Do You Have 'Ozempic Hair'?

Beauty

Written by: Kylie Gilbert

Published on: May 29, 2025

Hypothesis and Emerging Research

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Some early observations support this concept (or parts of the theory), and there is scientific interest in elucidating exactly what’s at work.

“After a facelift, patients would be like, okay, my painting is beautiful, but where is my frame? What do you recommend for hair?” says Benjamin Paul, MD, a double-board-certified facial plastic surgeon and a leading expert in hair restoration. “And then I realized this is something that is deeply important to women.”

Hair loss, thinning, and shedding are also incredibly common: “Up to 50 percent of women will deal with hair loss in their lifetime,” Paul says. “It’s a huge, huge, number. Every other woman is dealing with this.” At the same time, most women don’t know which products or treatments are actually worth their time and money—especially since the root cause of the issue could be anything from hormonal changes to stress, weight loss, or simply getting older, he says. “When they come into me, there’s just this unloading of their experience and emotions—it’s so tied to their identity—but there’s so many options now, which is so exciting for women.”

For Paul, that also means business is booming. In his Upper East Side practice, many busy patients are opting to combine a hair transplant with another procedure (such as an eyelid lift)—restoring the painting and the frame in one trip to the OR. For those unprepared to go under the knife, Paul also offers noninvasive treatments that can help with hormonal hair loss, including a newer ultrasonic technique called the Alma TED that uses low-frequency sound waves and air pressure to deliver topical growth stimulants deep into the scalp. “It was totally painless and I feel like my hair is a bit thicker since I did it,” Gwyneth says of the procedure.

Ahead, Gwyneth sits down with Paul to discuss the many causes of hair loss in women and which treatments—from supplements and PRP injections to cutting-edge hair transplant techniques—can truly make a difference.

A Q&A with Ben Paul, MD

Why is hair loss so common?Is it supposed to be this common? And is there always a correlation between aging and hair loss for women?

As women get older, there are certain hormonal events and shifts that occur in the body that make hair loss a little bit more present and visible. For example, after childbirth and after menopause, women see a lot of shedding and hair loss.

And some of it’s just getting older—our skin ages and so does our hair. For example, the diameter of the strand miniaturizes. That’s the term we use to describe this hormone-related hair loss that so many women deal with, that leads to a shorter and thinner hair shaft.

Most women are going to have an element of what’s called androgenic alopecia, which is a very fancy term for female pattern hair loss. Often, the hairline is maintained, but they see a widening of the part. They see their hair caliber thinning and maybe some shedding involved. And, often, there’s also a little triangle thinning in the front. So, in that situation, I’m looking to modulate hormones, specifically lowering DHT [dihydrotestosterone, a naturally occurring hormone that causes hair loss].

So, how do you approach hair loss generally—do you believe in starting with supplements, for example?

The simplest way to think about your hair as a general concept is, am I having an issue where I have hair that’s not growing well, but it’s still alive? Or do I need more hair in an area that no longer grows hair? An analogy would be a garden: Does the garden need fertilizer or does it need more plants?

So let’s start with the fertilizer options. Supplements are kind of providing the nutrients for hair to grow. So if your diet is severely deficient or, from a biology standpoint, your body doesn’t allow you to uptake certain things—for example, certain people cannot process biotin—they absolutely need biotin supplementation. But if you’re growing hair with our modern diet, you likely have an abundance or too much biotin—and supplementation on that particular vitamin isn’t going to do anything for you. It all comes down to what’s the root cause of the hair loss. So every visit, every time I’m meeting with a patient, as I’m talking to them, I’m saying, where exactly have you been on this journey, and what have you tried?

Some of the best supplements out there are products like saw palmetto, which are foundational to vitamin supplements, such as Wellbel. I’m also interested in stress hormones. Cortisol turns out to have a really negative impact on hair, and it can be lowered with Ashwagandha and curcumin, a turmeric extract. Having a full complement of your usual B vitamins, B12—these are also important. And lastly, cystine is a really important nutrient for hair, and oral Minoxidil helps boost levels of cysteine—one of the key amino acids that supports hair growth.

I know certain issues like dysbiosis in the gut can impede nutrient absorption—is that a concern for hair loss as well?

It’s still in the earliest stages of research, but everything’s pointing to that it is relevant. It’s probably not the only thing that matters, but if you’re having a problem there, it absolutely can contribute.One of the most extreme examples that I see often now is with semaglutide, like Zepbound or Ozempic. There’s so many benefits to those weight loss drugs, but they’re seeing shedding and hair loss with it. It’s not just Ozempic face—it’s now also Ozempic hair. [Editor’s note: The first study linking hair loss to GLP-1 drugs, including semaglutide, was recently published based onanecdotal reports, case studies, and reports to the FDA of hair loss.]

Hair is one of the fastest growing structures. And people are having such slow gastric transit and they’re reducing all of the uptake, so they’re not seeing their normal nutrients. So sometimes in this case we’ll use IV injections—it’s a huge cocktail of very, very good multivitamins—to get their body back into a state where it’s recognizing that it has all the nutrients it needs to grow hair. It reduces shedding and it’s helpful for growth—sometimes patients will need it about once a month while they’re taking [weight loss drugs] just to keep things regulated.

As you discussed, there’s female alopecia and then there’s shedding. Can you explain why shedding happens?

