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It’s the sort of thing an opinionated grandparent might tell a
grandchild wearing a hat indoors, but there are some who believe there’s
wisdom in the admonishment.
“I’ve had people ask me about this, and I can understand why they think
it’s true,” says Dr. Hayley Goldbach, a dermatologist at UCLA Health.
Some people start wearing a hat to hide hair loss, she says, which may
lead observers to conclude it was the hat-wearing that triggered the
baldness.
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That’s probably not the case. “I think the short answer is that [hat
wearing] is probably not a real concern,” Goldbach says.
“Genetics are the main player in hair loss,” says Dr. Michael Wolfeld, a
plastic surgeon specializing in hair restoration and assistant clinical
professor at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City.
Wolfeld says “male pattern” and “female pattern” baldness are both
initiated in part by an inherited genetic sensitivity to a hormone
called dihydrotestosterone (DHT), which turns up in the scalp as well as
other parts of the body.
Among people with this inherited sensitivity, hair follicles languish
and shrink in response to DHT. Popular hair-loss therapies such as
Propecia (finasteride) work by blocking the production of DHT, research
has shown.
That said, the causes of baldness are “multifactorial,” says Wolfeld.
The experts TIME spoke with agreed that pulling the hair back
severely—like in a very tight ponytail or in stiff braids—can create
tension that pulls on hair follicles.
“Over a period of years, that tension can cause hair to fall out,” says
Wolfield
Most people probably don’t wear a hat so tightly that it could create
this kind of tension, Wolfeld says.
Tightness is subjective, but if your hat is so tight that it’s leaving a
prominent mark or indentation in your skin, you may want to find a
looser lid.
“I think that if someone were to wear a hat very tight and for long
periods of time”—every day, for months or years in a row—“that could
cause some damage to the hair,” Wolfeld adds. That, in turn, could
promote hair loss.
“If the hat were too tight, I could see that causing irritation or
inflammation in the hair follicle,” Goldbach says. By itself, this
probably wouldn’t cause hair loss. But it could be a contributing
factor, she says.
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The materials used in a hat—the dyes or textiles, for example—could also
play into hair loss, says Dr. Adam Friedman, a professor of dermatology
at George Washington University.
“If a hat causes an allergic reaction in the scalp, that could cause the
hair to shed due to inflammation,” he says. If someone were already
going bald due to other factors, like a genetic predisposition, this
inflammation-induced shedding could speed up the process of hair loss,
he says.
In rare cases, wearing a hat while you sweat could also be a factor.
“The salts from sweat are physically irritating to the skin,” he says.
If you wear a sweat-stained hat all the time, this irritation could lead
to inflammation, which, again, could speed up the process of losing
one’s hair, he says.
But Friedman and other experts say that for most people, these are
unlikely to be serious risk factors. “In general, hats do not cause
baldness,” Friedman says.
What hats reliably do is protect the wearer’s scalp and face from UV
damage, which can in some cases lead to skin cancer, he says, and this
benefit is “more valid” than any concern that a hat may cause hair loss. |