If your hair feels drier, finer, frizzier, or less predictable than it did a decade ago, you’re not imagining it.
Your hair changes alongside the rest of your body. Hormones shift. Oil production slows. Hair follicles change. Even your nutrition and sun exposure can influence how your hair looks and feels. While you can’t stop every change, understanding what’s happening can help you care for your hair long-term.
1. Hair Structure Changes
Each strand of hair has a follicle (the part underneath your skin that grows and supports the hair) and a shaft (the part above your skin).1 Both change with age and can affect your hair’s thickness, curl pattern, and texture.2 Changes in stem cell production and scalp circulation can also affect hair structure.
Hair Follicle Changes
As you age, your hair follicles may shrink, change shape, and grow fewer hairs.2 They also spend less time growing hair and more time resting and shedding. Your metabolism, or energy production, also slows with age, which may affect your follicles.3
Together, these changes can lead to:42
Changes in curl pattern, such as straight hair becoming wavy or curls loosening
Finer, thinner strands
Less volume and fullness
Slower hair growth and more shedding
Hair that feels dry, rough, or frizzy
Hair Shaft Changes
Your hair shaft is made mostly of keratin, a protein that gives hair strength and shape.1 Years of chemical treatments, heat styling, and sun exposure can wear down the protective outer layer of the hair shaft.5
These changes can make your hair:2
Dull and dry
Less flexible
More likely to tangle, split, or break
Rough or frizzy
How Graying Changes the Structure of Your Hair
Each hair follicle holds stem cells that become either the cells that build the hair strand or melanin, the pigment that gives your hair color.1 As you age, the melanin reserve decreases. When your follicles make less melanin, your hair turns gray, silver, or white.
Because these same stem cells also help build the hair strand, this decline can change your hair texture, too. Gray and white hairs may feel coarse, wiry, stiff, or unruly.2
Changes in Scalp Circulation
Your scalp circulation decreases with age, reducing the blood flow, nutrients, and oxygen to your follicles.1
Hoover E, Alhajj M, Flores JL. Physiology, hair. In: StatPearls. StatPearls Publishing; 2023
This may contribute to slower growth, thinning, shedding, and breakage.3
2. Hormonal Shifts
As you age, your hormone levels rise and fall, and these shifts affect your hair texture.3
Rinaldi F, Trink A, Mondadori G, Giuliani G, Pinto D. The menopausal transition: Is the hair follicle “going through menopause”?.
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