My hair is falling out and the strands that are falling out are tapering at the ends, why?

I get a lot of questions from hair loss sufferers about shedding hairs that have tapered tips. Questions about hair with tapered ends are just as common as questions about loose hair with white bulbs at the root. People often look at both sides of your loose hair for clues. And many people assume that the tapered tips and white bulb may be significant in terms of indicating the cause of hair loss or the state of its recovery.

I heard someone say, “I know this is going to sound weird, but I examine a lot of my loose hair. And I can’t help but notice that most of it is tapered on the end. Why is that the side away from the bulb?” does it come to a tapering point? What does this mean? Does it mean something in terms of why my hair is falling out or does it mean I’m not recovering?”

There are many theories about the possible reasons for the tapered tips on your fallen hairs. One possible reason is that the hair with the tapered ends is hair that has not yet been trimmed or cut. When you go to your barber and cut your hair, the scissors will make the hair blunt at the ends where it has been cut. Therefore, hair that has been cut (and it is likely older hair) will not be tapered, but rather blunt.

In this case, the person who wrote said that most of what he was seeing falling was hairs that were tapering and this generates another set of possibilities. You would have to ask yourself if it had been a long time since you had a haircut or if it was possible that you were experiencing hair loss conditions like chronic telogen effluvium or androgenic alopecia where you were going through regrowth.

You see, when you have chronic teleogen effluvium, your hair can go through a few cycles of falling out, trying to grow back, and then falling out again before the trigger that started the hair loss is the first place to be removed for that normal hair cycles can start again. So that’s a possibility.

Another possibility is androgenic alopecia. There is a theory that the sebum that builds up with this condition prevents hair from growing, and therefore those pronounced sharp ends are evidence of that process. Many describe these types of ends as having almost a little round bulge on the end. You can literally feel them if you run your hand through the shaft of your hair. This looks (and feels) very different from tapered hair that has never been cut or even the ends of hair that is affected by telogen effluvium.

It may be helpful to look at the length of these worn hairs. If they’re short, it’s likely either regrowth that’s cycling due to shedding, or your scalp can’t support your new growth (as is often the case with androgenic alopecia).

Finally, here is one last consideration. Some hairs that have been affected by an autoimmune hair loss condition called alopecia areata produce what are called exclamation point hairs. These hairs also have tapered tips, but I must tell you that this disorder is relatively rare, and often the hair loss is patchy rather than diffuse. Therefore, there can be many reasons for tapered ends, including: hair that remains uncut; that is in the part of its life cycle that is shedding: or hair that is falling out prematurely due to different hair loss conditions.