About 5 years ago, Carrera Alvarez was going through a tough time. She was in the middle of a tumultuous divorce, and rather than letting her stress go, she found herself internalizing it, day after day. As her stress level intensified, so did other health problems. Taking a shower one day, Alvarez looked at the drain and was stunned by the large clump of hair she saw there.
But it wasn’t until Alvarez, 41, a hairdresser herself, was in another stylist’s chair that she learned just how much of her hair was gone. “The stylist said, ‘Carrera, your hair has changed so much, it’s very thin, and you’ve got patches missing,” recalls the Los Angeles native. “And I said, ‘What?’ Her advice you really need to figure out what’s going on made me realize how bad it was.”