In this video, the speaker talks about his experience with hair loss at a young age and how he was able to reverse it. He discusses feeling embarrassed and losing confidence, initially denying that anything was wrong with his hair. He tried different treatments such as finasteride, but had doubts due to potential side effects. Eventually, he decided to take a more proactive approach and started using various treatments including minoxidil, ketoconazole shampoo, and microneedling. He also added oil treatments and exfoliated his scalp with salt. Over time, he noticed significant improvements in his hair density and overall health. He encourages viewers to stay consistent with treatments and trust the process.
Key Insights:
- Starting to lose hair at a young age was discouraging and affected confidence. Attempting to cover it up and denying the problem initially.
- Realization of hair loss came after a friend’s comment and looking at old photos.
- Delay in taking action due to lack of knowledge and awareness about hair loss treatment options.
- Started using finasteride as a hair loss treatment, but skepticism about its potential side effects led to discontinuation after four months.
- Embarrassment and frustration intensified as more hair was lost, prompting a decision to seek full treatment.
- Engaged in a comprehensive treatment plan including finasteride, minoxidil, sebazole, tretinoin, and microneedling.
- Oil treatments and salt exfoliation on the scalp were added for better results and improved hair health.
- Significant improvement in hair growth and thickness was observed between 1 to 8 months of consistent treatment.
- Importance of being aware of family hair loss history and genetics in determining the susceptibility to androgenic alopecia.
- Avoidance of dandruff and dry scalp by incorporating scalp exfoliation and oil treatments.
- Consistency, patience, and trust in the treatment process are emphasized for achieving desired results.
- Confidently shares that it is possible to reverse hair loss with the right treatment and consistency.
Transcript:
This is how I reversed my hair loss at 18 years old. Now I’m going to talk about how it felt to start losing my hair at such a young age. Yeah, it really was discouraging, man. I have to be honest. I was embarrassed, lost my confidence, constantly trying to wear hats, you know, just trying to cover it up. Also, I was in denial for a big part of it. Because what happened was, right, I was in the spa with my mates, nothing suspect, and then my mate, who’s a barber, looks at me and goes, „Hey, man, your hair’s looking sick.“ I’m like, „What are you talking about? My hair looks sick. I have great hair, Rick. What are you talking about?“ He’s just like, „Nah, bro, you got to do something. I don’t know what you’re gonna do, but you got to do something because it’s looking really sick.“ And at the time, I didn’t believe him, and I didn’t even think anything was wrong with my hair. And even after that comment got to me a bit, right? And I went into the mirror, I was looking at myself in the mirror, checking out my hair, and I was like, „It’s not that bad.“ Then I started looking at old photos of my hair, and that’s when I realized, like, what has happened? Where’s my hair going? Why is it not as thick? Why does it look like how it currently looks? And it’s just thin and wispy, and I didn’t even notice it. And the hairline was receding, and it was just a scary period because I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how to stop this hair loss from occurring. So, like most people, I just didn’t do anything for a while. When I found out, it was probably like January 2020, when my mate told me. I didn’t do anything. I was like, „Oh, it’s just okay. Maybe it’s a bad hair day. It’ll just stop itself.“ I didn’t really know what to do. I didn’t know that androgenic alopecia is something that constantly keeps going. At the time, I was like, „Oh, maybe it’ll grow back. Maybe it’s just bad hair. I don’t know. I honestly don’t even remember what I thought, but I remember there was no sense of urgency, no sense of knowing what to do, because I didn’t know what to do. So, I just left it up until May. And then in May, I looked at my hair and I was like, „Oh, [censored] this is really, really bad. I have to do something.“ So then I remember my father told me about finasteride. Not that he even knows about it, but he started searching it up on his phone, and finasteride came up. So what I did, went to the doctor, got a finasteride prescription, and yes, I take finasteride. But during this period of time, I really was skeptical of finasteride and the side effects, because I remember the doctors telling me the potential side effects. Then I would go on Reddit forums, research finasteride, and it was all bad stories about how they have post finasteride syndrome, and just all this fear-mongering. And I really believed that I had perceived myself into feeling that way. And I wasn’t seeing retention at the time, and my mental health was really bad. And I really believed that finasteride was the cause of this. So, I did it for four months, from May to September. And in that time, my hair actually got way worse. And I was losing way more hair, and it looked terrible. And I was just like, „What’s the point of this? It’s obviously not working.