I've Been a Hairdresser for Over 15 Years. Here's Why I Created a Hair Supplement for My Clients
The Pattern I Kept Seeing in the Chair
I've been doing hair for over fifteen years. I've worked in salons, built a client base, trained other stylists, and spent more hours than I can count with my hands in people's hair. You notice things when you do this job long enough.
What I noticed - particularly over the last five or six years - was a pattern that troubled me. More and more women were coming to me with the same quiet concern. Not something they'd necessarily announce when they walked through the door, but something that would surface during a consultation, or sometimes just in how they sat in the chair.
Their hair had changed.
Not dramatically. Not in a way that was always obvious to anyone else. But they could feel it. The ponytail that used to sit thicker in the hand. The parting that had started to sit differently. The amount of hair left in the shower on a Tuesday morning. The way the light caught their crown at the wrong angle in a photo and they'd think - when did that start?
These weren't women in their sixties. Many were in their thirties and forties. Some were postpartum. Some were navigating the early stages of perimenopause. Some were just exhausted - running businesses, managing households, absorbing the pressure of modern life in a body that was quietly keeping score.
And almost all of them had already tried something. A supplement. A shampoo. A serum someone had recommended online. They'd spent money, given it a few weeks, and seen nothing that felt like a real change.
The Supplement Question I Couldn't Answer
The question I kept getting was some version of: "Is there actually anything I can take that will help?"
For a long time, my honest answer was unsatisfying. I'd talk about what I knew from the salon side - protein treatments, scalp care, avoiding heat damage, the importance of not over-washing. All true, all useful. But I knew, in the way you know things from years of experience, that for a lot of these women, the issue wasn't at the surface.
Hair health isn't just a styling problem. It's an internal one. And I didn't have a supplement I could recommend with any real confidence - because most of what was on the market didn't make sense to me when I started looking at it properly.
So I started looking at it properly.
What I Actually Learned About Hair Supplements
I spent a considerable amount of time - with a lot of help from my co-founder, who brought the nutritional science side - going through what was actually in the supplements most people were buying. Not just the ingredient names on the front of the packet, but the actual forms those ingredients came in, the doses, the supporting nutrients, and whether the formulations made any logical sense from a biology standpoint.
What I found was frustrating, but also clarifying.
The vast majority of hair supplements on the market are built around a handful of ingredients that most people already associate with hair - biotin being the obvious one - at doses that sound impressive, in forms that the body often struggles to use effectively. The marketing leads with promises. The formulation rarely justifies them.
There's nothing necessarily dishonest about this. Biotin does contribute to the maintenance of normal hair - that's well established. But biotin alone, in a formulation that doesn't account for absorption or the broader internal environment hair depends on, is unlikely to address the reasons most women are actually losing hair in the first place.
And if I'd spent fifteen years seeing the same women, understanding their lives, listening to their concerns - I knew what those reasons were. Stress. Hormonal shifts. Nutritional gaps that don't always show up in a standard blood test. An internal environment that had been quietly depleted over time.
The Real Problem: It's Not Just the Ingredients, It's the Forms
One of the things that surprised me most when I got deeper into this was how much difference the form of a nutrient makes - not just whether it's present, but whether the body can actually absorb and use it.
Take zinc. Zinc contributes to the maintenance of normal hair, and it plays a role in supporting normal hormonal activity too. Most supplements use zinc oxide, which is inexpensive and ticks the label requirement. But zinc bisglycinate - a chelated form where the zinc is bound to the amino acid glycine - is considerably better absorbed and gentler on digestion. Same nutrient, meaningfully different outcome in the body.
Or vitamin B6. Standard supplements use pyridoxine, which your liver has to convert into the active form your cells can use. That conversion process is inefficient in a lot of people - particularly those under stress or with certain nutritional patterns. Pyridoxal-5-phosphate, known as P-5-P, is the active form directly. It skips the conversion step entirely. Vitamin B6 in this form contributes to the regulation of hormonal activity - relevant not just for hair, but for the hormonal environment that hair cycling depends on.
This wasn't obscure biochemistry. It was well understood. But it wasn't showing up in the products most of my clients were spending money on.
What Hair Actually Needs Internally
Here's something worth understanding about hair, because it changed how I thought about the whole problem.
Hair grows in a cycle. There's an active growth phase - called anagen - where the follicle is producing a strand. Then a short transitional phase. Then a resting phase, called telogen, where the old strand sits before it sheds and the cycle begins again. In a healthy head of hair, the vast majority of follicles are in the growth phase at any given time.
When thinning happens, what's often occurring is a shift in that ratio. More follicles spending longer in the resting phase. Fewer actively producing new growth. The shed hair isn't being replaced at the same rate it's lost. And the triggers for that shift are almost always internal - hormonal changes, nutritional depletion, stress responses, reduced circulation to the scalp.
Which means that no amount of topical product is going to address the root cause. Serums and shampoos have their place - I'd never suggest otherwise. But if the follicle environment isn't being supported internally, you're working at the surface of a deeper problem.
Iron, for example, contributes to normal oxygen transport around the body - including to follicles. Vitamin C contributes to increased iron absorption - which matters, because iron in the wrong form or without adequate vitamin C alongside it is poorly utilised. Iodine contributes to normal thyroid function, and thyroid changes are one of the most common and most overlooked drivers of diffuse hair changes in women. Zinc and biotin both contribute to the maintenance of normal hair through different pathways. These aren't isolated facts - they're a connected picture of what healthy hair cycling depends on internally.
You can read more about how perimenopause affects this internal environment, or why stress is such a significant trigger for shedding, in the Anavive blog - both are worth understanding if you recognise yourself in any of this.
The Decision to Build Something Properly
After months of research - reading clinical data, working with my co-founder on the nutritional science, and being honest about what I couldn't recommend from what already existed - I made a decision. If the product I'd want to put in front of my clients didn't exist, we were going to have to build it.
That meant starting from the outcome we actually wanted to support, and working backwards to the formulation. Not starting with a cost target and filling the capsule from there. Not choosing ingredients for their marketing appeal. Every choice had to have a clinical rationale, a bioavailability rationale, and a safety rationale for daily long-term use.
It also meant being realistic about what a supplement can and can't do. Hair changes that stem from an underlying medical condition need medical attention - a supplement is not a replacement for that conversation. But for the large number of women whose hair has shifted due to stress, nutritional gaps, hormonal transitions, or the general toll of modern life? Giving the body the right internal environment, in forms it can actually use, made a great deal of sense to me.
I'd spent fifteen years watching women leave my salon feeling slightly defeated about their hair, not knowing what to do next. I wanted something I could point them to with genuine confidence.
Is This for You?
Anavive is not for everyone, and I mean that genuinely. It's for women who are ready to approach their hair health seriously - who understand that real change comes from within, takes consistency, and requires a formulation that's actually built for the outcome.
It's not a gummy. It's not a single-ingredient fix. It's not built around a marketing claim. It's built around the same question I asked myself at the start: if I were going to recommend something to a client I'd known for ten years, what would it actually need to contain, and why?
If you're at the point where you've tried the obvious options and you're ready to look at the internal picture more seriously, you can find out more about Anavive here. There's no hard sell. You'll either recognise it as the right fit, or you won't - and if you're not sure, the blog is full of genuinely useful reading regardless of whether you ever buy anything.
Fifteen years in, I'm still learning from the people who sit in my chair. But I can finally answer the question properly. Yes - there is something you can take. And I'd only ever say that about something I believed in enough to put my name to.