Ricki Lake says seeing her hair grow again has given her her “life back”.
Ricki Lake
The 52-year-old actress revealed last year she has been battling with hair loss for around 30 years, when she shared an Instagram picture of her freshly shaved head after deciding to give up on keeping the struggle a secret.
But after shaving her hair, Ricki started noticing that the new hairs which came through were much healthier than before.
She said: “It has given me my life back. And I know those are big words, but honestly, anyone that’s suffered with this knows what I’m talking about. It takes over your life. Every time you walk past a mirror, every time you run a brush through your hair, anytime your boyfriend wants to grab your hair and pull it, every time you’re in the shower, it consumed me.”
Ricki’s battle with hair loss began after her starring role as Tracy Turnblad in the original 1988 ‘Hairspray’, where she had to tease and triple-process it every two weeks while filming.
And the actress said she soon began to lose “clumps of hair” every day.
She added to Us Weekly magazine: “For Hairspray, it was all my own hair and I love it but that set the stage for the quality of my hair being damaged. It was worth it, because that was the part that made me famous and put me on the map, but it definitely did take its toll. I had noticeable, oh my God, clumps of hair in the shower. It was traumatic.”
Meanwhile, Ricki recently said she felt “shame” amid her battle with hair loss, because she didn’t think she could talk about the subject without being ridiculed.
She said last month: "I went back and forth about coming forward last year. It's such a shameful thing. I was afraid of coming out. Because no woman as far as I knew had ever gone public about female baldness."
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