from other women who had undergone such a procedure. Plus, it would cost £5,000. What if it didn’t work?
But I was desperate. It was an investment in my mental wellbeing – and my daughter’s future, too.
I booked the transplant for December that year. It would cover a large area – all the front of my head and round the sides – which meant the surgery lasted 11 hours under local anaesthetic.
Tiny incisions were made in my scalp and 3,500 follicles from the back of my head were implanted one by one. I drifted in and out of consciousness, even convulsing from the drugs, which was frightening, but I was told it was normal.
Afterwards, my face was swollen, I had two black eyes and my head – which I had to spray with water every 20 minutes – was incredibly painful.
It was two days before Christmas, and my family were shocked to see the bandages and bruising. Rosie told me I looked like ‘a potato left in the cupboard’.
Then came the waiting, which felt endless.
Four weeks later, I spotted the first tiny new hairs. I lingered in front of mirrors for the first time in years, smiling instead of blinking back tears.
‘My hair transplant made me feel dignified once more,’ says Katie
After eight months, I left the house without a headscarf. After a year, I deliberately went out bare-headed in the rain; I was so excited I was laughing like a child.
Finally, 18 months after the transplant, my hair had regrown to the extent that I could leave the house without even having to check it in the mirror. I felt like a whole new person.
I even appeared on a YouTube series called Hair Stories with celebrity hairdresser Michael Douglas. Previously, I’d been too anxious to go to the hairdressers, but he was wonderful.
I feel passionately that we need to talk about women’s hair loss, alopecia and female-pattern baldness to remove the stigma and shame around it and allow women to make informed choices on how to face it.
An estimated 33 per cent of women will suffer some form of hair loss over their lifetime, with around eight million women in the UK currently afflicted. And yet women make up only 12.7 per cent of hair transplant patients.
Now 42, it’s taken decades for me to feel ready to share my story. My hair transplant made me feel dignified once more – but should I ever lose my hair again, this time I won’t hide away.
If it makes even one other woman struggling with hair loss not feel alone, it will be worth it.
As told to Julia Sidwell
