Please stop buying hair growth supplements if your scalp itches

The itch and the thinning turn up together, because the same hormone sets both of them off. But only one of them happens where a shampoo can reach it. Inside: how to tell in a minute which kind of thinning you have, and the two numbers on a label that decide whether a bottle can do anything at all.

If your scalp itches and your hair is getting thinner, those two things did not arrive separately.

They turned up together because the same hormonal shift set both of them off.

But only one of them is on the surface.

Only one of them is where a shampoo can reach.

Which is exactly why the medicated shampoo settled the itch and changed nothing else.

Not the wrong brand.

Not the wrong price.

The wrong half of the problem.

It took me two years to learn the difference. It should take you about four minutes.

Here is what you can work out in the next few minutes.

Which kind of hair loss you actually have. There is more than one.

They look identical in the mirror, they need completely different answers, and almost every product on the shelf is built for one kind and sold to all of them.

There is a list of signs coming. Read it and you will know which one you have.

And if it turns out to be one of the others, you will know that too, and what to do instead.

Why it happens under your skin, not on your hair. Plain English, no diagrams of follicles being strangled.

It is the one fact that makes sense of every pound already spent.

The two words printed on the back of almost every hair supplement in Britain that mean you cannot possibly know what you are taking.

Once you have seen them you will spot them in four seconds, in any shop, for the rest of your life.

Finding that out cost me £812.

Over two years I spent £812 on things that were supposed to stop my hair falling out.

Tablets, powders, a shampoo system, oils, a scalp massager I bought at half eleven at night, a silk pillowcase because somebody on Instagram swore by it.

None of it did anything. Not one strand.

And when I finally worked out why, I sat down on the edge of the bath and cried.

Not because it was complicated. Because it was so simple. And because I had been standing in the wrong room the whole time.

I used to complain about how much hair I had

That is the bit that gets me now.

I had the kind of hair where the hairdresser said “God, you have got a lot of hair”

every single time, like it was a personality trait. Forty minutes to dry. Two bands to hold it up, because one snapped.

I used to moan about it. Too thick. Too heavy. Takes forever.

I would give a lot to have that problem back.

I cannot tell you when it started. That is the horrible part. It does not happen on a day you can point at.

It just adds up, a bit at a time, until one day you notice.

For me the first thing was the bobble. I had always wrapped it round twice.

Then one morning it was three times. Then four, and it still slid.

I told myself I had bought thinner bobbles.

The second thing was the itch.

Nothing dramatic — a scalp that wanted scratching by about four in the afternoon, and a bit of flaking on the shoulders of a dark jumper.

So I bought a medicated shampoo, and it helped, and I filed it away as a separate small annoyance.

I did not connect the two for eighteen months. Nobody had ever told me they were connected.

Then it was everywhere. On the pillow. On the back of my chair at work.

Round the plug. On the bathroom floor, which I hoovered twice in one day and told nobody about.

The moment I could not pretend any more was at my daughter’s birthday.

My sister took a photo of me from behind, leaning over the cake, and when I looked at it that night I zoomed in and my stomach went.

You could see through it. From three feet away, in a kitchen, in normal light.

I looked at that photo for about twenty minutes.

Then I deleted it — which I have since learned is the single most common thing women do at that exact moment, and it is why almost nobody has a “before”.

The next morning is where the money starts.

£812 in two years, and not one strand

So I did what everybody does.

The next morning I searched.

why is my hair thinning female. best hair growth supplement UK. how to make hair thicker fast.

And every single page said the same four things. Biotin. Collagen. Protein. A clinically proven system.

So I bought all of it.

And my hair was thinner than the day I started.

“It happens to a lot of women” is not an explanation

I went to my GP. She was kind about it. She did bloods.

Thyroid, normal. Ferritin, normal. B12, normal. Vitamin D a bit low, take a supplement.

“Everything has come back fine,” she said. “It is probably stress. Or hormones. Or it can just be genetic. It happens to a lot of women.”

She said it the way you would mention the weather.

She was not wrong. That is the maddening part. Hormones, she said, and genetic, and she was right on both counts — but a true sentence you cannot do anything with is not an answer. It is a shrug with a diagnosis in it.

