Want healthier, thicker-looking hair? Start with your scalp.

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Ella Blaxill (0:41)

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Ellie Rashid (1:00)

Healthy hair really starts at the scalp level. So in order to have healthy, glossy flowing locks, you need to really look after your scalp health as well. Most of the time, if people are having problems with their hair growth or they're shedding too much hair, we normally have to consider other factors. So I always start with looking at someone's nutritional profile to really help to optimize their hair growth. There might be some partial small benefit from pumpkin seed oil. I think for people not to think that this is going to be the silver bullet that makes their hair grow luscious and long.

Hello and welcome to the After Hours Skin Clinic. Now, if you've been here before, you'll realize that I'm not with my right-hand woman, Dr. Emma Craythorne. I'm Dr. Ellie Rashid and I'm a consultant dermatologist with a PhD in regenerative dermatology. Right here is my favorite clinic, where we unpack the evidence, challenge the trends and answer the questions that don't necessarily fit into a 10-minute consultation. This is the other side of dermatology, the questions you want to ask your dermatologist, but don't have time. And if you don't have one, well, you do now.

Today's episode, we're going to be focusing on scalp health. And really the scalp is the most important aspect when we're thinking about our hair health. And what people often do wrong is in the pursuit of this perfect, glossy, gorgeous hair, they focus all of the attention on the hair itself. But if you want gorgeous, glossy, light reflecting hair, you really do need to place lots of importance on your scalp and your scalp health. And to help me with this episode today, we have our gorgeous producer, Ella, and she's going to be asking me some of the questions that we always get from our listeners and that patients will ask me in clinic all the time. So let's start with the basics.

Ella Blaxill (2:49)

So first question would be, what actually makes a healthy scalp?

Ellie Rashid (2:53)

So a scalp is essentially like the skin anywhere else on our body, but the difference is that we have so many hair follicles and a really high density of our oil glands. So it produces more oil than the skin elsewhere on our body.

And that sebum and oil build up and product build up on our scalp can mean that the scalp gets inflamed. And when the scalp gets inflamed, the hair follicles that are deeper down into our skin, so in the lower level of our skin, they don't tend to grow as effectively. So in order for the hair follicles to produce healthy hair, you need to have a healthy environment within which those hair follicles grow. So that's why we try to focus on our scalp health as much as possible, because scalp health really means healthy hair.

Ella Blaxill (3:44)

Okay, and so what's an unhealthy scalp? What would that look like?

Ellie Rashid (3:49)

I saw a very unhealthy scalp in clinic recently, and this was someone who had seen a few trends on TikTok. So he had curly hair. One trend was in order to maintain the curls, you need to not wash your hair.

In order to maintain healthy curls, you need to not brush your hair.

And in order to regulate the oil on your scalp, you need to not wash your hair.

So came in with matted hair on a very oily base. And I mean, the curls were intact, but the environment and the scale and the oil and the sebum and the debris had built up to an extent where the hair was not healthy. So a condition that we so commonly come across is this condition called seborrheic dermatitis. And seborrheic dermatitis is where you have an oily scalp and a yeast that naturally lives on all of us, on all of our scalps, called malassezia. It gobbles up this oil and sebum and it produces this byproduct. So it's a fatty acid byproduct. And that byproduct, some people can be sensitive to it. And it creates this inflammatory reaction. And that inflammatory response shows up as this scaliness of the scalp. And so it can be itchy because it's inflamed. You develop this dandruff or scale on the scalp. And people always equate scaling to dryness. So you think, oh, it's because my scalp is dry. That's why I've got this scale and dandruff. But actually it's because your scalp is oily. So in an attempt to try and address the dryness of your scalp, or what you presume is dryness of your scalp, you end up not washing your hair so often, because you're like, well, I need the oils and I'm just stripping it away. So you end up not washing your hair and then the oil just builds up and up and up and you can make the problem worse and worse and worse. So it's really important to differentiate whether you have a dry skin condition that might be driving the scale. So you might have eczema or psoriasis, or do you have this oil builder that's then driving this malicepsia and this byproduct that you're sensitive to that's giving you this scale. So that differentiation is really important for people to make.