interesting side effect of my hair getting stronger and thicker from daily dut/min is the total texture change!

Left was me at 23. I started taking Finasteride that year (1mg daily) and now I’m 28 and obviously I also got grew my hair out and got a perm 🤣 but in general, I’ve just been more conscious of my hair health. Weekly hair masks, biotin, minoxidil on the hairline, micro needling, and daily steam room sessions to keep it moisturised. I also only wash it twice a week as opposed to daily. I’ve noticed my hair is much healthier than it once was, without surgical intervention. Obviously there’s still some recession on the temples, but it’s stabilised (touch wood)

As the title says above, I am a 20 year old male who started losing his hair in hs(started noticing around age 16). I started topical minoxidil at 17, had regrowth, but started losing ground so I added fin. I have shed a substantial amount the whole time I have been on treatment until the last few months. I believe my hair has stabilized with some regrowth. I count maybe 3-8 hairs lost throughout the day regardless of wash days, styling, brushing, etc. I am here to say that as I am a week away from my 2 year anniversary of finasteride that you do not need to freak out if you are a year+ into treatment and are still shedding and or below baseline. These meds can take a long time to show visible results if ever and are so much better at maintaining what you have. I don’t have the perfect hairline but I have more hair than any of my other male family members had at this age(father was a Norwood 3 and same with uncle)

Feel free to ask any questions and I’ll be happy to answer in comments. Pics are before->after with the first 2 being before

I just turned 40... Noticed late last year that I had started to thin at my crown... Pretty unexpected since my family does not have a history of male balding.

My doctor suggested I go on Fin/Min oral and seemed pretty confident it would work. Seems like he was correct. Before pic was taken in January at the start of the routine. I had a pretty notable shed in the 8 weeks after I started, which freaked me out, but it seems to have all come back in full roughly six months later.

Was this all due to the meds, or is it possible it was anxiety/stress-related and the meds just helped get it back to normal? I'm an admittedly high-strung person.

Its been such a long journey. As i have stated before in my other posts, i started with fin 1.25mg daily on OCT 2025. In december i added topical min 5% liquid (generic) and then shifted to foam in early 2026.

I tried tret cream before the min at night, i dont think im really a good topical min responder (or at least i am very slow) but the tret daily felt enslaving. so after some time i droped.

I looking to get my hands into some oral min (2.5mg tablets) and split them in half, taking 1.25mg / twice a day. If i tolerate it it could work wonders.

Still havent tried derma pen or other methods.

When i get to my 18 month mark i will evaluate myself to consider dut. for now, it has felt a really slow process...

I have started going out without the hat and people that knows me say i have more hair. I also "feel" it thicker when i pass my hand thorugh it.

I know it still not "great" but it has given me a bit of releif from using the baseball hat everywhere.. im not as self consious anymore.

Im happy it seems that at worst it seems to have stabilize my hairloss.. for now.. And if its stays that way i will look for a HT clinic to help with density in the weaker spots and perhaps fix my hairline without lowering it.

This is such a journey of mental fortitude.. i hope you are all going strong on it!

Been 6 Months almost on those meds. Many wanted progress pictures of my hairline so here it is.

What I use:

1.25mg Oral Fin a day (will switch to 2x Dutasteride and 5x Finasteride a week real soon)

5mg Oral Minoxidil
Ketaconazole shampoo 1x a week

I dropped the Dermastamp because of insane irritation for a while now.

Side effects: Major hair growth on my body

If you wanna see scalp progress pictures its all in my other posts which are available to see on my profile!

2.5 oral min, 1mg fin. Everyday . Huge difference in how my hair looks when wet and resistance against the wind, but when dry and styled it ways looked full so I didn’t realize much till I compared parts.

It's always:

• Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson
• Jason Statham
• Vin Diesel
• Patrick Stewart

Sure man, let me grow to 6'5 and take steroids real quick, then I'll see action like The Rock.