I know she was not being unkind. She had eight minutes and a waiting room.

But I sat in that car park for a while before I drove home.

And then I did what I think most women do, without ever deciding to do it.

By the end I was checking the forecast for wind, not rain

I want to write this bit down properly, because if you are reading this you might recognise it, and it helps to see it in somebody else’s handwriting.

I stopped putting it up, because up showed the sides.

I stopped sitting under the downlights in the kitchen and started sitting at the end of the table.

I moved my parting three times looking for the one that covered the most.

None of them did, so I settled on a heavy sweep over to one side and wore it like that for a year.

I started checking the forecast for wind. Not rain. Wind.

None of that was a decision. It just happened, one thing at a time.

I bought a hat that lives by the front door and has nothing to do with being cold.

And one night my husband found me on the bathroom floor with a handful of hair out of the plug, and he tried to put his arms round me, and I snapped at him.

I told him he could not understand. He could not, and that was not his fault, and I still think about the look on his face.

I did not think I was vain. I think I thought I was disappearing.

What I did not know is that I had been buying for the wrong problem the entire time. There is more than one.

“Hair loss” is not one thing — and the kinds need different answers

This is the bit I wish somebody had shown me two years earlier.

Because “hair loss” is not one thing. There are a few kinds. They look the same in the mirror. And they need completely different answers.

Almost every product on the shelf is made for one kind and sold to everybody.

So before you spend another penny, work out which one you have got.

It takes a minute.

If you are in the second box, close this page and do that instead.

We would rather lose the sale than take money from somebody we cannot help.

If you are in the first box, the rest of this page is the explanation nobody gave you.

Which brings me to the itch.

Your itchy scalp is not the problem. It is a clue about timing.

Here is the connection, and it is genuinely under-explained everywhere else.

The itch, for most women, is on the surface. Skin, oil, and a yeast that everybody carries and some people react to.

That is what most itchy, flaky scalps are, and a medicated shampoo can properly reach it.

If yours is helping, it is doing its job. Keep using it.

Now the link.

DHT is one of a group of hormones. That same group also sets how much oil your scalp makes.

For most women these hormones start to change somewhere in the late thirties or forties. When they do, two things start at once.

One. Your scalp makes more oil. The yeast feeds on that oil, and the yeast is what you are itching.

Two. More DHT reaches your roots. Oestrogen used to keep it away. There is less oestrogen now, so it gets through.

Two problems. One cause. Two different places.

One cause. Two problems. They are related, but they are not the same thing.

Which is why an itch that arrives in your forties, alongside a parting that is widening, is not a coincidence and is not a shampoo problem.

It is a clue. It tells you roughly when the other thing started.

So if you treat the itch and then wait for your hair to come back, you will be waiting a long time.

The shampoo did the job it was for. It never touched the other one.

It took a stranger in a shop about ninety seconds to explain that to me. Nobody else had explained it in two years.

The woman in the shop who refused to sell me anything

Here is where it turns, and it is not dramatic. It is a Tuesday, in a health food shop on a high street, in the rain.

I had picked up another bottle. Nice matt label, the words “advanced hair complex” on the front, and I had already decided.

The woman behind the counter — Bev, sixties, been there forever — took it out of my hand.

She did not snatch it. She sort of received it, turned it round, and held it so we could both see the back.

“Read that,” she said.

So I read it.

I read it. Horsetail extract, bamboo silica, biotin, pumpkin seed, and then the words hair blend.

“Right,” she said. “How much pumpkin seed oil is in there?”

I did not know.

“No,” she said. “Neither do I. That is the point. It does not say.”

And then she said the thing I have thought about most days since.

“Love, they are not allowed to lie to you. But nobody is making them tell you either.”

She put the bottle back on the shelf. She did not sell me anything.

She stood there in an empty shop and talked me out of buying it, and then she gave me ten minutes I had been waiting two years for.

Your hair is not falling out. It is coming back smaller.

“Everything you have bought,” she said, “has been working on your hair.”

I said yes. Obviously. That is the problem area.

“Your hair is already dead.”

“The bit that is alive is underneath, in your skin. That is the root. And that is where this is happening.”

