I’ve interviewed women about their relationship with their hair for my podcast with the Future Dreams charity, And Then Came Breast Cancer. Again and again, women told me the same thing: it was nothing to do with being vain.<\/p>\n
Nicky Elkington, a hairdresser, told me she was determined not to lose her hair when going through chemotherapy. “It’s not a vanity thing\u2026 and I think people think that, but it’s your identity and I didn’t want to look like I had cancer,” she says.<\/p>\n
For her, the worst thing anyone could say to her was, “It’s only hair, don’t worry about it”.<\/p>\n
School nurse and mother of two, Natasha Anderson, said she loved messing about with her hair while growing up – “one week having a big afro, then having hair extensions,” she remembers.<\/p>\n
“It wasn’t just hair, it was my culture.”<\/p>\n
Faced with the prospect of losing it through chemotherapy, she asked her brother to shave it off for her.<\/p>\n
“I felt liberated when it was being shaved,” she says. “I had taken control of the situation\u2026 it was more painful and upsetting seeing it just falling out.”<\/p>\n
One of the hardest parts of cancer is how little control you have over any of it – the diagnosis, treatment, or the side effects. For some women, choosing to shave their hair before it falls out becomes a way of taking back a semblance of control in their life.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I’ve interviewed women about their relationship with their hair for my podcast with the Future Dreams charity, And…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":620181,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-620180","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/620180","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=620180"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/620180\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/620181"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=620180"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=620180"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=620180"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}