I think my son had this, but it was before internet, so I didn’t know it was a THING!!!
When 16-month-old Locklan Samples was born, he had jet-black hair not too far off from his mom Katelyn’s color. But by the time he was 6 months old, that dark hair was replaced by what Katelyn and her husband Caleb affectionally called “peach fuzz.”
“We were like, huh, what is this?” she tells PEOPLE of Locklan’s (nicknamed Lock) newly-blond, soft hair. “We knew it was different, but didn’t know exactly how. And then it kept growing and growing.”
By 9 months, Lock’s hair was white-blonde, super soft and sticking straight up out of his head. It matched his 3-year-old brother Shep’s hair in color, but could not be more different in texture.
Katelyn called their pediatrician, who said they had never heard of the syndrome and directed her to a specialist at nearby Emory Hospital.
“We went to see her and she said she’d only seen this once in 19 years,” Katelyn recalls. “She didn’t think it was uncombable hair syndrome, because of how rare it is, but they took samples and a pathologist looked at it under a special microscope.”
And after looking at the structure of Lock’s hair, they were able to confirm that it was uncombable hair syndrome, an extremely rare condition that causes the hair to grow with a very soft and easily breakable texture. Lock is one of just 100 known cases of the condition.
Hearing that Lock had this syndrome was a shock at first.
“You’re just going about your day thinking everything’s fine and that your kid might have curly hair, which does run in the family. And then to hear that there’s a rare syndrome associated with your kid — it was crazy,” Katelyn says.
Thankfully, the syndrome only seems to affect Lock’s hair.