“For a very long time, I hid my alopecia areata. It was my shameful secret, and the fewer people aware of it, the better I felt. Except, I wasn't feeling that good. Alopecia had taken too much of a negative place in my life. I felt different from other women. I told myself that people were going to find me ugly or that they would love me less, because of this partial absence of hair. I was setting up a lot of stratagems to hide it. ⁠Then, I realized that I was not the only one carrying such a secret. And I wanted that to change, I wanted women to stop living with this taboo of hair loss. That's why I started @hellopecia on instagram, and today, I live more freely with my alopecia. I manage to embrace it, I now manage to find myself beautiful with it. My shameful secret has become my strength, and if I can inject a little of that strength into other people by showing myself as I am on social media, it's a great pride. I have no doubt that having access to more images of women losing their hair would have helped me when I was younger. We all need to see people who look like us, to identify ourselves, to feel represented. Especially as a teen, you really realize your body and its differences. I wouldn't have been ashamed of losing my hair if I had seen other women whom it happened to on TV, in magazines, or in commercials.