Firstmy twenties
It went at the temples first. Nobody warns you how slow it is. You don't lose your hair one morning — you lose it across a decade, and you spend that decade deciding whether you're allowed to mind.
Crown & Scalp
I'm Desmond. I started losing my hair in my twenties and I'm fifty-four now. In between I tried almost everything sold to men in my position. This is the record of what I actually did, and what it actually did back.
It went at the temples first. Nobody warns you how slow it is. You don't lose your hair one morning — you lose it across a decade, and you spend that decade deciding whether you're allowed to mind.
Nioxin, more or less continuously, for about thirty years. Rosemary oil when that came round. Blends I mixed myself with cloves, curry leaves and cumin, because somebody's uncle swore by them.
I can't tell you any of it grew hair back. I can tell you it was thirty years of doing something instead of nothing, which is its own kind of answer.
Receded at both front corners, thinning across the top, the crown holding on better than the front. That's the Norwood scale, and it's the one number in this whole business that nobody tries to sell you.
A hair transplant. Around 5,200 grafts, taken from the back of my head and placed across the top and the two front corners. Very little on the crown.
I'll write the whole thing up properly — choosing a clinic from six thousand kilometres away, what the week afterwards is really like, the parts that are grim and the parts nobody mentions. The honest version of that account is genuinely hard to find, which is most of why I'm doing this.
Minoxidil. A laser cap a few times a week. Scalp massage. That's the whole list.
No supplements. No shampoo that promises anything. If something comes off the list, I'll say why.
The before-and-afters are lit differently. The reviews are bought by the hundred. The supplement aisle is, mostly, a tax on frightened people. I've been the frightened person buying from it, on and off, since the nineties.
What I want to build here is the thing I couldn't find at twenty-five and still couldn't find at fifty: a plain account of what the evidence supports, what it costs, what it feels like, and what nobody warns you about. Written by someone who paid for all of it himself and has no reason to flatter any of it.
There is nothing to buy on this site. If that ever changes, I'll say so plainly, and I'll tell you what I stand to make.
If you're somewhere on this road and want to compare notes, write to me. I read everything.
desmond@crownandscalp.ca