What Happens to Relaxed Hair During Menopause?

30.05.2026, 02:34 allure.com

“I’m just going to cut the rest of it off.” These words looped through Susan Wiley’s mind as she sat in the salon chair, working up the courage to finally part ways with her relaxed hair. The 60-year-old had permed her hair every six weeks for 30 years before realizing that chemically straightening her hair had become a time-consuming and self-imposed obligation. “I was so exasperated with having to go to a salon and spend my whole Saturday waiting on hairstylists that were running late,” she says.

As Wiley entered menopause and experienced the hot flashes, hair-thinning, and other physical symptoms that come with it, her straightening treatment—once a moment for pampering—became an exhausting chore.

Susan Wiley in 2025, wearing her natural hair.

Like Wiley, many Black women in their 50s and beyond reach this same breaking point and choose to ditch their relaxer. Brendnetta Ashley, a hairstylist in San Francisco, has recently noticed this shift as her more mature clients have started going through menopause. With the hair changes that often come with it, “they didn’t want to put any extra stress on the hair like getting a relaxer or using harsh chemicals,” says Ashley.

Facing the physical realities of aging, these women are going natural in response to what their hair is already going through, and it requires unlearning decades of messaging about what is acceptable for Black hair.

Robin Richards’ big chop was more spontaneous when, at 55, she “just got up from the kitchen table and went upstairs and chopped it.” Richards was tired of scheduling hair appointments every few weeks, ultimately letting go of the ritual when she learned of reports linking chemicals commonly found in relaxers to cancer. She’s been natural for four years now.

While many millennial and Gen Z Black women embraced their natural texture during the YouTube-driven natural hair movement of the early 2010s, older Black women were often left out of the cultural conversation. The faces of the movement, from the models fronting natural-hair campaigns to the content creators filming wash-day tutorials, were overwhelmingly young—women like Chizi Duru, who is now 30; Whitney White, now 40; and Shaneice Crystal, now 31.

Richards vaguely remembers seeing messages on social media around 2016 about Black women embracing their natural hair. “I was pleased that wearing our natural hair was being more accepted,” she says—but she wasn’t heavily involved in or influenced by the discourse.

As the Black community is on the verge of another natural hair movement, older women are finally entering the conversation and sharing their experiences. We spoke to four Black women over 50—Wiley, Richards, Avvi Forcer, and Marie Randall—who went natural later in life. For these four women, parting with the comfort and familiarity of straight hair required more than a social trend—it would take a deeply personal desire to return to their most authentic selves.

For many Black women, going natural wasn’t simply a matter of trying a new style. It required unlearning decades of messaging that framed straight hair as more professional, manageable, and ultimately more acceptable. All four women we spoke to said they had considered going natural earlier in life, but limited product options, a lack of education around caring for natural hair, and the social pressures tied to straightened styles often kept them from making the transition sooner.

For Wiley’s generation, straight hair wasn’t simply about aesthetics; it was often tied to social survival. Raised during the early years of integration following the Civil Rights Movement, many older Black women learned to view straightened hair as a way to navigate predominantly white schools, workplaces, and social spaces more safely. “For women my age who grew up back in the ’80s, our hair was not celebrated at all; everybody had a relaxer back then,” says Wiley, who was raised in a predominantly white neighborhood in Maryland. “My hair didn't look like my friends’ hair. So all of those things painted this negative picture that I carried all the way into adulthood,” Wiley says.

Many millennial and Gen Z women—including myself—explored going natural in college as part of the common self-discovery that comes with leaving home. This was during the beauty boom on YouTube during the 2010s, where there was a rise in service-driven beauty tutorials on the platform. Many of us saw wash days as an opportunity for pampering and experimentation with the different hair products and styles that our favorite YouTube creators were touting.

Black women in Gen X, however, had a different experience. Wiley recalls that during her high school and college years, Black women didn’t have nearly as many styling options as they do now, and there weren’t tutorials to guide them through the process (YouTube launched in 2005 when these women were in their 40s). Braids, silk presses, and similar styles weren’t “really a thing.” Your hair was either relaxed or worn in its natural texture—and the latter wasn’t very common. Richards, who began relaxing her hair at 13-years-old, echoes this. “It was easier for it to be relaxed; that way, it could just be washed and put in a ponytail,” she says.

