By Salem Wynter, Cosmetic Scientist and Trainee Trichologist
Regrowing your edges is like trying to regrow something you have carefully removed from your garden.
If that is where you are right now, be gentle with those areas. Fragile edges should never be styled tightly. Leave them loose for at least twelve months. I know that is a long time. But if you are willing to change how you style your hair for a year, that is the single most useful thing you can do.
Here is the part most brands will not tell you. If the follicle is still alive, hair can come back. If the follicle has closed, it will not — and no shampoo, oil or serum on earth will change that. Nobody selling you something wants to say that out loud. I would rather you heard it from me.
So the honest answer to “can I regrow my edges” is: sometimes. It depends on what happened, and how long it has been happening.
First, the bit that matters most
Please see a GP or a registered trichologist if any of this sounds like you:
- Your hair is coming out suddenly, or in patches
- Your scalp is sore, painful, tender or tingling
- The skin where the hair has gone looks shiny, smooth or scarred
- You are losing hair from more than just your hairline
- It started after an illness, a medication change, or something you cannot explain
None of those are things a haircare routine can sort out, and waiting costs you time you may not get back. Nothing on this page replaces a proper examination.
Still here? Good. Let us talk about the everyday kind.
Why edges thin in the first place
Two different things look identical in the mirror.
Breakage. The hair is still growing, but it is snapping off before it gets anywhere. Around the hairline this is by far the more common of the two.
Shedding or loss. The hair is leaving from the root, and less is coming back to replace it.
Telling them apart matters, because the fixes are completely different. Breakage is about handling. Loss is about what is happening underneath.
Five things cause most thinning hairlines, and four of them are within your control:
Tension. Tight braids, tight ponytails, wigs glued or clipped in the same spot, the same parting for years. Your hairline is the finest, most fragile hair on your head, and it is the first to give up under pulling.
Friction. Headwraps, hats, cotton pillowcases, the constant rub of a wig cap.
Relaxers and chemical processing. Especially along a hairline that has already been through something.
Products and tools. Stiff edge controls with high alcohol content, hard-bristled brushes, the little toothbrush used every single morning.
Stress on the body. Illness, surgery, birth, grief, crash dieting. This one is not a styling problem, and it usually shows up six to twelve weeks after the event that caused it — which is why almost nobody connects the two.
How long does it take?
Longer than you want. Hair grows roughly a centimetre a month, so even in the best case you are looking at months, not weeks, before you see anything meaningful. And you will not see it at all until you have stopped doing the thing that caused it.
That is the order. Stop the cause first. Everything else is second.
Working out your cause
Think back. When did you first notice it?
Did you change your style? Start wearing wigs? Have a baby? Get relaxed? Start a new job with a headwrap or a hard hat? Switch products?
Usually the answer is there if you go back far enough. Once you have found it, your job is to give that area a proper rest. If wigs or weaves have been your everyday, try something loose and uncovered for a while — a flexi-rod set, a twist-out, anything that lets your scalp breathe and leaves your hairline alone.
What we can actually do about it
Root2Tip does not treat, cure or reverse hair loss. No shampoo does, and if a brand tells you otherwise, be careful with them.
What we do is look after the soil.
Think about it this way. A gardener cannot make a seed grow. What a gardener can do is clear the weeds, water the ground, and make sure nothing is in the way. Then, if the seed is viable, it has its best chance.
Your scalp is the ground. A scalp that is not itching, not flaking, and not caked in product build-up is a scalp that is not working against you. That is the whole job, and it is worth doing properly.
Keep it clean. Gel, edge control and oil build up along the hairline more than anywhere else, and build-up sits there irritating skin that is already having a hard time. Wash properly with a gentle, sulphate-free cleanser — our Stimulate & Cleanse Shampoo is formulated for exactly this, with aloe, ginger and plant proteins, and it will not strip what is left.
Keep it comfortable. Grow-it-Long Serum was made for scalps that will not settle. I formulated it with natural sulphur after my own seborrhoeic dermatitis got worse on something a GP prescribed. It is a scalp product, not a growth promise. A comfortable scalp is not a guarantee of anything, but a permanently inflamed one is a problem worth solving.
Can a follicle really come back?
This is the part that gives people hope, and it is worth understanding properly.
Your hair follicle is one of the very few organs in the human body that regenerates itself over and over throughout your life. It grows a hair, rests, sheds it, and starts again. That is not damage. That is the design.
Which is why traction alopecia is not automatically the end of the story. If you catch it while the follicle is still cycling — before the tension has gone on so long that the follicle scars over and closes — the machinery underneath is still there. Take the tension away, and it can get back to doing what it has always done.
The window is the whole thing. Caught early, there is something to work with. Left for years, there may not be. That is why I would rather you acted this month than next year.
What about oils and nightly massage?
Here is where I can be more specific than most brands are willing to be.
On massage. In a 2016 study, men who massaged their scalps for four minutes a night saw a measurable increase in hair thickness over twenty-four weeks. It was a small study — nine men — so hold it lightly. But the researchers found two things happening at once: increased blood flow to the area, and a direct mechanical effect on the dermal papilla cells sitting underneath, which changed how those cells behaved. Their words: stretching forces result in changes in gene expression in human dermal papilla cells.
Worth noting what it did not find. Hair thickness went up. Growth rate did not. So massage is not speeding anything up — it appears to be changing the quality of what grows.
On rosemary. In a six-month randomised trial of 100 men, topical rosemary oil performed comparably to 2% minoxidil on hair count, and the rosemary group reported slightly better results on reduced hair loss. That trial looked at androgenetic alopecia rather than traction, so I will not pretend it is a direct read-across to your edges. But it is a real trial, published and peer-reviewed, and it is a good deal more than the anecdote it is usually dismissed as.
So what does that mean for you? A few minutes of gentle nightly massage along your hairline, with a scalp oil as the medium, is a genuinely reasonable thing to do. It increases circulation to the area, it applies the mechanical stimulus those researchers were measuring, and it takes four minutes.
Our Root Energizer Oil is built for this — rosemary and lavender with Amla and Brahmi, in a base designed to sit on the scalp rather than the strand. Grow-it-Long Serum is the one to reach for if your scalp is also itching or flaking, because an inflamed scalp is its own obstacle.
Neither is a treatment for hair loss, and I will not sell them to you as one. What they are is a sensible thing to do nightly while the follicle does the part only it can do.
Do it gently. An area that is already fragile does not need vigorous rubbing.
Protecting what you still have
While you wait, look after the hair that is there.
Keep the moisture up, because dry hair snaps. Deep condition regularly. Handle your hairline with your fingers, not a brush. Swap a cotton pillowcase for satin. Take the headwrap off at home.
And if you find yourself reaching for the edge control every morning to lay down hair that is barely there, consider stopping. That daily routine is often part of the problem rather than a way round it.
Where this leaves you
Thinning edges are frightening, and they are frightening partly because they are so visible. That is real and I am not going to talk you out of it.
But a thinning hairline is not automatically permanent. For most people it is a handling problem, and handling problems can be changed. Take the tension off, look after the ground, be patient for longer than feels reasonable, and give it a proper year.
And if something about it does not feel right — if it is sudden, sore, patchy or spreading — go and get it looked at. That is not giving up. That is the sensible first move.
Your hair is a plant. Let us look after the soil.
Salem Wynter is a cosmetic scientist and a trainee trichologist studying with The Trichological Society. She is the founder of Root2Tip, the author of Your Hair Is A Plant: The Hair Loss Black Book, and was the Hair Agony Aunt for Black Beauty & Hair Magazine. Eighteen years formulating for Afro and textured hair, handmade in London.