Joanne Larby, aka The Make Up Fairy, has revealed her battle with hair loss.
The top blogger, who lives in London with her boyfriend Paul Standell, decided to open up about her “biggest insecurity” on her Snapchat story – and it was absolutely heartbreaking to watch.
“My biggest insecurity is how fine my hair is without extensions. I literally hide in my house when they’re out. I lost a lot of my hair when I was younger after an illness. It’s not something I ever speak about because it’s something that really upsets me.
“But to anyone who’s suffered from hair loss I know what it feels like! My ponytail may look ok there but it’s very fine on top and I’ve relied on hair extensions and pieces for as long as I can remember.”
“Everyone has a massive flaw or thing that hurts them about their appearance. To this day I haven’t been brave enough to share my hair but I hope to one day get over myself and maybe help another girl that’s suffering the same or disguising a flaw.”
After telling her followers about her fine hair, Joanne decided to talk to the camera in tears as she explained how her hair loss has affected her.
“So… I have to try and hold it together for these snaps. I’m completely blown away by the snaps I received. It’s one of those things that’s so vulnerable and personal to me, and it’s caused me such stress for so many years of my life and I wasn’t sure if I was actually ready to share it.
“I use a myriad of different products to disguise and mask my fine hair to the point that the average person would never ever notice. Only my nearest and dearest would ever see me in my natural state without extensions and the things that I use.”
Joanne then explained that due to getting recurring infections, her immune system was seriously affected and her hair started to fall out.
“I would say around that time I lost about 60% of my hair. At the time I went through so many different tests, so many different, doctors, my mum took me everywhere to try and see what we could do. I took herbal remedies, my mum used to massage oil into my scalp, I remember taking whatever it took to try and help.
“The general concesus with doctors was that as a result of my immune system being so stressed, that I developed a form of alopecia where your hair gradually thinned as opposed to falling out.
“My hair wouldn’t fall out in chunks on my pillow, it just gradually got thinner all along the top section, the back isn’t so bad, but the top section, the bit that everybody sees when they’re talking to you, was the bit that fell out.”
“Every single day I looked in the mirror and all I could see was my hair loss and the stress I had gone through over those few years, and I just forgot who I was and what I looked like and even to this day at least once a week I will cry over my hair because it’s all I can see.
“And in the bloody industry you have to be glamourous and have perfect hair, perfect nails and all this sort of s**t and I just felt like ‘how can I be in this industry when I’m hiding something so massive and so required?’
“Because I’ve hidden it for so long, my hair never got better, it just stayed to the level of thinness that it got to, sometimes it gets worse. Mine is very noticeable and sometimes I’ll get patches in areas of more tension and nothing has helped. There’s been no shampoo, no remedy, no tablet, no lack of stress, no happiness that has really helped.”
Joanne also revealed that she started to panic when people on her Instagram started asking if she was wearing a wig.
“I remember a couple of people commenting under photos a few months ago when I was wearing a hair piece saying ‘is that a wig, is that a wig?’ and just deleting them immediately because I couldn’t answer that with this sort of an answer, it was something I was planning on hiding for the rest of my life.
“But then I started to talk to Paul about it and wonder if I could help people one day and talk about what I’ve been through and just show that you can be glamourous and beautiful, but lose your hair.
“As a woman it’s just the worst thing in the world that can happen to you because I guess it just shows that you’re feminine. I remember Suzanne Jackson putting up snaps about her hereditary grey patch of hair and opening up about it and that she uses a hair powder.
“And I wanted so badly to say I use that hair powder too, but I use it to conceal my scalp, I dot a powder into my hair and I coat the thin areas and then I have extensions so that it’s just essentially hidden.
“I’m having a complete panic now where I just want to delete all those snaps and ask myself ‘what am I doing?’ but in a way maybe it will free me of hiding and masking such a big weight that I’ve carried with me for so many years,” she said through tears.
“Maybe I’m just taking control of it now and say ‘well f*** you hair loss’, nobody can really hold it against me now.
The blogger also recalled the time she told her boyfriend Paul about her hair loss.
“I remember the day that I told Paul about my hair and it was early on in the relationship and I had flown to London and I ran out of my hair powder that I used and I literally sat in his bathroom having a panic attack. I’d never talked about it with a boyfriend, I lived with somebody for four years and I never discussed it.”
“I’m sure he noticed, but I just got so used to hiding it, I mean I hid it from you guys for so long. And I remember when i told him I was so scared that he would look at me differently or see me differently and he just cried when I explained it to him, and explained how much he loved me and that my hair didn’t define me and that he wouldn’t care if I lost all of it.
“And to this day, if my extensions are showing or there’s a patch that’s showing and we’re out with friends or I’m on the tube he’ll very discreetly give me a kiss on the head and just hide it with his hand or put it back or text me back saying ‘babe, there’s a bit of your extension showing’.
“And at night time, he kisses my worst patches. And I remember some f**king eejit sending me a message saying, ‘Paul’s clearly just using you for followers,’ and I felt like saying if you only knew the behind the scenes of how he’s been about something that’s so horrible to me.”
After revealing her hair loss on Snapchat, Joanne took to Instagram and wrote, “Exposing my hair loss experience to thousands of people has genuinely been one of the most difficult things I have ever experienced.
“I have wanted to do it for so long but the constant insecurity left me feeling completely powerless. I wanted to vomit after posting my Snapchat story and I still have an overwhelming m anxiety telling me to take it down. But today I take control.”
