The Best Hair Loss Treatments

by Reviews.com

There's no cure for baldness, but there are ways to hold on to what you've got.  The hair loss specialists we spoke with and the clinical studies we read agree: 5 percent minoxidil foam is the best hair loss treatment to start with.   It's safe for both men and women, it really works, and you don't need a prescription to use it.

The Best Hair Loss Treatments

​Men’s Rogaine Unscented Foam
Best Overall for Men and Women

Kirkland Signature Regrowth Treatment Minoxidil Foam for Men
​Generic Runner-Up

Equate Hair Regrowth Treatment for Men
​Generic Runner-Up

HairMax Ultima 12 LaserComb
A Pricey Add-on Treatment

If you were to check your spam inbox right now, you’d probably find — among the fishy links and generous offers from Nigerian princes — at least a dozen offers for the best hair loss treatments money can buy. There’s a reason these offers tend to get clicks: A lot of people are losing their hair.

According to the American Hair Loss Association, two-thirds of American men will experience some degree of appreciable hair loss by the age of 35. By the age of 50, the number of men with “significantly” thinning hair shoots up to a staggering 85 percent. Women hardly have it any better. Though pop culture tends to associate hair loss with men (Julius Caesar’s hairline-hiding laurels, George Costanza’s shiny dome), women actually account for up to 40 percent of the total hair loss sufferers in the United States.

Men’s Rogaine Unscented Foam and its sister, Women’s Rogaine Foam, are our top picks. They’re both safe, non-prescription, and easily available. They are identical formulas in different bottles — ladies, apparently, need something with a flower on it. (Costco’s Kirkland Signature Regrowth Treatment Minoxidil Foam for Men is the cheapest generic.) The most important part of their ingredients list is minoxidil, a topical drug that has been clinically proven to slow hair loss and even regrow some hair.

Prescription finasteride (sold under the name Propecia) and at-home laser treatments, such as the FDA-approved HairMax Ultima 12 LaserComb, have also been shown to be effective. The key to halting your hairline is ultimately finding a hair loss regimen that works for you. A doctor is your best bet for that kind of guidance — but we can definitely tell you which treatments your scalp (and your wallet) should steer clear of.

How We Found the Best Hair Loss Treatment

“The most common cause of hair loss in both men and women is androgenetic alopecia, which is genetic pattern hair loss,” explains Dr. Michael B. Wolfeld, a board-certified plastic surgeon and an assistant clinical professor of plastic surgery at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. The root cause of this type of hair loss is dihydrotestosterone (DHT), a byproduct of testosterone that shrinks certain hair follicles until they eventually stop producing hair.

Other medical conditions — most commonly telogen effluvium and seborrheic dermatitis — can also cause hair loss, but most people can trace their follicular woes back to androgenetic alopecia, so we focused our search there. We started with more than 200 products, including all-natural solutions and high-tech gadgets, while skipping treatments that focus only on volumizing or thickening hair. We also limited our scope to the scalp, and left out specialty products designed only for eyebrows or beards.

We dug into clinical studies and talked to experts in the field, who helped identify specific ingredients that have proven effective in combating hair loss and aren’t just snake oil.

The ugly truth: The vast majority of hair loss treatments boast exaggerated claims, and a startling number have absolutely no scientific backing whatsoever.

Our first step: eliminating those snake oils.

To us, that meant any product with zero proven ingredients, case studies, or FDA clearance — which shrunk our list by a whopping 180 contenders. That’s right, there are only three treatments that have actually been cleared by the FDA and supported with clinical studies: finasteride (commonly marketed as Propecia), minoxidil, and laser treatments. And, since finasteride is prescription-only, it left us with two.

With those pinned down, it wasn’t hard to determine which don’t actually work. Pretty much all the “active” ingredients listed in ineffective treatments — from biotin and zinc to emu oil and saw palmetto — have never been proven, and are instead marketed based on logical-seeming correlations. It would make sense that biotin, a B vitamin readily found in hair, skin, and nails, could help hair grow more quickly. And caffeine is a stimulant that works in coffee, so rubbing some on your scalp might wake some of those sleepy follicles… right?

Not so fast. Dr. Alex Khadavi, a board-certified dermatologist and associate professor of dermatology at the University of Southern California, says that it’s a good idea to approach all of these products with a skeptical eye. “There’s people selling pills and creams and lotions and whatever else, and sometimes you can’t even trust what ingredients they have in there,” he warned us when we spoke to him over the phone. Key takeaway: The hair loss industry is crazy dishonest.

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