How hormones like DHT and testosterone drive hair loss, and what that means for treatment choices.
By Philippe Boissard, hair-loss researcher and author. M.Sc., Aalborg University. Updated June 2026. Rubbing your head to grow hair sounds like the kind of free advice you should ignore. I almost did. Then I dug into the cell biology of…
By Philippe Boissard, hair-loss researcher and author. M.Sc., Aalborg University. Updated June 2026. Rosemary oil went viral because of one line: a study showed it works as well as minoxidil. That line is technically true and badly misleading at the…
By Philippe Boissard, hair-loss researcher and author. M.Sc., Aalborg University. Updated June 2026. This is the question my audience asks me more than almost any other. A guy finally starts lifting seriously, buys the most evidence-backed supplement on the shelf,…
By Philippe Boissard, hair-loss researcher and author. M.Sc., Aalborg University. Updated June 2026. Ask the internet about finasteride side effects and you’ll get two answers, both wrong. One side says it’s harmless, take it and forget it. The other says…
By Philippe Boissard, hair-loss researcher and author. M.Sc., Aalborg University. Updated June 2026. This one surprised me when I first dug into it. Smoking and hair loss sounds like a wellness-blog scare, the kind of claim that falls apart under…
By Philippe Boissard, hair-loss researcher and author. M.Sc., Aalborg University. Updated June 2026. The honest answer is: partly, sometimes, and it depends entirely on one thing most people never check. A receding hairline isn’t a single situation. Some of those…
By Philippe Boissard, hair-loss researcher and author. M.Sc., Aalborg University. Updated June 2026. A 22-year-old notices his hairline isn’t where it was at 16, panics, and spends a month convinced he’s going bald. Sometimes he’s right. Often he’s just watching…
By Philippe Boissard, hair-loss researcher and author. M.Sc., Aalborg University. Updated June 2026. Almost every man starting out asks the same thing: finasteride or minoxidil? People treat them like rival teams you have to choose between. They’re not rivals. They…
Dutasteride suppresses about 90 percent of DHT versus roughly 70 percent for finasteride. Here is what the head-to-head trials actually found, and the catch.
DHT shrinks hair follicles in men who are genetically sensitive to it. Here is exactly how that happens, why the pattern forms where it does, and what actually stops it.