Hair loss story echoed with many
Becoming an influential voice on social media, glamorous Mullingar woman Lauren Egerton tells Eilís Ryan that she has battled both weight and hair loss issues and that you don't need to break the bank to look good
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In her bid to keep things real, and not just Insta-fake perfect, Lauren Egerton has spoken bravely about the impact her weight loss has had on her hair.
Initially, with clever photography, she hid her weight issues from her followers: “So everybody would probably think, from the outset, that I looked fine, that I’m in a great shape, or that I'm in a great place, mentally. And I said, ‘enough is enough: if I'm going to continue on social media, I can't hide the reality’.
“So I randomly came out one day, and put up - on my story on Instagram - me talking, and I said: ‘just by the way, nobody knows this, but I lost a lot of weight last year, and nobody knew. Because I hid myself, I was embarrassed, I was ashamed of how I looked, and I didn't want anybody to know’.
“And I said, 'I'm just letting you know the long and the short of it is, that social media can be fake'.”
Lauren got lots of feedback from people going through a similar struggle, with some admitting they were “stuck”.
“So, I had started posting a few videos on TikTok, talking about just being able to help somebody and thinking: ‘if I sit here and I tell you my story, you might feel benefit from it, or you might feel good from it’.
“The more I spoke about it, the more people wanted to know.”
One thing she had not shared with them was the fact that the weight loss had impacted on her hair: “I was coming online and I was making my videos with clip-in extensions because when I nearly got to my target weight, I noticed my hair falling out.”
That came as a shock, because during Covid, Lauren had succeeded in getting her hair to a really healthy state and it was long.
“But all of a sudden it started to fall out and I ignored it for a long time and it kept falling out and it was really bringing me down at the time. And I didn't know what was happening, what was going on, but I completely hid away; completely and utterly hid away from the fact that my hair was falling out.”
Now, she wears semi-permanent extensions, and has been told that the hair loss was effectively, her body going into shock: “It’s almost like the having a baby. Your body's going into shock. I lost so much weight so quickly – even though I did it the natural or the healthy way and it didn't come down to binge diets or any of that.”
There is hope that her hair will recover, but in the meantime, Lauren is happy to discuss the problem, in line with her aim of letting people know that glamorous shots on social media aren’t always giving the true picture.
Weeks on from that video, Lauren is still getting messages from people revealing that they have been through the same thing.
“I didn't actually realise how common it was until I said it. Once I said about hair loss, everybody else was kind of saying, ‘it's exactly what happened to me’ and they appreciated that I was actually saying it instead of hiding it.
“I think that that's the way that social media should be: it shouldn't be all about the perfection, it should be…we should all look to find our tribe.”