She said there is a hormone. DHT. Everybody has it, men and women both.

It sticks to the root that your hair grows out of.

Now, your hair sheds and grows back anyway. It always has. That is just what hair does.

But each time round, a root with DHT on it comes back a fraction smaller. And a smaller root makes a finer hair.

Do that enough times, over enough years, and the hair coming out is too fine to grow long at all.

It reaches about an inch. Then it gives up.

Here is the part of this that is on your side.

Nothing has died. A root making a one-inch hair is a root that is still working. Still going round, just coming back smaller each time.

That is exactly why the hairs in your brush are fine rather than absent, and why the front of your head is thinner rather than bare.

A root that is still growing something is a root you can still do something about.

That is the whole reason timing matters. Not because it becomes hopeless.

Because it is easier while it is still turning — and it does not pause. It goes round again whether or not anybody decides anything.

“So it is not falling out,” she said. “It is coming back smaller.

And that is a completely different problem to the one you have been buying for.”

I stood in that shop doing the maths on two years of my life.

Two years. And nobody had ever taken that sentence one step further.

Everything I bought was aimed at the hair. The hair was never the problem.

Once you know it happens at the root, under your skin, you can go down the list and see where each one was aimed.

Not one of them was aimed there.

SEE THE TWO AMOUNTS

1,000 mg cold-pressed pumpkin seed oil · 320 mg saw palmetto · printed on the back

Two plants work at the root — and one honest thing about the research

Bev told me there are two things worth taking, and that both of them work at that end of it — the root end, not the hair end.

Pumpkin seed oil, on how much of that hormone your body makes in the first place.

Saw palmetto, on how much of what is left gets to latch on to the root.

One turns the tap down. The other stops it sticking.

That is the whole idea. It took a woman in a shop about ninety seconds.

And here is the thing nobody selling this will tell you, which is why I trusted the rest of it: the big study everyone quotes about pumpkin seed oil was done on men.

Same hormone. Same mechanism at the root.

But it was men, and anybody telling you there is a mountain of research on women here is having you on.

I went and looked it up myself that night and she was right.

I would rather know that than be sold a certainty that does not exist.

So that night I went home and turned over every bottle I owned.

We turned over every bottle in the house and found the same two words

I rang my sister Beth that evening. She reads supplement labels for a living, which I had never once thought to take advantage of.

She came round. We took every bottle out of the bathroom cupboard, lined them up on the bed, and turned them all round.

The expensive one: a marine something, a botanical something, and the word blend.

Amounts for the vitamins, which they have to print. Nothing at all for the thing I was actually buying it for.

The thickening shampoo: a paragraph of botanicals and not one number.

The one from the shop that afternoon: same.

And then the one that made my face go hot.

One of them did list pumpkin seed — as pumpkin seed powder, near the bottom of the list, which is where the smallest amounts live.

Not the oil. Ground-up seed. A lovely thing to eat, and not the same ingredient at all.

I had been paying by the month, for six months, for a tub whose amount nobody would tell me.

Nobody was breaking any rules. I want to be clear about that, because there is no conspiracy here and we are not going to invent one.

It is simply this. Vitamins and minerals have to be declared with a number. Plants do not.

They are not allowed to lie to you. They are just not required to tell you.

And when telling you is optional and the number is small, nobody tells you.

That is the whole scandal. It is duller than a conspiracy and it costs you more.

And it left me with the question I could not get past: why would anybody go to the trouble of leaving out the one ingredient doing the work?

Printing the amount costs money. Saying “blend” costs nothing.

I assumed it was pure greed. Beth said no, it is mostly sums.

Cold-pressed pumpkin seed oil is the most expensive thing you can put in a capsule. It takes up a lot of room, so the capsule has to be big.

It is an oil, so the capsule has to be a softgel.

And there is an easy way out. Use ground-up seed instead.

It costs a fraction of the price, and the front of the box still says exactly the same thing.

Saw palmetto is the same. The proper extract costs many times what dried ground berry costs.

On the front of a box they read exactly the same.

So the incentive is obvious. Print the number and you pay for the number, forever, on every unit.

