Aging Hair: How It Changes with Time

Like the rest of you, your hair is impacted by age, sometimes for
the better, and other times, for the worse. There’s nothing you can
do to stop time from marching on in your hair cells, but knowing
what changes to expect can help you plan for ways to compensate
for them through the use of hair growth stimulating medications,
by styling changes.
Knowing what’s normal and what’s not as you age may also help
you recognize early genetic hair loss and plan to treat it early, as
medications and transplantation work best when you still have
enough hair to work with.
Change of texture
Whether a baby’s hair sticks up all over or forms only a few wispy
curls, all baby hair is baby fine. But hair changes during childhood.
It remains soft but becomes bulkier. Through the teenage years
and into early adulthood, hair takes on an adult texture, becoming
coarser as a rule.
Hair counts are thought to be maintained well into the senior
years, at least for half of the human population. The other half
experiences hair loss prior to reaching their 50s.
The weight of each individual hair shaft is genetically imprinted in
your genes, as is the number of hairs you’re born with. It’s not
unusual for an adult to start off with a medium-coarse hair shaft,
only to find that as he or she ages, the hair becomes finer as the
thickness of the hair shaft changes in adulthood.This change is slow and,
provided that the number of hairs on
the head doesn’t drop off precipitously, the change usually isn’t
alarming.
Of those men who have a full head of hair into their 60s, nearly half
will experience a substantial reduction in the thickness of each
individual hair shaft.
One in three women will also experience an overall pattern of
thinning hair in menopause, due to an increased sensitivity to the
male hormone testosterone.