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Yes. Things that end in 'zole are mildly estrogenic and often used for fungus relief of various human body parts. Thanks for the encouragement.
Hair is not Life but it's Pretty Damn Close; HRT and Pictorial Posts Prove it.
- Thread starter JaneyElizabeth
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No problem.
I'm no expert for sure despite having signed up to this site a long time ago. I'm 37 now (scarily), and from the UK. I guess that would have made me about 25/26 or so when I signed up here and when I first noticed (and started on obsessing about hair loss). At the time I had noticed my hairline corners receding and I got really depressed about it and started taking a crazy amount of photos etc. I also would have had some slight crown thinning. I lived with my cousin who had severe hair loss and used minoxdil and I 'borrowed' some of his to use on my hairline corners before buying my own. Bad move I think - that stuff just very quickly seemed to make my hair shed where I used it and after 8-9 months of use it just didn't really recover. I shaved my head off and on for like two years and I had a distinctly asymmetrical patterned hairline in the shape of where my fingers had been applying the minoxidil. I researched finasteride over and over but just could never do it...something about me and the thought of feminising my body whatsoever I just hated...hair loss has been incredibly mentally painful for me, but I just couldn't alter my male hormones no matter how much distress I was in. The opposite to you I guess in terms of masculine/feminine mental self image etc. And I still feel the same about finasteride all these years later. Back when I was in my late 20's I went to Hair transplant surgeons and trichologists who all said I was miniaturising badly and would make an awful hair transplant candidate as my hair is so fine (literally as soft as a baby's hair...I saw the top hair transplant surgeon in the world at the time and he simply said 'your hair quality is sh*t'...even at the donor. Just extremely fine and not great for a hair transplant (although he would just about be able to do the hairline if I wanted it and then I would have to SMP the rest because when I lost it because I wouldn't have enough donor density or quality to cover my NW6 thinning pattern).
Thing is, 10+ years on...and I still have coverage in a NW3V pattern. Yes it's thin and fine all over, but if I cut it short then I can almost look like I have a fullish head of hair. I have a very thin spot at the back which is a couple of inches in diameter and the temples are also thin in that NW3 pattern. So while my thinning is all over (and the crown does look annoyingly bad in some lighting), my loss has been slow. I'm kind of at that point where if things got much worse then I'd have to really just keep cutting it very short until maybe in another 7-8 years possibly(?) I have no option but to shave it...and shaving doesn't look great because of the asymmetry of the hairline. So yeah...sorry that was long but I thought i'd give my background and where I'm at. It would be good to maintain at least and then I can keep cutting it fairly short. If I could get any regrowth at all at the crown (even like 10% thickening then it would be amazing, as this is the bit that bothers me now when I see photos or video myself).
My very basic routine at the moment just goes:
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Sunday - nizoral 2%/keto shampoo in the morning and then dermaroll in the evening with a 1mm roller, pressing fairly hard (some blood spots but more redness).
Monday - normal shampoo/shower gel
Tuesday - normal shampoo/shower gel
Wednesday - nizoral/keto 2% shampoo
Thursday - normal shampoo
Friday - nizoral/keto 2% shampoo
Saturday - normal shampoo
So nizoral 3 times per week and I leave it on for around 8-10 minutes each time. I deliberately leave 2 days without using it after dermarolling as I don't want to risk keto going systemic.
I just wonder what else I could add to give myself the best chance without touching my internal DHT. It's a tough one I know as the answer to all my problems would probably be just to pop 1mg finasteride every day. But nope, it's just not for me and probably never will be.
Did you see the bit where the Dr said I'm basically the worst transplant patient candidate possible in terms of hair quality?
One surgeon 4-5 years back (Dr B .... edit..for some reason HairLossTalk.com blocks his full name) simply refused to even consider it. He said he'd seen people's hair loss suddenly accelerate at like 40 years old and that if that happened to me and I'd had my hairline transplanted then I'd not have anywhere near enough hair to cover the rest. Dr Rassman said he could do the hairline but said that putting it into the crown (the part I am most self conscious about these days) would likely cause shock loss and wouldn't be recommended...he said I could SMP it to give an illusion of thickness until I bald further and had to just shave, but I saw some guys who'd had SMP up close and the dots had become blue blotches. Again, it might all be avoidable if I took finasteride...but mentally it's just not something I can do. So it has to be other options even if they're nowhere near as effective.
HairForceOne
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As you can probably tell, I don't sleep a whole lot but
He's had decent refinements over the years. For a while, his looked crappy.
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Yeah. In the olden days, a lot of hair wouldn't survive and the grafts would never sit properly, causing a cobblestone effect.Did you see the bit where the Dr said I'm basically the worst transplant patient candidate possible in terms of hair quality?
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I mean it's not wrong to avoid hormonal meds. They lack a history of long human use but they also up T while lowering DHT so it's not really an issue of becoming "less androgenic".Did you see the bit where the Dr said I'm basically the worst transplant patient candidate possible in terms of hair quality?
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Oral min works a bit differently and better than regular so it might be worth looking into if you lose any more ground. It's easier to use too because then you can just use topical once daily or not at all.
I hadn't heard of dix before. Do you use it? Min isn't something I want to use because of my bad past experience with it (it quickly eroded my hairline) and because of the dependency on it. I might consider trying stemoxydine.
Not sure if you meant to write something else after the but?
Hm.. oh that's another thing...i have a history of heart palpitations. Have had two ablation surgeries for palpitations so anything like oral min is out. As you can tell I'm very health conscious and that's probably due to my medical history. For me its basically a case of what can I do to work locally on my scalp without systemic changes. I'm wondering where I would add the selsun blue shampoo and/or castor oil into the mix in my routine.. but this dix stuff sounds interesting if there's any possibility of it working and if it doesn't cause lowering of systemic hormones.
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I was about to keel over from lack of sleep, lol. One thing about my HRT is that I seem to need much less sleep but when I get tired, it can be like, "zzzzzz".
Yeah maybe 'less androgenic' is the wrong word. I'm a strebgth athlete so having DHT as normal or not knocking it out to the levels that finasteride does is just quite desirable. DHT can really help in things like powerlifting and thats why some athletes used DHT based performance enhancers (I don't and wouldn't).
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My personal feeling is that we seem to lack pictorial evidence for Zix but like castor oil, it's cheap and likely good for us anyway in smaller amounts. You have to mix up Zix though so I don't have much room in my regime to that one. It's a very active thread though. Min and oral Min can affect blood pressure so yes, health comes first unless someone is desperate and he or she should probably have a doctor monitoring every six months or so.
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We are up to 30 percent who are willing to accept gyno or some breast growth which is up from about 22 percent previously on the poll. It's not very scientific since probably more folks are aware now that this is more of an HRT thread and less so of an experimental thread. I might put it more so as open to HRT and proven advanced treatments like oral Min, and the folks using Zix, RU, CB etc. only for synergy and not expecting huge results from them alone. Or it could just be statistical noise.
Thanks.. do you have any experience with castor oil? Is it supposed to work in an anti androgen sort of way?
Yes stemox is something I'm considering adding before too long (want to build up and see if I can get any effect with what I'm doing first), and I've been looking into fluridil too. Never heard of seti. It's good to hear about these new options like seti, castor oil and dix...makes me feel like I at least have some hope. Possibly in a few years breezula might then be widely available.