Is my hair shedding or breaking? How to tell the difference

The test: look at the root end

Pick five or six hairs out of your brush or off your clothes. Take them to a window or a bright lamp. Hold each one so you can see both ends, and look at the end that was attached to your scalp.

A shed hair has a small pale swelling on that end. It is about the size of a pinhead, softer in colour than the rest of the hair, and sometimes see-through. That is the base of the hair that sat inside the follicle. A shed hair is also close to the full length of the hair on your head, because it grew for years before it let go.

A broken hair has nothing on either end. It is shorter than the hair on your head, sometimes much shorter, and the ends look blunt, split or frayed. If you pull a handful out of your brush and most of them are four centimetres long when your hair is forty, you are looking at breakage.

Most people have some of both. What you are measuring is the ratio. If nine out of ten hairs carry a bulb, your problem is shedding. If nine out of ten are short stubs, your problem is damage, and the guide to split ends and breakage is a better use of your time than any supplement.

What shedding actually is

Every hair on your head runs a cycle, and the cycle is long. Cleveland Clinic describes a growing phase that lasts two to seven years, a short transition of about two weeks, and a resting phase of up to four months that ends when the hair falls out and the follicle starts again.

Because your hairs are not synchronised, a small share of them is always at the end of that cycle. The American Academy of Dermatology puts normal shedding at 50 to 100 hairs a day. You never see those hairs arrive in a tidy daily count. They collect in your brush, on your pillow, in your hood, and above all in the shower, where water and your fingers release everything that had already detached and was sitting loose among the hairs around it. Wash every third day and you see three days of shedding at once. The rate did not change. The viewing did.

Shedding becomes a real event when something changes in your body. The same source lists the usual triggers: childbirth, major stress, high fever, surgery, serious illness, large weight loss and stopping birth control pills. Cleveland Clinic adds thyroid problems, protein-poor diets and some medications, and notes that the shedding tends to start two to three months after the trigger and lasts three to six months, with people losing up to 300 strands a day instead of 100.

That delay is the part almost nobody is told, and it causes a lot of wasted effort. The shedding you are seeing today was set in motion by something that happened in the summer. Whatever you changed about your shampoo last week did not cause it and will not stop it.

What breakage actually is

Breakage is mechanical. The hair you can hold has no blood supply and no living cells, so it cannot heal anything that happens to it. Every hot iron, every bleach touch-up, every comb dragged through wet hair and every tight elastic leaves a small amount of wear that stays there until you cut it off.

The American Academy of Dermatology's list of habits that damage hair reads like most people's normal week: rubbing shampoo into the length of the hair rather than massaging it into the scalp, combing or brushing while wet, drying by rubbing with a towel, heat styling more than once a week, tight styles that pull, and chemical services spaced too close together. Their own advice is to use the lowest heat setting, aim for heat tools once a week or less, wrap hair in a towel to absorb water instead of rubbing it, and wear hair loosely pulled back.

None of those habits snaps hair on its own. The problem is that they stack. Bleach thins the outer layer, heat drives water out of a weakened strand, a wet brush stretches it while it is at its most fragile, and an elastic holds the same point under tension for ten hours. The hair gives way at the weakest spot, which is usually somewhere in the middle, and you get a short stub with no bulb.

Where each one shows on your head

Shedding spreads evenly. The hair comes away from everywhere, your parting looks the same width as it did last year, and the change you notice is overall thickness: a thinner ponytail, a smaller handful when you gather it.

Breakage clusters. It shows up where the damage is concentrated: around the face, where the hair meets heat tools most often; at the back of the crown, where a ponytail sits; at the ends, which are the oldest part of the hair and have been through every wash you have ever done. The American Academy of Dermatology points out that the ends are the oldest and most fragile part of your hair, which is why they recommend coating them with conditioner at every wash.

There is a third pattern worth knowing, because it is neither of these. Pattern thinning concentrates at the parting, the crown or the temples, and it gets wider over months rather than settling. If your parting is spreading, stop troubleshooting your routine and see a doctor, because the treatments for pattern hair loss work better the earlier they start. The guide to shedding and thinning covers how to tell those apart.

New growth is not breakage

Short hairs standing up along your parting confuse almost everyone, because they look exactly like snapped ends. There is a way to tell. New growth tapers to a soft, fine point, because that is how a hair starts. A broken hair has a blunt or frayed tip, because it was cut off by force.

If the short hairs on your parting taper, they are the recovery you have been waiting for. Resist the urge to flatten them with product or hide them, and do not add heat to the area to blend them. They need length, and length needs months.

The fix for breakage

Breakage is the problem you can change this week, and the changes are unglamorous.

Cut heat to once a week or less, and use the lowest setting that gets the result. Stop brushing dry hair at the roots when it is tangled at the ends, and work bottom-up with a wide-tooth comb instead. If your hair is curly or textured, comb it damp rather than dry; if it is straight, let it dry partly before you touch it. Blot with a towel or a cotton shirt instead of rubbing. Loosen every elastic until it stops leaving a dent. Space bleach or relaxer touch-ups eight to ten weeks apart rather than monthly, and do one chemical service at a time.

Then accept the part people dislike: the damage already on your head does not go away. Conditioners and masks coat the strand and make it behave better, which is worth doing, but they do not rebuild it. The broken length has to grow out or be cut off. Hair grows about a centimetre a month, so a plan measured in seasons is the honest one.

The fix for shedding

Shedding asks a different question: what happened to your body about three months ago?

Work backwards through illness, surgery, a fever, a birth, a crash diet, a medication change, a stretch of poor sleep and sustained stress. Often the answer is sitting right there, and knowing it is most of the treatment, because shedding from a single past event resolves on its own as the body readjusts.

Where it does not resolve, the usual suspects are iron, thyroid function and protein intake, and those need a blood test rather than a guess. Supplements bought without a test are the single biggest waste of money in this category. If the shedding has run past six to nine months, if your parting is widening, or if your scalp is sore, scaly or painful, that is a doctor's appointment rather than a shopping list.

Why people treat the wrong one

The reason this mix-up is so common is that the hair in the sink looks identical either way, and almost every product on the shelf is sold as an answer to both. A mask cannot slow shedding, because shedding happens below the skin where nothing you apply reaches. A supplement cannot mend breakage, because the broken hair is already dead. Buy the wrong one and you get six months of no change, which most people read as their hair being beyond help.

If you cannot tell which one you have after looking at the root ends, that is worth getting a second opinion on, and your own photographs are the fastest way to do it. The Kurli AI Specialist reads three photographs of your own hair, front, a small turn to one side, and the top of your head, alongside four tapped questions, and writes back a reading of your hair type, texture, density, scalp and damage, the one change to make first, wash-day steps with the reason for each, what to do between washes, a seven-day calendar, ingredients to look for and avoid, and a plain note when something belongs with a doctor instead. It is one payment, with no subscription, and it is not medical advice.

The thing to hold onto is that these two problems live in different places. One is a cycle running under your skin, on a timetable set months ago. The other is wear on something that cannot repair itself. Treat the cycle with patience and a blood test. Treat the wear by stopping it.