Before her big chop, Randall had already scaled back her relaxer touch-ups to twice a year instead of every few months. As a result, she began noticing more of her natural texture peeking through at the roots than ever before, which made her realize she didn’t actually know what her natural hair looked like.
Having started on relaxers as children and teenagers, the four women we spoke to spent decades disconnected from their natural texture. Eventually, curiosity became reason enough to meet that version of themselves again. Wiley, Forcer, Randall, and Richards also found that age came with less regard for what people thought about them. “As I was approaching menopause and all these physical changes, I got really tired of performing for people. I just decided to present myself as who I naturally am,” says Wiley.
Richards relates to this desire to be unapologetic in her later years. “I used to always tell my son, when I turn 60, I’m going to chop all my hair off, and I’m going to color it blonde and buy me a convertible,” she says. “Because when you get older, you don’t have to fit in. You’re more accepting of how you look and how you feel, versus when you’re younger, trying to stay with the trends and have long, beautiful hair.”
How do menopause and aging affect relaxed hair?
Hair damage from relaxers isn’t exclusive to people in their 50s and older. However, the negative effects of chemical straighteners can become more pronounced with age. “As women get into menopause, something called miniaturization happens,” says Yolanda Lenzy, MD, a board-certified dermatologist in Massachusetts. “It’s when the hair follicle gets smaller.” She explains that it occurs due to the large drop in estrogen and progesterone that happens during menopause. The result is sparser hair. Add relaxers into the mix, and your hair can appear even thinner. “Relaxers break disulfide bonds in the hair, causing curls to become straight, but when you’re already experiencing thinning, perming your hair is going to lead to decreased hair density,” she says. “So even though you have the same amount of hair, perming it can make it look less full as opposed to if you had it natural.”
Richards recalls experiencing exactly what Dr. Lenzy described: thinning hair caused by a combination of the natural miniaturization process and her continued perm appointments. Wiley, too, found that as she aged, her hair changed. It became drier and more brittle, and suddenly, the relaxer that she’d gotten for years without issue no longer felt compatible with her hair. “I did not have this beautiful, long, flowing, relaxed hair. My hair was very, very short, and it was broken and damaged.” Eventually, she had to ask herself, “Why am I even doing this?”
Dr. Lenzy explains that hair density isn’t the only thing that can change with age. “I’ve definitely seen textural changes that come with aging and menopause,” she says. “If you had very coarse hair in your younger years, that’s now becoming fine and looser in texture, you could run into some issues if you continue to relax your hair.” Dr. Lenzy adds that the main risk of continuing to relax natural hair that’s becoming finer and looser in texture is loss of density.