“ You know, I mean, just really stupid, stupid, in hindsight. And I went off it, and I was like, „Okay, it’s causing me depression. I’m gonna get off it.“ So I got off finasteride. That’s when it started to get really, really bad. And that’s when I started treatment in late December 2018, because I knew if I didn’t do anything, my hair would go. I’d have to be that bald dude, but I was 19 now. And I would have been 19 and bald. And I remember it was really embarrassing. It was really embarrassing because when I wouldn’t wear a hat, it was really obvious. And I had a different type of hair loss, whereas my hair loss was diffused thinning, hair loss. So that’s why I diffused thinning all over, even on the sides. The only thing I wasn’t thinning is the back. And it just looked really terrible. And I didn’t have it in me to cut my hair or shave my hair off. And I remember when I moved to Melbourne, I hadn’t seen family in so long. Last time they saw me, I had really nice hair, because this happened so rapidly. And I remember my family was like, „Oh, take off your hat. I haven’t seen you with your hair.“ Because I got a crop at the time. I had removed curtains. I got a crop to cover it and try to cover as much hair as I could. Yeah, I remember taking off my hat and, to be fair, I wore a hat like 12 hours on the drive to Melbourne. I remember my family just looking at my hair, going, „Ah, hi.“ I was like, „Yeah.“ It was really awful. And I remember one of my aunties was like, „You know, bald suits coming in. You don’t need to worry.“ Oh my God, I’m that guy. I’m getting the talk of like, „Man, you should probably shave it off. It’s time to shave it off. It doesn’t look like it’s happening.“ I was just, I was like, „No, nah, this can’t be me. Not in my teens, not at 19 or in my 20s. This can’t be me.“ And I felt even worse about myself because I always had long hair, man. I always had long, luscious hair. I used to have my hair up to here, and it was long, thick, and that’s what I’d rock. I looked like every surfer dude, even though I didn’t surf. But I always had long, luscious hair. So it was a part of my identity, and it was so hard to swallow this pill. And then I did end up swallowing a pill, you know, the red pill, finasteride. That’s when it all changed for me. After that, I remember going, „Watch.“ And I remember my cousins, everyone in my family was so, like, you can’t do anything about this. So yeah, that’s when I started treatment full-on. And we’re going to get into it, but before I get into it, I want you to understand a bit about hair loss. If you don’t understand how hair loss works, I’m going to explain it to you quickly. We all that our men produce testosterone. Now, unfortunately, for some unlucky men, your hair follicles, the androgen receptors on your head, may be sensitive to DHT. And especially if you have the androgenic alopecia genome, you are technically (beep) , in a sense. Your hair will start miniaturizing and going, right? And what DHT does is it latches onto the hair follicle and it starts miniaturizing it. And the form of action is that your hair has three cycles that it goes through. It has anagen, which is the growth phase, and this can last like three to five years. Then it has the catagen phase, which is the resting phase, right? And this is where your hair is about to go through the telogen phase, which is the third phase. But it’s in the resting phase and just stays. It doesn’t grow, and then it falls out like two weeks later. And it goes into the telogen phase of removing the hair, it leaves the follicle, and a new hair will start growing. But what happens with DHT is it miniaturizes the hair on your scalp. So it literally limits the anagen phase and increases the catagen and telogen phase of the hair cycle. And it does this enough times where your hair just gets weaker and weaker, the anagen phase is shorter and shorter, that at a point, it just doesn’t grow back and it literally turns into scar tissue. And it’s almost like it’s impossible to get it back without a hair treatment. If your hair is gone and your skin is like skin there, you know how you see some people and it’s like skin there, it’s almost impossible to get it back. Like almost impossible. Only a few lucky people like microneedling and minoxidil will be able to get it back, but most likely you will need a hair transplant. So that’s why it’s so critical to, when you notice you have androgenic alopecia, and the sign is to look at your scalp. And this is the Norwood scale that I’m going to play right now. And you can see the natural progression of androgenic alopecia. It starts at the hairline, it goes back, then starts at the back and it kind of meets each other. And then you just have a bald scalp on top. And for most people, your sides and your back will stay the same. That’s why you see old people in movies, they’ll have the sides and the back, but they won’t have the top. So you have to know if you have the androgenic alopecia genome. And to do this, look at your family. Look at your family, bro. If it is in your genetics, it is a very potent gene. If for some reason, and I was very unlucky, because my dad doesn’t have that bad of hair. Like he does have a bald patch at the top, but that came when he was like 32, right? And the rest, he has his hairline’s kind of intact. And the rest of the hair kind of looks healthy. It just has this little bald patch on the back of his head. I was like, „Okay, let me look at my mom’s dad,“ because that’s how they usually say you get your mom’s dad’s hair. My mom’s dad’s hair was the best hair I’ve ever seen. Literally incredible hair. Even when he was 75, he had incredible hair. Yes, he had a widow’s peak, but he had incredible hair. And that came way later in his life. I was like, „Oh, okay, what the f***?