When War Lives Under the Skin: Early Graying and Vanishing periods

By Fatima Al Bassam

Airstrikes are not the only threat to women’s lives in times of war. There are things the camera cannot capture and the news does not mention: a body quietly fracturing, hormones thrown into chaos, heartbeats falling out of rhythm. Sudden hair loss, premature graying, disappearing menstrual cycles, and skin that screams on behalf of its owner are not minor or passing symptoms. They are a living archive of a war waged on the inside as much as on the outside.

In war, women’s bodies are not simply survivors. They are political spaces, charged with memory, and sites of both suffering and resistance. These silent symptoms, which rarely enter the narratives of war, are not secondary. They reflect a fundamental face of systematic violence against women. Chronic anxiety and continuous stress are not merely psychological states, but drivers of concrete biological disruptions that imprint themselves on hair, skin, menstrual cycles, sleep, and immunity.

These symptoms are no less serious than visible wounds, yet they are often neglected or dismissed as marginal because the camera cannot capture them, and because women’s bodies are so often reduced to symbols of fragility or sorrow rather than sites of struggle and documentation.

Hair loss and premature graying
Rana, who survived an airstrike that nearly took her life in the south, did not expect to lose a part of herself with every strand of hair that fell. She says that her hair is part of her identity, and suddenly it began to fall as though something inside her was collapsing. This collapse was not only the result of psychological pressure, but also of a constant sense of insecurity that reshapes the body at the cellular level.

Amani, in her thirties, searched for an explanation for her early gray hair, insomnia, and hormonal disturbances. She says that the fear is no longer of death, but of every sound that resembles it. The gray hair becomes a living marker that the body refuses to forget. Instead, it chooses to endure, resist, transcend, and challenge in its own way.

Zeina, a journalist, thought her experience and professionalism would shield her from shock. But her heart began to race whenever she heard the sound of a plane, and she felt the weight of events pressing on her heartbeat. She says she grew a gray hair in one hour. It sounds like poetic metaphor, but here it is a precise biological description of trauma’s effect.

The psychological and physical impact: an inseparable overlap
Psychological stress caused by war does not surface only as internal pain. It manifests directly in the body, especially among women and girls who live at the center of crises.

Rayan, who was not physically in the south, experienced the war through phone screens and television, through news about her besieged family. Yet she found that her body did not escape the effects of war. She says her face changed and her skin transformed as though her skin decided to bear witness to the war on her behalf.

The menstrual cycle can be significantly affected by continuous psychological stress. Irregular periods, delays, or complete absence can result from accumulated tension and suppressed emotions. Hormonal changes extend beyond monthly cycles to include alterations in skin, weight, and overall body sensations. Some women experience acne flareups or unexplained changes in body shape, generating intense anxiety.

Lack of health care for women
With no emergency health plan that addresses women’s needs during war, women’s bodies pay an enormous price. Who has the privilege to visit a doctor Who can afford treatment or even speak openly about pain In these questions emerges the class dimension of oppression, marginalization, and exclusion, present in every detail.

Between women who managed to leave the south for safer areas and those trapped without electricity, water, or medicine, the gap widens. Without analyzing this reality through a comprehensive feminist lens that considers class, geography, and gender, women’s suffering remains invisible despite its profound impact on mental and physical health.

Medical perspective: hormonal disturbances and other severe biological effects
Dr Gaelle Abu Ghannam, a specialist in women’s health, explains that in moments of chronic anxiety and stress the biological system becomes dysregulated and hormones are disrupted. She emphasizes that chronic stress caused by war affects not only mental health but also leaves severe biological effects. The body remains in constant alert, releasing hormones in ways that exhaust internal organs and weaken the body’s ability to repair itself.

She explains that hormonal imbalances directly affect menstruation, women’s fertility, and even skin and hair health. She notes that women’s bodies, especially young women’s bodies, respond very sensitively to violent environments, which can manifest as hair loss, hormonal disruptions, ovarian cysts, or even sudden cessation of menstruation. She adds that these physical symptoms are indicators of acute psychological changes that cannot be ignored.

Other consequences include delays in conception, sleep disturbances, sudden weight gain or loss, chronic unexplained pain, digestive issues, and other serious symptoms diagnosed in women who have lived through crises. These consequences cannot be treated as secondary signs. They are clear messages from bodies experiencing violence in all its forms. The body ultimately retains in its cells the traces of what cannot be spoken.

Psychiatrist Fadl Shhaimi explains that the body speaks when the psyche cannot. Many women who have lived through bombings or displacement suffer from clear physical symptoms that are sometimes misdiagnosed as isolated organic conditions detached from psychological or political context. He stresses the need to train medical teams to provide integrated psychological and physical care that takes the wartime and gendered context into account, avoiding fragmented or oversimplified diagnoses.

The medical perspective cannot be separated from the social and political context. Physical health is not merely biological. It is a direct reflection of environment, class position, social circumstances, and lived crises. When we fail to account for the impact of power, discrimination, and structural violence on bodies, especially women’s bodies, we reduce their pain to symptoms treated without addressing their roots.

Speaking about bodies is resistance

Speaking about these symptoms is not a luxury, but a necessity. Because the body is never neutral, every tremor in it, every pain no matter how small, is testimony to a system that sees women only as tools or as silent victims. When war is reduced to death and external destruction, the stories and suffering of thousands of women are erased from collective memory. Their bodies, shaped by wars and crises, have shifted from being private spaces to arenas of public struggle.

When our bodies shake, collapse, or fall silent, they record what we could not say. These silent recordings, from insomnia to menstrual disturbances, from gray hair to hair loss, are political documents in every sense. They are the cells’ protest against neglect, against violence, against the absence of care. They are the way our bodies choose to resist.

Resistance, practiced daily through self-care, is a feminist approach that demands recognition that women’s pain is not marginal but central to understanding violence in wartime. It is resistance that goes beyond survival and endurance, extending to archiving, storytelling, and speaking of the body as a living record of what cannot be said.

Because war does not unfold only on battlefields, women tell the stories of their bodies and speak of the deep marks left on them, raising their voices against a system that insists on keeping them in the shadows. Writing about the body and documenting symptoms that are insistently labeled as marginal is an act of resistance in itself. Silence was imposed on them. Speaking and rebellion are their conscious choices.

About the missing spaces of healing
On the other hand, there is no clear space for healing. Relief organizations rarely allocate specific support for women’s psychological and physical health in wartime. Medical institutions often reinterpret physical symptoms outside their political context or strip them of their collective dimension. Even cultural norms insist on treating gray hair as a sign of collapse rather than a scar that tells a history.

Healing must be understood as a right, a priority, and part of social justice, not merely an individual option. These testimonies should not be read as isolated stories, but as an entry point into a broader conversation about the relationship between the body and war, the cost of silence, and the need to build safe feminist spaces for expression, healing, and demand making.

When the body speaks, we must not silence it or consider it marginal. We must listen to it as a political document in the face of the machinery of colonial wars, or as an open question posed to a society that has not yet learned to recognize women’s suffering or to restore what was taken from them: safety, voice, and the right to live without fear, without exploitation, and without marginalization.

By: Fatima Al Bassam