“I was once burned badly by a product that claimed to stop hair loss. It made me loose great amounts of hair in just a week’s time. I had nightmares from it.”

At the moment, she is taking a birth control pill whose properties seem to help her type of hair loss. She said the problem began when she was a young teen on a starvation diet, and as she went through two pregnancies and a course of antidepressants, her hair continued to get thinner.

“For a while, I thought I was going to go literally bald.” Now she is working on “being healthier, taking good care of my hair, and giving myself time to wait, wait, wait.”

It’s not easy in an unforgiving society. Men may have the likes of Sean Connery to look at as their hair disappears, but what about women? After all, Kobren said, “There are no great-looking balding role models for women to identify with.”

Joanne Kabak is an established free-lance writer. She has an MBA and specializes in health and business-related articles. She lives in Connecticut with her husband and two daughters.