“ And then I looked at my uncle, and I have two uncles on my mom’s side. One that has his dad’s hair, which is great hair. And then the other one who’s bald. I was like, „Ah, how f***ing unlucky.“ It wasn’t from him, himself. But I’m just saying that gene was in my family tree to a point where it actually came onto me. And yeah, he had the same kind of hair loss as me. He diffused thinning, very thin. Now, because he never did any treatments. And yeah, I was like, „Ah, this just sucks.“ Anyway, so yes, look at your family. Look at your mom’s uncles, your dad’s uncles. If anyone’s bald, you’re technically not safe. You’re really not safe. And it is way easier to prevent hair loss than it is to reverse hair loss. Preventing it is the main key because it is so difficult to reverse it. Because at the point where you want to reverse it, you’ve already lost like 40,000 hairs on your scalp. Because it has to become noticeable first. Most people think that they just go through hair loss. It’s already happened. So I started noticing my hair loss at 18. That means I started balding at like 16 or like 17. And it already started. It already started. I remember at 17, my hairline on the right side was gone. I was like, „Oh, my hairline was always like that.“ And I remember friends always giving me [censored] for it. „Bro, I’ve always had this hairline. Like my right side’s gone, but I still have my left side.“ But no, that’s the start of androgenic alopecia. It usually starts on the right side as well. Okay, now let’s go into the treatments I use. So as you can tell by all the photos of my hair right now, it was really bad. I had like four strands of hair. Looking very thin, looking like, „Yeah, how you going, buddy?“ „Time to shave it off.“ I am what you would call an aggressive „andagollopisha“ type. So the treatments I got on first of all was finasteride. Then I got on minoxidil. I started in the oral form, but I switched over about five months in because it was safer to go to the topical form. I’ll make a video about that another time of why topical form is better. And sebazole, which is ketoconazole shampoo. But they sell it as a brand name sebazole in Australia. And oh, do not forget this guy, microneedling. Microneedling, in my opinion, was one of the biggest pushes in getting dead spots back. And I had dead spots on my right side, and they weren’t completely dead, but they looked pretty dead, to be honest. It looked like skin. Like it was shiny. So maybe there was little hairs there. ‚Cause I was diffused, I said maybe they’ll just really miniaturize, right? But this was crazy, this was crazy. Coupled with minoxidil, like game changer, real game changer. And yeah, I really am a big believer of microneedling. I swear by it, love it. And yeah, still do it to this day. Now, I saw those treatments, and we’re going to go through the timeline of my hair reversal journey. Now, this is my hair one to three months. Already, you can see an insane change. Like already, you can see, oh, wow, density’s come back a little bit, and it’s looking better, looking healthier. And let’s do three to six months. Even looking better, right? So then we get to eight months. You can see my hair, yeah, it’s looking a lot better, looking a lot fuller. Very nice, very good progress already. And honestly, I was so grateful because that was what I hoped for, to get to the stage that I was at eight months was what I was just hoping that I could even get to. I didn’t even know if it was possible, because some people aren’t even responders to the medication, but in my case, I was lucky in a sense. I had diffuse thinning, which means the hairs were very miniaturized, but that’s a very good environment for treatment because it allows the hair to be resurrected in a sense. Because when you already have scar tissue there, it’s near impossible to get your hair back without a hair transplant. So at eight months, that’s when I added more to the treatment and I was like, „F*** it. How far can I go with this?“ So the treatments I added were tretinoin. What this does is it doubles the effects of minoxidil because it allows the absorption into the hair follicle and it actually works really well for non-responders to minoxidil. And there are research papers on when actually no one added that minoxidil actually starts working for non-responders. And also, I added another treatment, the big one. Which is like the last Infinity Stone to my research. Saw palmetto, it’s an anti-androgen. So those were the medical treatments. And then I added a few other things that I’ll discuss later. But definitely, I think they are a really big benefit of doing. I would exfoliate my scalp with salt, literally salt. So I put a bunch of salt in water and then I put it throughout my scalp and exfoliate it every week, once a week. And a bonus perk with it is that your hair would look great after the salt exfoliating. So that was awesome. So then, I’ll do the salt exfoliating, then I’ll do the microneedling, like later that