Ad copy

If you are using minoxidil, please do not stop it suddenly. That is genuinely the most useful thing I can tell you today, and I want to say it before anything else because I see the consequences of it constantly. I'm a dermatologist. I trained at Stanford, and hair loss is what I have spent my career on. Minoxidil is a drug I have prescribed a lot of over the years and I am not against it. It works for some people and I would never tell someone to throw it away. But there is something about it that almost nobody explains properly at the point of prescribing, and it is the reason so many of my patients tell me they feel trapped. Minoxidil is a blood pressure medicine. What it does on your scalp is dilate the blood vessels, so more blood reaches the follicles. And that can help. But it means the effect is entirely dependent on those vessels staying dilated. So when you stop, and particularly when you stop abruptly, those vessels clamp back up quite quickly. The follicles get a shock. And you get a fairly dramatic shedding episode. Which is why so many women say some version of the same thing to me. That once they started, they felt like they could never get off it. It becomes a treadmill. And I do not think most people are told they are stepping onto one. So if you are on it, taper. Every other day for a while, then every third day, under your doctor's guidance. Do not just stop on a Monday. And if you have already stopped abruptly, I would not restart just for that. It should settle down. It may just take a bit of time. Now here is the other thing about minoxidil, and it is really the reason I built something different. It works through one pathway. Blood flow. It does not address the inflammation on your scalp. It does not clear the oil sitting over the root. And it does not do anything about the DHT being produced locally around the follicle opening. And in menopausal women, that local DHT is a big part of what is happening. There was a UCSF-led trial of 137 menopausal women. A full year of systemic DHT blocking, and no improvement over placebo. Because female follicles are producing DHT right there at the root, and there is oil sitting over that root, so the first thing that has to happen is clearing the oil. Then you can target the DHT where it is actually being made. So one pathway was never going to be enough. That is not a criticism of the drug. It is just what the drug does. And there is a second problem that minoxidil does not touch at all, and honestly this is the one I see women get most frustrated by. You can reduce your shedding, keep more hair on your head, and still watch your ponytail get smaller. It is quite demoralising, because you have done the right thing and the mirror does not reward you for it. Here is why that happens. A research team including dermatologists from UCSF and the Royal Hallamshire Hospital looked at 1,099 women concerned about hair loss. Some of those women had not lost any hairs. Their hair count was still normal. But their parts looked wider, their ponytails felt smaller and their hair looked visibly thinner. What they had lost was not the number of strands. It was the thickness of each one. And that matters more than it sounds like it should. Ten percent less thickness means almost twenty percent less volume from every strand. Across tens of thousands of hairs, the whole ponytail shrinks. Then a finer strand is a more fragile one, so more of your length snaps off during washing, drying and brushing. So you lose fullness twice. Once because every strand is thinner. Again because more of it breaks before it ever reaches the end of your ponytail. Minoxidil targets new growth at the root. It does not thicken the hair already on your head, and new hairs take a long time to reach your ponytail even when it works. So I wanted to build something that worked on both problems, in the one place where both of them are actually happening, which is your wash. The shampoo is built around two compounds. CutiBiome is a complex of manuka, magnolia and black pepper. It rebalances the oil so the route to the root is clear, and it turns down the enzyme making DHT underneath. Most shampoos clear oil by stripping the scalp dry, which just restarts the greasy root cycle. This one does not. Then resveratrol travels into the follicle during the same two minute wash and helps keep hair in its growth phase rather than switching over toward shedding. In a placebo controlled trial, daily shedding dropped by 61 percent. Every shed hair counted daily against each woman's own baseline, with a combing test and a pull test alongside. Not a survey. And the conditioner is aimed entirely at the hair you are keeping. Kerashaft V uses very small plant proteins that get inside the strand and rebuild the structure responsible for its thickness. Ordinary proteins are too large. They collect on the outside and wash off. In a placebo controlled trial it increased the thickness of individual strands by 37 percent. ResistHyal uses two sizes of hyaluronic acid. The smaller one goes inside the strand, the larger one protects the outside. So you get moisture without the heavy coating that flattens fine hair. And Silkgel Neo is a vegan silk grown through fermentation from plant sugar. It wraps each strand in a thin flexible shield and increased the breaking strength of damaged hair by up to 70 percent. Here is the part that matters most if you have been on a treadmill before. This does not work by dilating blood vessels. So there is no rebound if you stop. That was very intentional. I wanted people to be able to use this consistently, but if you need to take a break, or it does not fit your life for a few months, you should be able to stop without being punished for it. I should say none of this is only me. Colleen is our head of R&D and she is my right hand on every one of these formulas. We are both fairly obsessive about product, which is really where this started. And Kelly moderates our community, which is thousands of women talking to each other about something I think can feel very isolating. She brings me questions from that group every day. Honestly, running a business is stressful and I did not intend for this to become as big as it has. The thing that gets me through the harder days is reading what women post in there. Someone writing that the drain looked different this week. Someone saying their hairdresser asked what they had changed. I can't examine your scalp through a screen. So I built the next best thing, which is the same questions I ask in clinic, in a two minute quiz. It asks when your hormonal changes began, how often you wash, where you are shedding, where you have lost volume, and whether your hair is thinning at the root or breaking through the lengths. Then it tells you what is actually driving it, whether what you are currently washing with is making it worse, and how often you should be washing for your scalp. Two minutes. No email. Take the Strand Quiz: https://kilgourmd.com/pages/strand-quiz Dr. James Kilgour, MD, FAAD Stanford-trained dermatologist P.S. To be very clear, if you are currently on minoxidil, you do not have to choose. You can use both. Just please taper the minoxidil rather than stopping it suddenly, and do that with your own doctor. P.P.S. Please take the quiz before you buy anything. It does not give every woman the same recommendation. It asks about your own timeline, your own wash frequency, and whether your problem is shedding, fullness, breakage or all three. Then it shows you what is happening, what to expect and the wash routine built around your answers. It also unlocks a discount on whichever routine it recommends. No email. No sign up. Just your results. https://kilgourmd.com/pages/strand-quiz