I spent years looking for this. So I built it.

I did gymnastics for more than twelve years. It was not a hobby. I lived it and I breathed it — all of my childhood, all of my teenage years, and into adulthood. It was not something I did. It was who I was.

It ended in a burnout, around the time of COVID. The kind where your body simply stops listening to you. Everything in me felt like it was failing at once, the body and the mind together.

At first it was mostly mental. Then, months later, the hair loss came — and the whole house of cards went down. It was the last straw.

I was frightened. I was ashamed. I was crying for help every single day. I remember coming out of the shower to my mother with my arms full of hair, sobbing. Look at this. I don't know what to do. I'm so scared.

I was sent to a dermatologist who specialised in hair loss. I was given minoxidil and put on spironolactone. My hair loss did not stop.

Minoxidil actually made the shedding worse at the beginning — far worse — and nobody had warned me that would happen. Nobody explained what was happening to me. Nobody told me what to do. Nobody said a single word about my diet. Nobody gave me anything complete. I was more than old enough to understand all of it, and it was never offered.

Minoxidil did eventually slow the loss. It is designed for androgenetic alopecia and female pattern hair loss, and it does what it does. But my hair never stopped falling, because the reasons underneath were never touched.

I was living in survival mode. Fight or flight, constantly. The anxiety took over more of my life than I like to admit — there were days I did not go to school because of it. And the hair kept falling. Every time life got harder, it fell faster.

Every blood test came back fine. Ferritin fine. Vitamins fine. And I was not fine.

I bought serum after serum and supplement after supplement. I want to be clear about this, because people assume otherwise: I did not give up on things after two weeks. I stayed on them for months. They did not work. Sometimes I thought I saw an improvement. Sometimes all I got was irritation and side effects.

There were other things too. My stomach was awful. I was bloated all the time. I had acne. But the hair frightened me most — my skin would flare and settle again, and cutting out sugar helped it. I noticed that helped my hair a little as well. Nothing stopped it.

Years passed like this. Other parts of my life moved forward and this one did not. I had bare patches on my scalp. I had genuinely accepted that I was going to live the rest of my life with alopecia, and probably bald.

Then, in my final year of university, late at night, I was scrolling on TikTok and someone mentioned an ingredient I had never heard of. Saw palmetto. I started reading, and I could not stop.

Saw palmetto and pumpkin seed oil have both been studied for the enzyme that converts testosterone into DHT — the androgen that makes sensitive follicles produce finer, shorter hairs with each cycle, until eventually they stop altogether. That is the mechanism behind female pattern hair loss. Nettle root has been studied on the same pathway. None of it is in a standard hair vitamin. None of it had ever been mentioned to me by anyone.

It was supposed to help with androgenetic alopecia — which I did not know I had.

Nobody had ever given me the word. And without the word, you cannot search. I had spent years typing hair supplement into a search bar, when every kind of hair loss is different, and almost nothing that came back was for mine.

The thing that finally helped me was never hidden. It was just never put in front of me.

I learned that saw palmetto works better alongside pumpkin seed oil and nettle root. I learned which deficiencies actually matter. I put it together myself, and I took it for months.

For the first three months, nothing. Then, somewhere around month three or four, for the first time in years — the shedding decreased.

But I was ordering all of it from the United States, more than a hundred euros a month, and buying men's prostate pills to get the right ingredients. There were always customs charges. Parcels went to the wrong address or got stuck somewhere, and I would be left with gaps between bottles. It was expensive and exhausting, and I kept thinking: why is something that works this well simply not available here?

By the end I was taking a whole shelf of it — saw palmetto, pumpkin seed oil, nettle root, ashwagandha, tocotrienols, vitamin D3, iron, zinc, selenium, biotin, a B-complex, horsetail, marine collagen, myo-inositol and D-chiro-inositol, vitamin C, hyaluronic acid, and the amino acids lysine, cysteine and methionine. Every one of those is in Saede now, at the amounts I found actually mattered.

It held for about a year. Then life became hectic again, I could not wait on a shipment from another continent, and I ended up with a gap of two and a half months. My hair started falling again. Increasingly. After everything I had done.

When I finally settled in Madrid I ordered it all again — and the shedding was worse than it had ever been. It broke something in me for a while. It affected my mental health far more than I let anyone see.

But this time was different, because this time I knew there was hope. I had proof. I had watched it work once already. There was still fear, and there was still a great deal of frustration, but underneath it there was something I had not had the first time.

While I waited for the parcels, I kept researching. A doctor had raised the possibility that I had PCOS, and I want to admit something: I was relieved. I was almost excited. Finally a name. Finally something they could treat.

Then I found out there was essentially nothing on offer. Lifestyle support — which I already had. I have been active and healthy my whole life, I look after what I eat, I do not eat sugar. Beyond that, the answer was hormonal birth control, and I had read enough about the side effects to be frightened of it.

That is when I came across myo-inositol and D-chiro-inositol.

Inositol is not a hormone and it is not a drug. It is a nutrient your body already uses in the signalling that governs how cells respond to insulin — which is why it is the most-researched nutritional ingredient in women with PCOS, studied for insulin sensitivity, blood sugar and hormonal balance. And because androgens, insulin and hair all sit on the same system, it mattered to me in more than one way. The research uses the two forms together in a 40 to 1 ratio, which is the proportion found in the body.

So I completed my own protocol. I cut sugar almost entirely. I treated myself like a diabetic patient. I went close to keto, low carbohydrate, to stop my blood sugar spiking — even though my blood work already looked fine, and even though not one doctor had ever suggested any of it.

I took control into my own hands, with everything I had learned. And this time it was better, and it was faster.

My hair loss stopped.

That was the moment I understood I was holding something. Not a supplement I happened to like. An idea, and an innovation, that other women deserved to have.

Because women deserve to know there is something for female pattern hair loss. For androgenetic alopecia. For hormonal hair loss. I spent years believing there was nothing — and I was wrong, but only because nobody ever told me.

So my partner and I built the thing I had spent all those years assembling by hand: two products, everything I had found to work, at the amounts that made it work.

I am still on this journey, and I think I always will be. Androgenetic alopecia is not something you finish. It is something you learn to understand, and to keep under control.

I want Saede to reach as many women as possible — to make you feel less alone in it than I was, and to give you hope. Because there is always hope.