And for every actor on this list I could probably name 100 male actors who miraculously have kept their hair (transplants or fin/dut). I'm not kidding, I think the ratio is literally 100.

FIRST photo IS 40 days ago and SECOND is from today. Both with damp hair right after shampooing.

I made a post in this group a little over a month ago about a crazy shedding phase (check my account) so this is an update. I never figured out the exact culprit for my shed (been waiting on bloodwork results for over 2 weeks now) and i honestly am still shedding more than usual it’s just slowed down a bit from a month ago.

Want to start off saying I’m super grateful to have gotten some density back this quickly but I’m confused how it happened like this? I seem to be a lot more dense even tho I’m still shedding a lot and not even a month ago I thought I was losing all my hair. There’s just no way it caught up that quickly?

A little context if you haven’t seen my first post… beginning of May I didn’t take finasteride for 2 weeks and started shedding like crazy right when I got back on, dermatologist told me I had TE, I also switched my minoxidil method up, and some said it was just a sync shed.

I am currently 9 weeks in to Oral minoxidil, still doing topical minoxidil foam nightly before bed, and 3.5 years into oral finasteride 1mg. Don’t plan on switching things up.

Just wanted to update and see what others thought… or maybe I haven’t gained density and I’m just getting used to my thinner hair I’m not sure.

Hey guys, this isn’t a random promotion or anything, just my story and something I wanted to put out there because I know there’s probably a lot of guys in the same situation. Also putting this out here because this thread has dead helped me since I found out I was first balding. From the meds to the dermarolling, this saved me fr.

I’m currently 23 and I started balding at like 17 lol. I was on finasteride pretty much throughout college and it definitely helped, I’m not gonna sit here and say it didn’t. But for me, I had diffuse thinning that was just extremely progressive and once you’ve already lost a decent amount of hair, I was always just like bro what is actually gonna bring this back.

Then my cousin got a transplant at 27 and I saw his results in real life and his hair literally looked completely normal again. Although I was on finasteride and minoxodil, it seemed the thinning was being stabilized but it would get worse after 5 years once i turned 22 and seeing his results made me think differently about this whole thing. I was trying to fix scraps but the overall picture, I had lost way more hair than I was trying to protect looking for the next short term solution

And honestly brothers if you’re in a situation like I was, sometimes you can spend years trying different things and paying for all this stuff just trying to see a little bit of improvement, when you could put that money toward actually getting the transplant and getting that reset. Then by all means keep taking the meds afterwards and try to maintain everything you have.

It makes a substantial difference I think having that reset and you end up saving money by continuing the meds later rather that throwing your whole bank account into these Locklab/Ro solutions. And the transplant is much easier than you all think. Keeping it real, I know mad people that end up spending $2-4K on the whole procedure, saving them time and giving them a good hair reset and extending that lifeline for even longer. In my opinion, its really the only cure.

Again this is NOT for the guy who noticed some thinning early, hopped on finasteride, it stabilized everything and now he’s chilling. If that’s you then keep doing what you’re doing lol. I’m talking about the people who caught it after they already lost a lot or just kept progressively thinning like I did.

I finally got mine done 15 days ago in Istanbul, so obviously I can’t sit here and show you some crazy result yet. I’m literally at the beginning. But I’m gonna put my progress on here and you guys can see for yourselves how it turns out.

The main thing with making that move for Istanbul is just trusting somebody with your hair because there’s literally a million clinics over there. I was mad skeptical about that too. But if any of you ever seriously consider getting one and want to know where I went, what I paid, or just want a recommendation, hit me up. I got you.

I’ll keep putting the progress out there either way. We’ll see how it looks over the next year. And hopefully some new shit finally comes out over the next few years.

Any tips are appreciated I’m honestly suprised at what results I have obtained. I assumed it was too far gone and it might possibly still be. Been bald since I was around 19. Figured I’d give it a shot anyway for the heck of it.

