Minoxidil is widely thought of as a treatment for alopecia. It’s not available on the NHS, because the evidence for it working effectively is not very good. In the UK, there’s a body, the MHRA, which looks at different products and only allows them to be prescribed if there’s evidence that they’re effective and safe. And there isn’t adequate evidence that minoxidil is effective. It’s available over the counter, very expensive, in different concentrations. And it is popularly used. And patients who use it often say it has helped. But in general I think what it does is it produces a little bit of sort of fuzzy regrowth, as soon as you stop using it, the improvement stops, it’s not persistent. And although in, in clinical trials where people have measured, you know, the minute hair growth – yes, they can say it works, produces some hair growth, but it does not often produce a cosmetically acceptable level of regrowth. So it doesn’t make your hair all grow long again, it tends to just produce a little bit of regrowth to cover the area. For some people that’s enough. But it’s not reliable. And it’s not very effective.

So there’s minoxidil which is available branded in like Superdrug and Boots and stuff which is I think it’s 2.5% for women and 5% for men. And 5% is a high dosage, well a supposedly high dosage, but you could be prescribed higher dosages by like doctors. So I’ve done a lot of research. I’ve read a couple of papers about minoxidil 5% in treating alopecia in women, so I went into Boots and I said Do you have one available for women? Cos this one says it’s for men and I don’t want to necessarily I mean I don’t know if there’s a difference between the products for men and women. I know a lot of things there usually isn’t, but if it’s kind of a medical product I don’t want to be messing around with that kind of thing, especially if it affects hormones and stuff. So I went in and they said, No we don’t do 5% for women cos it causes side effects, so get prescribed by your doctor or something. So I don’t, I never really kind of looked into it any further in terms of being prescribed it because that kind of put me off strangely enough. But I have read things about women getting things like facial hair and stuff which I mean it’s interesting the kind of gendered thing about where hair is appropriate and where it isn’t, so women were like, I’m really happy my hairs grown back, but I have facial hair now. And men would be like, Oh I have hair and facial hair now, everything’s great. Which I found quite interesting. And it’s also interesting the fact that they don’t make that available to women because of the side effects of things like facial hair which I’m not sure if it’s on like a hormonal level that it affects things like that and that’s why they don’t prescribe it or if it’s because they think women having facial hair is such a bad side effect that it would be a bad product to market. So I found that quite interesting. I haven’t really, there’s not really much available in terms of like hormonal effects of it, but that’s definitely something that I found really interesting.