The little mistake that cost me 2 years and 6 bottles of scalp serum.
Eliza R.
Verified customer · 52 · San Diego, CA
I have stood in this robe in front of this mirror 1,000 times. Thursday was the first time I cried.
Nothing happened. That's what scared me.
Same robe. Same water still running down my back. Same 6:40 in the morning.
I'm 52. I was ready to look older.
Nobody warned me I'd look sick instead.
I looked up and there was a woman in that mirror I had never met.
My hair was wet. My part had gone wide and pale. The skin at the front was catching the light.
I stood there with the water dripping off my elbows and I thought, where did I go.
They warn you about the sweats. The 3am wake ups. The moods. Fine. I made peace with all of it.
Nobody warns you that one morning you will not recognize your own face.
So I started managing it. That's the word. Managing.
I haven't worn my hair up in 3 years. I look best with my hair up. I know that. I do it anyway.
If someone lifts a phone above my eye level my whole body goes hot before I even smile.
I skipped my own birthday dinner in October. I said I was tired. I was not tired. It had rained that afternoon and I knew what rain does to my part and I couldn't sit at a table while 8 people looked down at the top of my head over candles.
That was the week I finally made an appointment.
My doctor looked at my scalp for about 10 seconds and said hormones, very common, try not to stress.
I sat in the parking lot afterward with the engine off for a while, feeling like I just asked a stupid question.
So I started asking around instead.
Everybody has the same piece of advice. Just use minoxidil. Just get the foam. My friends said it.
I wouldn't touch it. And I had a reason.
My sister Sandra started it 4 years ago.
Week 3, her hair started coming out. Not a little. Handfuls. In the shower, on her pillow, on the back of her sweater. She called me crying at 11 at night and I didn't know what to say to her.
They call it the dread shed. Apparently it's normal. Apparently you're supposed to push through it.
And then the other thing nobody says out loud. She can never stop. She asked her dermatologist what happens if she quits and he told her, honestly, that it goes back. Maybe worse. She is 54 years old and she is signed up for a bottle on her bathroom shelf for the rest of her life.
I watched all of that from the front row.
So no. I was not going to make myself look worse on purpose for something I could never put down.
I went to the hair aisle instead.
I spent 2 years there. Shampoos at 40 dollars. Masks. Rosemary oil. Castor oil, which made me look unwashed for 2 days. Biotin every single morning for 9 months. A supplement at 79 dollars a month for a full year that gave me nothing but a headache and a subscription I forgot to cancel twice.
And 6 serums. 6.
Droppers, sprays, the fancy amber glass one. Every night. Parted, dripped, massaged in, exactly the way the box said. Then 10 minutes with a towel on my shoulders waiting for it to dry enough to lie down.
Two years of this. I kept the receipts for a while, then stopped.
Now here's where it turned.
In February, Sandra dragged me to a med spa for a facial for her birthday. I didn't want to go. I sat in the chair like a lump.
The woman working on me was named Renata. She had this little vial she was running along my cheekbone. It felt like somebody pressing a cool stamp on my face. I remember being almost annoyed that it didn't feel like anything.
I asked her, mostly to be polite, whether it was worth it or just fancy.
And she said something so ordinary I haven't been able to put it down since.
She said, we stopped bothering with droppers years ago. Skin is a wall. You can rub a serum on top of a wall all day. It has to be carried in or it does not go in.
Skin is a wall.
I got in the car and I didn't turn the radio on. About 4 minutes into the drive it hit me so hard I pulled over.
My scalp is skin, and I had been standing at that sink every night for 2 years, very carefully, very hopefully, putting expensive liquid on the outside of a wall.
I got home and put my reading glasses on and applied my serum the same way I do every night, except this time I actually paid attention.
The serum was not on my scalp.
It was sitting on my hair. Beading on the strands. Running sideways. One drop made it all the way down to my eyebrow.
I tipped my head and watched the rest of it leave.
I did it right every night. And it was never getting in. Not because I was doing it wrong. Because there was no way in.
I was up until 2 in the morning. Then 3.
And nobody lied to me. That's the part that gets under my skin. It's worse than lying.
Everything for your head is sold in the hair aisle. And that aisle gets judged on exactly one thing. How your hair feels afterward when you touch it.
So that's what they build. Slip. Shine. Silk under the fingers.