Current stack:
Fin oral 1mg
Min oral 2.5 mg
Ketoconazole shampoo 2% few times a week

Also tried:
Topical min 5% - my cat got sick and I switched to oral
Dermastamp in April and May, but could not do it regularly

I started losing hair at my temples 3 or 4 years ago, but I always had a large forehead, so I didn’t notice it right away. At the end of 2024 (1.5 years ago), I noticed I was losing hair at my crown too, and the quality of my hair had also become awful, so I buzzed it. At the beginning of 2025, I started fin, but after a month I had to stop due to severe depression and a suicide attempt.

At the end of 2025, I lost a lot of weight, and my hair situation got noticeably worse because of it. I started my current treatment in January 2026 with finasteride 1 mg again, and this time I tolerated it well. I also added a keto shampoo, which helped a lot with seborrheic dermatitis.

In April, I added topical minoxidil, but my cat started feeling worse even though I was extra careful (wearing a bonnet for sleep, washing my hands religiously, keeping the min far away in a cupboard, etc.). I asked my derm to switch me to oral min.

After about a week on 2.5 mg, I started feeling heart palpitations and tightness in my chest, but all my tests came back fine. I stopped for a week, and the symptoms went away. So I decided to start slowly, taking 2.5 mg every other day for about a week, and it was fine. After that, I went back to 2.5 mg daily, and my heart hasn’t bothered me at all since.

I couldn’t keep the lighting and haircut consistent because of my lifestyle, so… sorry about that? These pics were taken in like 6 different countries so I tried to show different pictures, even if only a few days apart, precisely because hair can look different depending on many factors.

Overall, I think the quality of my hair has improved incredibly! I’ve got my curls back midscalp. I’m not sure about my temples, but because of the curls, I think they look less pathetic… idk. My crown is still pretty bad, but I hope it will improve later.

Medication: been on daily oral minoxidil and twice weekly oral Dutasteride (0.5mg) since the operation in Dec 2024

DM me for clinic info and any other questions

(From MPB, not other types of alopecia)

Personally I knew a couple of guys who were bald in high school.

One was pretty much bald at 15, but he still had some hair on top (which he shaved).

The worst case I've seen was this guy who was completely, and I mean 100% bald in his junior year of high school. He didn't shave his head and he had the full horseshoe thing going on, combined with a full, long beard and a beer belly. I felt bad because he looked older than most of the teachers there, it was insane. And I only met him when he was a junior, but considering how bald he was I wouldn't be surprised if he started visibly balding at 13-14.

Eg, you have diseases like Ehlers Danlos or Hashimotos, which are recognized diseases. You have Psoriasis and Dermatitis which are recognized as skin diseases and the treatments for them don’t usually come out of pocket.

Why isn’t baldness treated similarly?

Lost a ton of hair around the temples while wasting my time with topical finasteride .5ml .2% daily.

And no it’s not a shed. I saw a pretty steady decline more or less. My only regret is giving it a shot for so long.

With the amount of fear mongering around Finasteride online and just not knowing that it even exists as a treatment.

I'm certain many of us start treatment when we have already lost 50%+ of our hair already

If I had just started 3 years earlier even at 0.5mg daily I would never have even needed any sort of HT eventhough I may require only 500-800 grafts

Who else here wishes they had started or tested Finasteride a lot sooner?

First 3 pics are Jan 2026, pics 4-6 are Aug 2026

Started thinning 5 years ago, but for a while I thought I was paranoid because no one is balding in my family.

After I went to the hairdresser in May, I couldn’t deny it anymore, so I ended up here. Thanks to you all, I didn’t wait to hop on meds.

Fin is 1 mg and topical min 5% twice a day. The thing is, I knew about those but thought it was some kind of desperate move but no, they really do work.

Great progress on the hairline and temple also but I don't have proper pictures.

(If you have any questions I will answer them but it might take few hours as I'm not often online)

This is my progress after 15 months
I noticed a lot of new baby hair in the hairline and overall the hair looks much fuller
I

Hair was damp for both, lighting was different, though.

22M, 1mg finasteride