day or that night. And then what I would do is that I would actually do oil treatments in my hair. Because the problem is with sebazone, ketoconazole shampoo, I use this every day. And most people don’t even use it every day because it makes your hair look so bad. People use it like two to three times a week. But I use it every day. Like here’s an image of my hair. It literally looks like a haystack. It looks like a tumbleweed in the desert. You know what I mean? It looked terrible. So I was like, okay, what’s the point of getting my hair back and using this shampoo? Which is, you know, a mild anti-androgen and my hair looking terrible. But I knew it works and I knew that it was really good for my type of hair because I had very oily hair, especially when I started finasteride. Like the testosterone on your scalp gets boosted and it’s just so oily and disgusting and just, ugh, chat. And this literally cleanses the scalp, helps with inflammation, and just, yeah. 100% big believer of ketoconazole shampoo as well. But it made my hair look terrible. So what I did is I added oil treatments. So what I did, I would get a bowl. Coconut oil, castor oil, rosemary oil, argan oil, olive oil, and then I would add aloe vera. Aloe vera is really good for hair growth and just hair health and, you know, creating a stable hair environment. And what I do, I mix this all together in my little bowl and then I put it in the microwave for like 20 seconds. So it’s like warmish, slash hotish, so it would really sink into the scalp. And I would do this once a week. Yeah, crazy, crazy. Because my hair looked way better dealt healthier, grew better. And then I would leave it in for about three to four hours and then just wash it out. I’d do double shampooing. So shampoo it once to get rid of all the oil. But I saw a huge difference in hair health, the look of my hair, the shine of my hair. The state of my hair was just, it looked nourished. Whereas when I didn’t do these oil treatments, especially with all these medical treatments that you do, right? It dries out your hair. And topical minoxidil, it’s alcohol as well. It’s mostly alcohol. So it’s all very drying to the skin, very drying to the hair. And also doing these oil treatments reduced and the salt exfoliating treatment on my scalp is that it really got rid of the dandruff that I had. Because I used to have a lot of dandruff. And a lot of people are going to experience a lot of dandruff. But it would subside. It cleanses the scalp and then I would nourish the scalp with oil. So you salt first, then you deal with oil the next day when I’d wake up three to four hours and wash it out. And yeah, that really, really worked for me. I’ve never really heard anyone talk about it. I’ve heard people do a few oil treatments, but I was doing this weekly. It depends how much you want it, bro. It does take time, takes consistency. And there’d be times where I didn’t want to do my hair or do the treatment on my hair, but I did the treatment on my hair anyway. At the time, I was a bartender and I’d finish work at like 1:00 AM or 2:00 AM. And I’d get home, last thing I want to do, you know, these treatments in my scalp was the last thing I want to do, but I did it anyway because I knew the ROI on it is so worth it, bro. To have a good, healthy head of hair and to go from nothing to something is like crazy. And it was crazy worth it. I do not regret anything I did and all the effort, all the time, really paid off. And you can achieve the same results if not better if you’re consistent with it and, you know, you’re putting action into resurrect your hair and save your hair. And trust me, bro, huge confidence booster. Not only that, I look way younger. I look way younger than I did two years ago. And it’s not just the hair. I got a full-on skincare routine. If you want a video on that, let me know in the comments because I have an elite skincare routine. I have an elite hair routine. And yeah, they’ve all really helped with confidence. And also, you don’t really value your hair until you lose it. I didn’t give a [censored] about my hair, man. I really didn’t give a [censored] . Like, I would be putting links gel into it and just [censored] . It’d look horrible. Like, I never styled it well. And it was just terrible. So, to wrap up this video, bro, if I can do it, you can do it. And I understand the way that you’re feeling right now. It is really scary, man. I know. I’d be in the shower as well, counting the hairs on my hand, man. Be like 40 hairs on my hand. But you just need to stay consistent with the treatment. You’ve got to stay consistent. You’ve got to trust the process. Don’t look at your hair until six months and then evaluate your results and evaluate what else you want to do or any adjunct treatments that you want to add. And yeah, just know that it is possible. It is possible. And if people are telling you to shave your head, you don’t need to yet, man. At least try six to 12 months of trying to do your hair because a lot can change in that time period. And 100%, you’re going to have some good results. Get through it, boys. Hair loss is [censored] scary, especially if you’re young or in your middle age. Right now, you can beat it. You can reverse hair loss because I did. Had a very aggressive type of hair loss and I was able to. So, you can too. All right, take care, bro. I’ll see you next video. Bye.
