Minoxidil, explained without a sales pitch

What this site is

Shedding Phase covers one drug. Not a shop, not a clinic, not a ranking of the nine best bottles — one molecule, read off the labels that the United States regulator approved, with the source and the date on every quotation. The name comes from exogen, the phase of the hair cycle when a hair lets go, which is both the thing this drug is trying to interrupt and the thing people notice most when they start using it.

We chose one drug because minoxidil is where the largest number of people arrive with the smallest number of straight answers. It is the most-searched hair-loss term there is, and most of what has been written about it was written by somebody with a carton to sell. A page with nothing to sell can simply say what the label says, and then say where the label stops.

What it will not tell you

There is no dose on this site. Not a milligram, not a percentage offered as a recommendation, not a frequency, not a volume, not a routine — not even quoted from a carton as though the quotation were guidance. Dosing is a decision about one person, and a website that prints one is inviting readers to skip the person qualified to make it.

There is also no reviewer. No clinician has checked these pages, and you will never see a reviewed-by-a-doctor badge on this domain, because it would not be true. What you get instead is the working: the label, the labeler, the revision date, and a link, so you can check us.

• We quote labels rather than paraphrasing them, because the paraphrase is where the selling creeps in.
• We name what we could not verify, on the page where you would have expected to find it.
• We say plainly when the honest answer is a generic from a pharmacy shelf or an appointment with a doctor, both of which pay us nothing.

How to read a label the way we do

A Drug Facts panel is a strange document: a legally constrained advert. Companies can only claim what they proved, so the panel ends up printing things a marketing page never would — that the product "will not work for all men", that hair loss "may continue for up to 2 weeks" at the start, that stopping means losing the regrowth again. The most useful sentences about minoxidil are already on the box, and almost nobody reads them.

So the method here is dull and deliberate. Find the approved label. Quote the sentence. Say who published it and when it was last revised. Where two labels disagree, show both. Where no label answers the question — and the biggest question about this drug, how it works, is one of those — say so instead of borrowing an explanation from someone selling an alternative.

Where to start

If you want the whole picture, start with what minoxidil is: the molecule, the accident that made it a hair product, the trial numbers printed on the carton, and the gap between the bottle and the tablet. If you are already using it and something has changed, the side effects page goes through both labels' lists, including one risk that appears on neither.