Say “blend” and you never have to explain yourself to anybody.

So we printed the number.

That sounds high-minded. It was not. We just wanted to sell something we could answer questions about.

So here is what is in it, and here is the one thing on the label that will look like a contradiction.

What we made: two softgels, two numbers on the back

Two softgels. Once a day, with food.

Two, not one, and I want to explain why rather than hope you do not notice.

A thousand milligrams of oil does not fit in one capsule. We could have halved it and sold you one. We would rather you swallowed two.

No system. No steps.

Nothing goes on your head, nothing has to be washed out, nothing stains a pillowcase, and nothing announces to a room what you are dealing with.

“Hang on — you just spent a page slagging off biotin”

Fair.

That is the first thing I said too.

So I asked Beth. And this is the strangest thing she told me.

In the UK, a supplement is only allowed to use the word hair on its label if it contains zinc, selenium or biotin.

Not because those three fix hair loss.

Because those three are the only ingredients with an approved hair claim behind them.

Plants do not have one. Not pumpkin seed oil. Not saw palmetto. Not a single one of the things you actually came here about.

So a bottle with nothing in it but the two plants that work at the root cannot legally print the word hair anywhere on itself.

Three keys. One word.

Go and check. Every single hair supplement in your cupboard contains zinc, selenium or biotin. It has to. That is the key that unlocks the word.

Which explains something I could never work out: why biotin is in absolutely everything, and why it ended up with a reputation it cannot possibly live up to.

It is not in there because it fixes what you have got. It is in there because without it the box has to stay silent.

So yes — there is biotin in ours.

Along with zinc and selenium, which each contribute to the maintenance of normal hair, and selenium to the normal function of the thyroid gland.

Those are the phrases we are permitted to print, and we print them.

But we are not going to pretend to you that they are the idea.

The idea is the two plants and the amounts, and those are the two lines on our label that almost nobody else prints. The rest is the legal key that lets the box say what it is for.

That is the most cynical thing on this page. It is also the easiest to check. Four minutes, any shop in the country.

Right. What actually happens if you take it, including the part where nothing happens.

Two softgels, once a day, with food. That is the whole routine.

SEE WHAT IS ACTUALLY IN IT

Two softgels a day · Nothing goes on your head · 120-day money-back guarantee

Weeks four and five are dead quiet. That is normal.

This is my own diary, taking our own product.

I am one person, I am the founder, and I would treat it with exactly as much suspicion as you are about to.

I am including it because the shape of it — particularly the weeks where nothing happened — is the thing I could not find anywhere when I needed it.

START THE THREE MONTHS

£49.99 for three · 120-day money-back guarantee

I am five months in now. Here is the honest version of that, with no photographs in it.

What is different now, and none of it is a photograph

Five months in.

I am not going to do a before-and-after at you. I deleted my before, on the edge of a bath.

And I am suspicious of anybody who happens to have a perfectly lit one.

What I will give you instead is what is different, which is all behaviour and no photographs.

• I have stopped sweeping it over to one side. It is parted where it wants to be now.
• I put it up on Saturday without thinking about it, and only noticed an hour later in a shop window.
• I sat under the big light in my own kitchen in July and it did not once cross my mind.
• The hat is still by the door. It has not been on my head since June.
• I have not looked at the wind on a forecast since about March. Just the rain, like everybody else.

And my husband, who did not notice when I redecorated the hallway, said something a few weeks ago while I was drying it.

He said “that is looking better, that.”

Then he went back to his phone. He has no idea he said anything.

I stood there with the dryer still going and had a small moment about it on my own.

Right. Now the bit where I talk you out of buying it.

SEE WHAT IS IN IT

No system · No steps · Nothing goes on your head

What other women have said about it

What it costs, and why we say three months

One bottle is one month.

Before the number, look back up at that receipt.

A hundred and eighty pounds on a tub whose amount nobody would tell me.

Two hundred and forty on a shampoo system aimed at hair that had already finished growing. A hundred and ten to be told my blood was fine.

£812. Two years. Not one strand.

Here is what this costs.

Three months is £49.99.

That is less than two months of what I was already paying — pointed, for the first time, at the right end of the problem.

