#minoxidil

Hi guys! New here! I'm 35 with aggressive Male Pattern Baldness! I'm Norwood 5 and just stop taking Minoxidil Day 10! Hope you can come along each day for pics/vids and emotions with it! 🤡 Also make sure to check out new YouTube page for my MPB - http://youtube.com/@TheBaldDomeSpot

There's no cure to baldness by the way, and it can start at any time and there's no way to predict how fast or slow it will go. The only real working option is a daily pill that usually just halts it, but it can stop working or just slow it down or cause major side effects. To regrow you have to use a daily topical solution, or use a roller to wound your scalp. None of these are surefire by the way, and if you stop them you'll just lose your hair and whatever you regained. It's a daily involved thing that might not work and often at best just retains. The best drug, the one that occasionaly gives regrowth, also causes shedding at the start, and can have side effects from growing breasts to brain fog to EDsyfunction(sorry, censoring cause tumblr). Now, those are INCREDIBLY rare and almost never happen but it weighs heavily on the mind of those already spiraling.

But that's just background. What I'm here to talk about is the pure woe you'll see on those forums. People speak as though their lives are over, as though they've lost every chance of finding a woman(predominantly, there's a running idea in such places that women don't like bald men or like them less) or doing anything. You can read countless stories of people who describe that they no longer go outside, are now filled with anxiety and self-hate, have gone from extroverted to never showing their face. And some of these people are kids who lost their hair in high school or even before, or are holding as best they can to a very receded hairline and feel like there is nothing they can do.

And then there's something touched upon far less in those communities, but is important to bring up here; baldness and masculinity. There's the horror of knowing so much of society sees a bald guy as a very masculine guy, at seeing that the best advice for being hot and bald is "grow and beard and big muscles bro". Imagine now you're AMAB balding and nonbinary, or a trans woman who doesn't want to be on hormones.

Just genuinely take the time to look at those forums no matter who you are. Understand what these people go through, what I am currently going through. It is soul-crushing, spiraling, brutal.I felt like and still feel like I would have to be masculine, have to be a bro-y dude, have to look older than I was. It was the feeling that I could never dress feminine again, never present as a woman when I wanted to again, that I'd always be viewed as a bald guy before anything else.

This is an incredibly vulnerable post for me, and I hope it reaches you all as well in a kind and understanding mood. There's a tendency online for people to joke about baldness, to make fun of it, to treat it as a playfull silly thing but it fucking ruins lives, and it shouldn't. It happens to half the population's sort of bodies and very often. It should just be a neutral thing. You don't need long hair to be feminine, you don't need hair to be feminine. You don't need hair for anything. I guess I'm just saying in general that everyone should be kinder about balding, more understanding, and view it with as much import as they'd view the pixels between this sentence and the next. None at all, I mean.

And for those like me, very feminine guys who wanna keep that and don't want a beard and are terrified of balding, here's some names and I do hope others that see this will add more; Mr. Bruce (also in The Correspondents(band) Jason Carl in LA By Night Cecil Baldwin of Welcome To Night Vale tananasho on instagram Also your mannerisms and style of dress will convey femininity far more than your hair. Yea sure a front-on neutral shot of you may not and maybe you need makeup and stuff, and hell maybe a lot of people might reject you more but it'll just filter down to the people for you

And to all you artists and writers and creatives; make more bald characters. Try it out. Feminine ones, masculine ones, all sorts. None of the copout nonhuman sort, just dudes and girls and mates and individuals who are all sorts of things and also bald. It might make a few of the people going through the various vortexes of pain that balding causes feel a bit better.

IF YOU'RE NOT ON ANDROGENISING HORMONES THEN MINOXIDIL WON'T MAKE YOU GROW FACIAL HAIR.

Your hair grows in stages. Your body is covered in something called vellus hair—"peach fuzz". The hair that's on your cheeks, your face, those tiny hairs that are almost clear in their thinness that cover your whole body. The stage up from this is "terminal hair"—the hair on your scalp, on your crotch, the hair on your body that's easily visible. We all love happy trails, right? That's terminal hair. And so is beards.

In the presence of androgenising hormones, some vellus hairs on your body will fall out and your follicles will start producing terminal hair in their place.

All Minoxidil does is speed up the hair production cycle and increase rate of growth. It will not convert vellus hair into terminal hair unless the hair follicles are already capable of producing terminal hair.

Minoxodil was created to combat balding. The way it works is that balding is caused by the body's reaction to DHT (dihydrotestosterone, a leftover conversion from testosterone in the body). Dihydrotestosterone, among some other things, tells the hair follicles to stop producing terminal hair, usually at the scalp. This results in baldness. All Minoxidil does is encourage the follicles to produce hair again (and sometimes it doesn't work unless you're also on a dihydrotestosterone blocker, like Finasteride).

For facial hair, Minoxidil works similarly. During androgenisation the hair follicles on your face, when exposed to rising testosterone levels, will convert from vellus-producing to terminal-producing. But it takes time, and a few hair cycles, for them to actually start producing terminal hair. All that Minoxidil does is speed up that cycle to fill those follicles in faster. It makes the vellus hairs die off, and grow back in, and die off, and grow back in, and die off, and grow back in, on and on until the follicles have matured and start producing terminal hairs instead. Even on Minoxidil this can take up to two years to fill out a beard—it's a matter of luck of the draw of your genetics.

But Minoxidil won't grow terminal hair (beard hair) unless the follicles have matured, and that only happens in the presence of androgenising hormones. If your hair is very dark and visible against your skin you might be able to get away with using Minoxidil to increase the amount of vellus hair you're growing, but the most you'll get is a slight shadow on your upper lip. You will not grow a beard unless you are on androgenising hormones as well, and Minoxidil is still subject to genetics. If you are not capable of growing a beard, Minoxidil won't give you one as it requires your follicles to become terminal first.

Also, on that note: if you're on androgenising hormones and using Minoxidil, remember that topical Minoxidil is toxic to animals and especially cats. Wash your hands after application and don't let your pets near your face until it's dried. If you want good results, apply it twice daily. The 5% strength is ideal. Don't buy that shit on Amazon cuz there's a lotta fakes out there—buy it in stores. You want Equate or Kirkland.

I just finished my first month at 2.5mg daily and bumped up to 5mg daily to start week 5. Already seeing some small changes. (Mainly on my brows and chest for some reason)