And a scared woman touches her hair. Constantly. I did it every single night. It felt soft and slick and I told myself that was proof something was happening.
They know exactly who is standing in that aisle. It's full of women like me. Women too frightened of the shed to try the real thing, holding a bottle, needing it to feel like it's working.
I wasn't buying a treatment. I was buying the FEELING of trying. For 2 years. At 40 dollars a bottle.
That left me with a new question.
Say I could actually get something into my scalp. What would I even put in there.
There's a copper peptide called GHK. It isn't exotic and it isn't invented. It's already in you. It's in human blood plasma and they've been studying it since 1973.
By the time you're in your 50s, about 60 percent of it is gone.
Read that again. 60 percent.
Your body did not fail you. Your body did not quit because you did something wrong. It quietly ran low on something it used to have plenty of, at the exact same time everything else was changing, and nobody mentioned it.
At 3 in the morning it finally fit together, and it was so simple I felt stupid.
There's something my body used to have and doesn't have enough of anymore.
And it went missing in my scalp.
Which is the one place nothing I own has ever been able to reach.
I called the spa the next morning at 9 and asked for Renata. I have never done anything like that in my life.
I stood in my kitchen and asked a woman I'd met once, for 40 minutes, whether the little stamp she used on my face came in a version for your head.
She said, yes. We don't do scalp here. But that's not new. Nobody does the part with a dropper anymore. And you can do it yourself, at home, in about 5 minutes.
She said don't buy a roller. Everybody buys the roller. It catches your hair, it drags, and when you're done you're still standing there rubbing serum on top of your head. Same problem. Extra step.
She said get the kind where the serum comes down through the head itself. So it goes in at the same moment. That's the only thing that matters.
I asked her what she points people to when they ask her.
She told me. I made her spell it twice. I ordered it standing at my kitchen counter with wet hair.
2 years. I had been 5 minutes and one honest sentence away from this the whole time, and not one person in that aisle was ever going to tell me.
That's all it is. Tiny points that open temporary channels in the skin and carry the serum down through them, instead of leaving it on top to run off.
Along the part. The crown. The temples. The exact 3 places I've been managing with lighting and hats and camera angles for 3 years.
Watering the leaves versus watering the roots. That's the whole thing.
If you're rolling your eyes right now, good. You should be. I rolled mine too.
I ordered it anyway because worst case I get my money back, and I've already thrown away a lot more than that on things I couldn't return.
So let me be straight with you, since nobody else has been with me.
It isn't minoxidil. There was no shed. There was nothing to get through, and no bottle I'm chained to for the rest of my life.
It isn't fast either. I finally noticed after 2 months.
And it is not going to hand me back the hair I had at 30. Anyone who tells you otherwise is the same liar in a nicer bottle.
What it is, honestly, is the easiest thing in my bathroom. Twice a week. 5 minutes. My hair is dry when I put my head on the pillow. After 2 years of nightly grease, that alone almost made me cry.
And what happened was much smaller than I wanted and it mattered 100 times more.
I got ready one Tuesday with the ugly light on and I did not check.
I just did not check.
I was in the car before I understood what hadn't happened. And I sat in the driveway and cried, except this time it was the other kind.
I wore my hair up at my son's rehearsal dinner in May. First time in 3 years.
I'm in every photo from that night. Not behind the camera. In them.
If you've been standing at your sink putting something on your head, quietly wondering whether any of it is reaching where it needs to go, that is not you being crazy.
That is the most accurate thought you've had all year.
You were right the whole time.
Go see what it looks like to put it where it actually goes.
That's all I needed somebody to do for me.
Disclosure
This is an advertorial. Her experience is her own. Hair thinning has many causes and results vary from person to person. Most women who use the kit see no change in the first several weeks, and some see no change at all. Nothing here is a promise of any particular result for you.
The Lanarie Micro-Infusion Kit is a cosmetic product. It is not a drug, it is not minoxidil, and it is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease or medical condition, including hair loss. Statements on this page have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. If your hair is thinning, talk to a doctor or a dermatologist. Sudden or patchy shedding can signal a thyroid, iron or hormonal issue worth having checked.
Not for use on broken, irritated or infected skin, or over moles, cysts or active breakouts. Do not share the applicator head. If you are pregnant, nursing, taking blood thinners, or being treated for a skin or scalp condition, check with your doctor before use. Stop use and speak to a professional if irritation persists.