A hair cycle is measured in months, not weeks.

That is why we say three months — not because we know what will happen to you, but because anything less is not a fair test of anything.

We would rather say that now than have somebody buy one bottle and write us off in six weeks.

No timer. No countdown.

This is not a subscription. You buy the bottles you buy.

Nothing renews, nothing arrives that you did not ask for, and there is nothing to remember to cancel.

The five-bottle box works out at forty per cent less than buying them one at a time.

That is not a countdown timer and it will not expire tonight. It is what bulk costs us, passed on.

A hundred and twenty days. And here is how to judge it, so you are not relying on a feeling in a mirror.

Count the turns of your bobble this week. Write the number on the back of the box.

It is the one measurement on this page you cannot argue yourself out of.

Look at the plug after a shower. Then notice, some week, that you have stopped looking.

Make a parting at the front and one at the back, exactly as in the box further up. Do it again at week twelve.

And run a finger along your hairline for short bits that stand straight up and will not lie down.

If in a hundred and twenty days the number of turns has not moved, email us and we refund you.

You do not need to send back an empty bottle, and you will not be put through to anybody whose job it is to talk you out of it.

A hundred and twenty days is the three months plus a month to think about it.

A guarantee we can actually honour beats a longer one that is quietly made difficult.

CHOOSE YOUR THREE MONTHS

£15.00 a month on the five-box · Free UK delivery · No subscription

The only honest thing anybody can say about timing is the thing we have already said: the cycle keeps turning either way, and it turns whether or not a decision gets made.

Most of the women who tell us they wish they had done something sooner are not talking about our product.

They are talking about the eighteen months they spent buying off the wrong shelf.

You could buy the two of them separately. Here is how.

I am going to talk you through the other option, because if I do not, you will think of it yourself on the way to the car and wonder why I left it out.

You can buy saw palmetto on its own. Around eight pounds for a month.

You can buy pumpkin seed oil on its own. Around twelve, if you get the cold-pressed oil and not the ground-up seed.

So that is about twenty pounds a month, in two capsules, and it is a perfectly sensible thing to do.

Here is what you would be paying us the difference for. It is a short list and I am not going to pad it.

Do the arithmetic and it is close. Ours is fifteen pounds a month on the five-box.

Doing it yourself properly, with all three right, and you will not get much change out of twenty.

And if you would still rather do it yourself, do it yourself.

Buy cold-pressed pumpkin seed oil, not seed powder, and check the back says a thousand milligrams. Buy saw palmetto extract and check the back says three hundred and twenty.

Add zinc and selenium if you want the label to be able to say anything at all. Take them with food.

That is genuinely the whole recipe.

I have just told you how not to buy from us.

I would rather do that than have you work it out in a month and decide I had left it out on purpose.

The two paths

What to do tonight

1. Work out which one you have got. Go back up to the two boxes. If you are in the second one, do that instead — properly, and today.
2. Keep using whatever calms your scalp. That part is fine and there is no reason to stop. Just stop expecting it to do the other job.
3. Go and get whatever is in your cupboard and turn it round. Tonight, before you buy anything from anybody.
4. Look for a number next to the ingredient you bought it for. Not the vitamins — those are always there. The plant.
5. If it says blend, complex or proprietary and there are no milligrams, put it back. You do not know what you have been taking, and neither does anyone else.
6. Then do the same to ours. 1,000 mg cold-pressed pumpkin seed oil and 320 mg saw palmetto extract, standardised, per two softgels. We would genuinely rather you checked than took our word for it.
7. If you start, give it three months. Expect weeks four and five to be silent. Knowing that is normal is most of the battle.

GET THE THREE MONTHS

120-day money-back guarantee · Free UK delivery · No subscription

P.S. — The thing I would change is not the £812. It is the two years I spent believing the problem was me.

Every time somebody said “it happens to a lot of women”, what I heard was that I was being vain about something ordinary — so I went quiet about it, and I kept buying things quietly.

It is not vanity. It is a hormone doing something at the root of your hair. It has a name, and none of it is your fault.

P.P.S. — If you take one thing from this page and never buy anything from us, take this: the front of a label is marketing.

The back of a label is a document.