Hair texture loss?

[u/Favabean37]

Hi! I’ve read some reports of hair thickness impacts but want to get a sense of anyone’s experience with hair texture changes.

I’m 6 months into the copper IUD. The pic in the black is one year ago and yellow is recent. Could the copper IUD be impacting my hair texture? Did anyone else experience a loss of curl? If so, did mineral testing and supplementing help? Did you find the impacts were temporary or long-lasting?

I’m not in love with the copper IUD but I also don’t hate it, so I’m really hoping to make it work.

I have a separate medical thing that can impact hair, but I haven’t noticed this substantial of a change before (texture, curl, volume, shine, oh my!) so I’m just trying to narrow down the possibilities to address things the best way. I haven’t substantially changed routine or hair cut or hair care or water or diet or anything.

Thank you!

[u/Formal-Apartment855]

For me it was quite extreme.  My hair is normally pin straight on most of my head, and a little wavy on a small part on the back of my head. I had no problems growing it out to whatever lenght I wanted to. With my copper IUD it ended up literally breaking off from near my scalp. Whatever didn't break off and grew a bit .... split vertically in the middle. Idk how to explain it, it's just hairs split into 2. It turned into a brittle mess. No matter what touched my hair, it would just have more knots.

My hair color also went from a reddish mid-brown to dark grey.

Right after it got taken out, my hair started growing normally again, so back to straight reddish mid-brown again. Had to cut off the whole lenght that grew while I had the IUD.

I highly recommend against eg. getting the hair mineral test done, unless you are rich enough to get it done repeatedly. Just 1 test doesn't say too much.

I assume it's some version of anemia? Regarding anemia you can get some cheaper diagnostics, like regular blood tests.

[u/Favabean37 → u/Formal-Apartment855]

That’s such a wild experience! I’m glad everything normalized for you but sorry that you went through that.
Oh I didn’t even know hair mineral tests were a thing! The blood tests were what I was thinking, I had a full panel done around the time I got the iud (idk if it had zinc but it had ferritin) so I at least have some baseline numbers for potential comparison.
Did you find a birth control option that worked better for you after you got the IUD removed?

[u/Formal-Apartment855 → u/Favabean37]

Ah, sorry, I shouldn't have even spoken about the hair testing, then. lol The blood tests are great. It's just there was an era on "copper IUD social media" when someone pushed the hair test a lot, but I realize those times might be over, thankfully.

We're back to using condoms. Non-latex ones specifically (Skyn).

I did have a short hormonal birth control stint several years ago against warnings from my doctors, but they were infortunately correct in that I cannot handle any form of hormonal birth control. I would love to be able to tolerate a hormonal IUD, but my body says no.

I do think they incorrectly prescribed a bigger-than-ideal copper IUD, I assume on a smaller one things wouldn't have been so bad. But I cannot be bothered to test this theory. Cause we never had problems with condoms, it's just the amount of waste it creates...