Every year, around the same time, the searches spike. The nights draw in, the heating goes on, and suddenly there's noticeably more hair in the shower drain, on the pillow, wrapped around the hairbrush. If you've found yourself wondering whether winter is making your hair fall out, you're asking a genuinely sensible question, and the answer is more interesting than you might expect.
Seasonal shedding is real, and it's measurable
This isn't folklore. Studies tracking hair cycles across the year have found that a larger proportion of hair follicles enter their resting and shedding phase, known as telogen, during certain seasons. For many people, shedding peaks in autumn, which then shows up as visibly more hair fall through late autumn and into winter.
The leading theory connects it to summer. Through the brighter months, more of your follicles stay in their active growing phase, holding on to hair that would otherwise have been released. Those hairs are effectively kept on an extended lease. When the season turns, the lease ends, and a wave of them is shed at once. So the hair you're losing in November was, in a sense, borrowed time from July.
It can feel alarming because it arrives in a clump rather than spread evenly. But for most people, seasonal shedding is the hair cycle doing exactly what it's designed to do, on a schedule that happens to be bunched up rather than smooth.
How to tell seasonal shedding from something more
Here's the crucial distinction, because it decides whether you can relax or whether it's worth acting.
Shedding is hair falling out. It's temporary, it's diffuse (spread across the whole head rather than concentrated), and the hairs that fall are generally full, healthy, terminal hairs. Seasonal shedding is this. It settles on its own within a couple of months as the cycle rebalances.
Thinning is different. Thinning is hair coming back finer each time, or not at all, concentrated in specific areas: a widening parting, receding temples, a thinning crown. This is the signature of hormonal hair loss, and unlike seasonal shedding, it doesn't resolve by itself.
The quick test: look at what's actually falling. Lots of full-length, normal-thickness hairs, spread evenly, that eases off after a few weeks? Most likely seasonal. Lots of short, fine, wispy hairs, concentrated at the parting or hairline, that doesn't settle? That points to something ongoing and worth addressing.
When winter shedding is worth taking seriously
Seasonal shedding becomes worth acting on in a few situations:
It doesn't settle after two to three months and keeps going into spring.
You can see your scalp more clearly than you used to, under normal lighting, not just winter overhead lights.
The loss is concentrated at your parting, temples or crown rather than evenly across your head.
It's layered on top of thinning you'd already noticed before the season turned.
In these cases, the season may simply be amplifying an underlying pattern that was already there. Winter didn't cause it, but it made it impossible to ignore, which is actually useful: the thing that finally gets people to act is often a seasonal shed sitting on top of a slow-burn problem.
The winter factors that make it worse
A few genuinely seasonal things pile on top of the natural shedding cycle:
Vitamin D drops. In the UK, sunlight between roughly October and March is too weak for your skin to make meaningful vitamin D, and low vitamin D is linked to increased shedding. This is a big one, and it has its own article in this series.
Central heating and cold air dry everything out. Dry scalp and brittle hair mean more breakage, which reads as more loss even when your follicles are fine.
Winter stress and illness. A nasty flu, a bout of Covid, or a genuinely stressful period can trigger a temporary shed (telogen effluvium) that kicks in two to three months later. A rough December can quietly become a February shed.
What actually helps
If it's purely seasonal, the honest answer is patience and good basics: eat well, manage the dryness, support your vitamin D through winter (via your GP, diet or a dedicated supplement), and let the cycle rebalance.
But if the shedding has pulled back the curtain on underlying thinning, that's a different job, and it's worth doing regardless of the season. Hormonal thinning is driven largely by DHT, a hormone that gradually shrinks sensitive follicles. Addressing it means supporting your hair on that pathway from the inside.
Our Hair Growth Softgels are built around two ingredients studied on exactly that mechanism: saw palmetto, studied for its ability to help reduce DHT levels by up to 30%, and pumpkin seed oil, the subject of a 2014 published clinical study in which men with hair thinning taking 400mg daily saw a 40% increase in hair count over 24 weeks. They're combined at those research-matched doses.
A note worth making: because hair cycles are slow and winter shedding resolves on its own anyway, the only way to know whether a supplement is genuinely helping is to give it a proper run. Four weeks tells you nothing. Judge at month three to four, by which point you're also through the natural seasonal dip.
The reassuring bottom line
For most people, more hair in the drain as the weather turns is your hair cycle behaving normally on a bunched-up schedule, amplified by a handful of genuine winter factors. It typically settles by spring.
The time to look closer is when the pattern is concentrated rather than diffuse, when it doesn't settle, or when it's sitting on top of thinning you'd already clocked. In those cases, the season did you a favour by forcing the issue. Take the hint, rule out the simple causes like low vitamin D and iron, and if the pattern points to hormonal thinning, start supporting it properly rather than waiting for a spring that won't fix it on its own.
(Saw palmetto is not suitable during pregnancy or breastfeeding. Speak to your GP before starting any supplement if you take regular medication.)