Why take a hair cortisol test?

Cortigenix's hair cortisol test measures the cortisol that has accumulated in your hair over the past three months. Unlike blood, saliva, or urine tests — which only capture your cortisol at a single moment — this gives a genuine picture of your sustained hormonal status over time.

There are two broad reasons people take the test:

Prevention — knowing what's happening before symptoms take hold

Chronic stress and cortisol imbalance often build slowly, over months and years, before symptoms become severe. By the time most people recognise they have a problem, some degree of physiological impact has already occurred — on immunity, metabolism, cardiovascular health, or cognitive function.

Testing as part of a regular health check gives you early insight into how your lifestyle and stress levels are affecting you biologically — when there's still plenty of time to act. Think of it as the HbA1c equivalent for stress: a meaningful long-term marker, not a one-day snapshot.

Optimisation — tracking whether what you're doing is working

If you're already making changes — improving sleep, managing stress, adjusting exercise, trying supplements — a hair cortisol test gives you objective data on whether those changes are actually moving your cortisol in the right direction over a 3-month cycle.

Subjective feelings of improvement are valuable, but a biological measure tells you what's really happening at a hormonal level.

What your results mean

Results are delivered to your secure personal dashboard within 10 working days of your sample arriving at the lab. Your result is placed in context against validated reference ranges, so you can see clearly whether your levels are low, normal, or elevated.

If your result is outside the normal range, one of our cortisol experts is available to discuss what it means and what steps you might consider.