It can happen for a number of reasons. Hair has a life cycle. It grows for five to seven years and then it falls out. It’s normal for us to lose 50 to 100 hairs a day, but in the shower with long hair as a female, even three hairs can seem like a lot—especially if you’re not used to seeing or losing any. And so sometimes you’ll go through a moment where more of your hairs are sort of synced up, and it’s a shedding moment.

Sometimes shedding can be seasonal. We are still animals. October’s like national shedding month as we head in towards winter. And then sometimes there’s life stresses and events that cause our body to kind of fritz out—shedding can be the physical manifestation of emotional stress. You can lose a loved one, you can go through a major surgery and anesthesia, weight loss—you can have all of these impactful moments that present as hair loss, that’s called telogen or shock loss. And usually, that more extreme shedding goes through phases where you have shedding, rest, and then regrowth.

I think that for women in particular, you wanna try to understand and look backwards to be able to predict what we should do moving forward. So if you’re like, yes, three months ago I had this major horrible thing happen, then [it could be a contributor]. If you can’t quite find the trigger, it may be valuable to do some lab testing to make sure that you’re not anemic, your iron’s not low, that your thyroid is good—there’s a bunch of other lab tests we can use to make sure there’s not an underlying medical reason.

If you’re experiencing more shedding than normal, what are your treatment options?

Assuming [there isn’t an underlying medical reason], and you’re experiencing shedding and it’s part of the timing of life, then we can start to try to stabilize things. Again, we can talk about supplements, or do a treatment like PRP, which is platelet-rich plasma where we take out your blood and centrifuge it and use the growth factors inside your platelets to help stabilize your hair. The other thing that we have that’s available is a laser called LaseMD Ultra, which uses a laser to generate a little bit of superficial trauma, which allows for penetration, and then there’s healing.

I tried PRP on my scalp at one point, and it didn’t really do very much—and you mentioned in my case it was probably because I didn’t have inflammation there. So, who is a candidate for PRP, and who’s not?

So PRP stands for platelet-rich plasma, which means nothing to most people. So, in your blood there are different cells: red blood cells, white blood cells, and platelets. We want the platelet because that’s the cell of healing. When you cut yourself, the platelets plug up the bleeding. They help you form that scab, and then they open up and release growth factors. So, we don’t even care about the platelet; we care about the protein, the growth factor. It really shouldn’t be called PRP; it should be called growth factor–rich solution. The growth factors exist to modulate moments of stress and trauma and inflammation. So, if I inject growth factors into your scalp, but you don’t have much inflammation, there may not be a target for it to latch onto. It may not do that much.

When we talked, I was convinced that there was more of a hormonal aspect, and that’s why I went with a treatment we now have using sound-wave energy called TED—and so far, it’s been a home run for you. If you’re dealing with inflammation, PRP may be very valuable, but if you’re dealing with strict hormonal-driven hair loss, the TED, or a different hormonally-driven treatment—which may be a pill or a topical—may be very valuable. And sometimes we do both.

How exactly does the Alma TED—the sound wave treatment I had—work?

It’s amazing and it’s relatively painless. It kind of sounds like you’re using an electric toothbrush. The sound energy creates small channels called acoustic cavitation. These channels allow the entrance of a complex medicines and vitamins—the proprietary serum is customized to you—to the scalp that would otherwise be blocked and couldn’t penetrate because the scalp is super thick.

I’m sure if we looked at your scalp under a microscope, we’ll see that it’s actually even growing thicker now out of the scalp. And it will be more stable. It won’t fall out as you play with it as much.

What about length? After I had kids and when I was younger I had really thick, long hair—and now it doesn’t grow as long as it used to grow.

Sometimes as the hair gets older, it’s a little different. When you were pregnant with your kids, your estrogen was super high so you’re probably going to see your hair be its best self. At this point you’re helping your estrogen situation, but it’s not going to be at the same level—because the influences on the structure of the hair itself are different. Just like your skin ages, as we said before, the hair ages, too.

At what point would you tell a woman they’re a candidate for a hair transplant?

If I’m looking at somebody, and I’m seeing the hair loss is pretty diffuse and the hairs are growing, but they’re kind of wispy, then it’s the garden that needs to be fertilized. Then we’re going to do supplements and TED and pills and everything except for a transplant. But if I look at you, and I see a lot of space in between your hairs, or there’s a patchy loss in the front, then I am going to suggest that we do a hair transplant.

For hair transplant in particular, I realized that there is such an opportunity for an elevated artistry. The hair transplant of yesteryear was moving clumps. I’m moving single strands and I can control the exit angle of each individual strand. So, rather than shave the whole head, I’m studying the exit angle of your individual hair, making a slit to match it so that way the new hair and your hair blend, and it’s familiar. Also, by not shaving the head, people have such limited downtime. They’re working from home the next day, it’s insane.

I have so many friends who are struggling with hair loss who don’t think that they’re candidates for hair transplants—why do people still think that?

In the beginning, hair transplants “didn’t work in women” is what people said. The way a hair transplant works is you take hair from the back, and you move it forward—those back hairs have different genetics and, when they’re moved in front, they keep their genetics, and they grow for life. Those are the donor hairs; we can extract them now in a way that’s invisible. You would never know that we were back there.

I do about 200 of these hair transplants a year. And—knock on wood—I’ve never had it not work. It definitely works. You just have to be very thoughtful in how you use a limited resource because what you do take out from the back won’t grow again back there.

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