Susan Wiley with relaxed hair in 2012.

When these women graduated from college, the pull to conform to Eurocentric standards didn’t subside—if anything, it intensified. They faced pressure that influenced not only how they styled their hair but also how they presented themselves in the workforce. “Being in corporate America, you always just wanted to stay mainstream,” says Richards, who works in the medical field. “You didn't want to bring any attention to your hair or the fact that it was different.” This was before the CROWN Act—a piece of legislation designed to prohibit workplace discrimination based on hair texture—was established, so women of Richards’ generation really felt that wearing their natural hair to work wasn’t an option.

Wiley faced a similar dynamic in her career. “You get so used to this idea of code-switching and trying to present yourself in a way that is acceptable to other people,” says Wiley, noting that relaxers became such a part of her identity that the idea of wearing natural coils to work felt intimidating.

The pressure to conform didn’t always come from outside the Black community, though. As the saying goes: “It be your own people.” Avvi Forcer experienced this firsthand 13 years ago. She was 43 and wearing her natural hair at a family member’s wedding. “Everyone had relaxed hair,” she explains, adding that she felt uncomfortable because her hair made her feel like she wasn't “dressed up” enough.

Two years later, she got an invitation to attend another wedding with the same group of family members. This time, she chose to relax her hair before the festivities. “I always loved the natural look, but I wasn't so grounded in myself, so I gave in and got a relaxer,” she adds.

A few years after getting a relaxer, scalp dermatitis drove Forcer to go natural again. This time around, she had more confidence—and the look stuck. She’s now 56 and has not used a relaxer since.

Like Richards, Marie Randall, 59, also went natural at 55. Her decision to do so, though, was part of a much larger emotional reset. Randall got her first perm at seven years old and consistently relaxed her hair for nearly five decades. After losing her mother in 2021, Randall took time away from work to focus on her mental and physical health. Cutting off her relaxed hair was a part of that reset. “I did the big chop myself, before I went into a salon,” she says. “The next day, I looked in the mirror, and I had all these beautiful curls—really short but really beautiful,” she says.

Marie Randall after her big chop in 2021.

Before her big chop, Randall had already scaled back her relaxer touch-ups to twice a year instead of every few months. As a result, she began noticing more of her natural texture peeking through at the roots than ever before, which made her realize she didn’t actually know what her natural hair looked like.

Having started on relaxers as children and teenagers, the four women we spoke to spent decades disconnected from their natural texture. Eventually, curiosity became reason enough to meet that version of themselves again. Wiley, Forcer, Randall, and Richards also found that age came with less regard for what people thought about them. “As I was approaching menopause and all these physical changes, I got really tired of performing for people. I just decided to present myself as who I naturally am,” says Wiley.

Richards relates to this desire to be unapologetic in her later years. “I used to always tell my son, when I turn 60, I'm going to chop all my hair off, and I'm going to color it blonde and buy me a convertible,” she says. “Because when you get older, you don't have to fit in. You're more accepting of how you look and how you feel, versus when you're younger, trying to stay with the trends and have long, beautiful hair.”

Hair damage from relaxers isn’t exclusive to people in their 50s and older. However, the negative effects of chemical straighteners can become more pronounced with age. “As women get into menopause, something called miniaturization happens,” says Yolanda Lenzy, MD, a board-certified dermatologist in Massachusetts. “It’s when the hair follicle gets smaller.” She explains that it occurs due to the large drop in estrogen and progesterone that happens during menopause. The result is sparser hair. Add relaxers into the mix, and your hair can appear even thinner. “Relaxers break disulfide bonds in the hair, causing curls to become straight, but when you’re already experiencing thinning, perming your hair is going to lead to decreased hair density,” she says. “So even though you have the same amount of hair, perming it can make it look less full as opposed to if you had it natural.”

Richards recalls experiencing exactly what Dr. Lenzy described: