Mel Cooley asks… Would the Beauty Brains recommend buying Toppik Hair Building Fibers for my slightly hair-impaired significant other?

The Right Brain responds:
Well Melanie, thanks for your question. Whether or not you want to be with the kind of guy who covers up his bald spot is up to you. But we can clue you in on the technology behind Toppik.

Toppik Hair Building Fibers. Yeah, right.

The hype on this one is a bit hard to swallow. Here’s what Amazon.com says:

The best hair loss concealer on the market. Toppik fibers are restructured to merge undetectably with your hair when applied. It is a safe, natural way to eliminate the appearance of baldness and thinning hair. It’s not a spray, cream or cover-up. In fact, it’s so scientifically advanced that it is unlike anything you’ve ever seen before. Toppik is an amazing new complex of tiny, microfiber “hairs” that perfectly blend with your hair. Toppik fibers are made of the same organic Keratin protein as your own hair. Through a unique process, these fibers are restructured to merge undetectably with your hair. You will instantly see a fuller, more natural looking head of hair than you could ever imagine.

Surprise: Toppik really works!

Surprisingly, Toppik fibers really do work. It’s really kind of amazing how well they fill in and disguise a small balding area. And they even look pretty natural (assuming your guy can match his hair color, of course.)  Even more surprising, the fibers actually stay in place during the course of the day. The only serious negative that we observed in our Beauty Brains test on random slightly balding males, was that if they got their hair wet (or even sweated too much) the color could smear. And of course, they’d have to reapply the product every day, which gets expensive.

How does it work?

The product is a fine powder made of the following ingredients: Keratin, Ammonium Chloride, Silica, DMDM Hydantion, Iodopropynyl Butylcarbamate. It may also contain yellow, red blue, and orange colorants to create different shades of hair. The formula is blended with just the right mix of keratin and silica to give you small hair-like fibers that adhere to the real thing. That means it works best when there’s at least a few scalp hairs to cling to.  If you just smear this on a totally bald scalp it won’t give the same effect.

The Beauty Brains bottom line

If your man is looking for a quick cover up for a thinning spot of hair, we’d recommend trying this product.

What do YOU think? Would you rather be with a guy who is “au naturale” with his hair impairment or would you like to be with someone who fakes it? Leave a hairy comment for the rest of the Beauty Brains community.

In keeping with the holiday spirit, today’s Beauty Brains post is about Christmas hair. What is “Christmas hair,” you ask? For Mark Davis, a Wales bus driver, Christmas hair means dying your hair red, shaving it into a holly design, and then having a small fir Christmas tree woven into your own natural hair. Ouch! According to BBC News, the result looks something like this:

The Beauty Brains are concerned that while Mark’s unusual hair style may put his passengers in the holiday spirit, it may be damaging to his own hair. As we posted recently, putting pressure on the roots of your hair can cause a condition called Traction Alopecia which can result in temporary or even permanent baldness. (You could always try Toppik Hair Building Fibers!)

So Merry Christmas Mark, but don’t leave that tree in too long!

And Merry Christmas to all our loyal Beauty Brainiacs. The Beauty Brains woudn’t exist without our community members!

Monica questions:  What causes more hair loss straightening you hair with a flat iron or doing a relaxer at a salon?

Left Brain straighteners her out:

Great question Monica.  A quick answer is that Relaxers lead to more hair loss than Flat Irons.  Read on for why.  If you want some additional options to flat irons and relaxers take a look at this post we did on 7 ways to straighten hair.

How Hair Straightening Processes Work

While relaxers and flat irons can give you similar styles, they work in completely different ways.  To understand how they work, you first must know that hair is made up of proteins.  Within these proteins are chemical bonds responsible for hair strength & hair shape.  The two most important types include Hydrogen bonds and Disulfide bonds.  (There are others but Sarah’s eyes are starting to glaze over so I’ll stop there.)

Hydrogen bonds are weaker, temporary and dependent on the amount of water in your hair.  When you flat iron your hair, you remove curls/frizz by first mechanically forcing hair straight and then removing the water with heat.  It works just like an iron on clothes.  This locks hair into whatever shape it currently is in.  It works great as long as your hair stays dry.  But once hair picks up moisture from the air, it will start to revert to its more natural shape.

Hair’s natural shape is controlled more by the Disulfide bonds.  These permanent bonds don’t depend on how much water is in hair.  With relaxers, hair’s disulfide bonds get broken down making your hair permanently straighter.  At least permanent until new hair grows back.

Both relaxing and flat ironing damage hair but relaxing is much worse because it actually degrades hair proteins.

3 Kinds of Hair Loss

When you ask about hair loss you could be talking about 3 different kinds; breakage, natural, and permanent.  Since I’m not sure which you’ve asked about, we’ll look at all three.

1. Breakage:  Everyone’s hair breaks to some extent, but damaged hair breaks more.  Relaxing causes much more damage thus leading to more hair loss via breakage than flat irons.
2. Natural:  People shed just like dogs & cats.  Your hair has a natural cycle where you lose about 100 hairs naturally each day.  Neither relaxing or flat irons will affect this hair loss.  You might notice more hair loss while flat ironing but that just because you pull out hairs that would have fallen out on their own.
3. Permanent:  In this type, hair stops growing at the roots & there is not much you can do to get it to come back.  It’s unlikely that flat ironing will cause this but it is possible relaxing hair can.  If your scalp is exposed to the chemicals in relaxers for too long, it can burn you and cause permanent hair loss.  This isn’t a problem when relaxing is done by a top notch, professional stylist but if you have an amateur, look out!

For more, see this information from the FDA about hair relaxer safety.

Should You Relax?

Despite the safety concerns and extra damage, there are some significant advantages of relaxing over flat iron straightening.  These include

• More permanent
• Easier to do (if you have a stylist)
• More consistent results
• Less prone to negative humidity effects

On the other had, being more permanent might be a negative to some.

The Beauty Brains Bottom line:

Both relaxing and flat ironing damage hair, but relaxing is much worse.  However, it does give some added benefits so you might decide hair relaxing is worth extra damage.  If you don’t want to lose or damage hair, the best thing you can do is shampoo infrequently, condition each time, and don’t comb or style it much.  Of course, that severely limits the type of looks you can get so these aren’t options for most people.

What do YOU think?  Would you rather have hair relaxed or do daily flat ironing?  Leave a comment below.

Jane’s hairy dilemma: My husband and I have seen the commercials for Scalpmed, and are wondering if it really works….he’s just beginning to lose his hair, and is interested in a preventative measure. Is Scalpmed worth it?

The Left Brain’s response:
First of all, if there really was a product that worked better than the approved drugs that are on the market, don’t you think the major Pharm companies would be all over it? The fact that Scalpmed comes from “GR Hair Solutions, LLC ,” a small company we’ve never even heard of is enough to start my BS alarm bells ringing.

I see from their website that Scalpmed actually consists of several products. Two of those products, their Vitadil-5A and Vitadil-2A formulas, “contain FDA-approved formulas for hair growth” and they state that the active ingredient in both of these products is minoxidil. Ok, so far so, good. Minoxidil (aka Rogaine) is an FDA approved drug to treat hair loss. So what’s the problem?

The devil, as they say, is in the details. Apparently you can’t just buy the minoxidil treatment, you have to buy three products that come in a kit: Vitadil 5A, Nutrisol-RM, and Cortex Enlarger. Only the Vitadil 5A contain the active drug. The kit costs $160 plus about $20 for shipping for a 2 month supply. Let me crunch some numbers and see if that’s a good deal.

Scalpmed: smart shopping?

I’ll assume that all three of the products in the kit are of equal value, even though I’d expect the drug product to be more expensive. With that assumption, the Vitadil product costs a third of that $180, or about $60 out of your hard earned cash for a two months supply. That’s about $30 per month. You can buy a 6 month supply of Minoxidil on Amazon.com for $38. That’s only about $6.00 per month. So not only is Scalpmed charging you 5 times more than you should pay for a Minoxidil product, but you have to pay ANOTHER $120 for the other two products in their kit that you DON’T really need. So really you’re paying about $90 per month for what really should cost you $6.00.

Scalpmed: superior science?

Ok, clearly this is NOT a good deal. But is it possible that Scalpmed is selling some kind of special version of Minoxidil that works better? While there’s no information on their website to indicate that’s the case, the rumor on the ‘net is that Scalpmed may be combining minoxidil with tretinoin (aka Retin-A).  We have no way of knowing if this is true or not, but there is some research on the combination. According to some studies, this combination can increase penetration of the minoxidil and result in even greater hair growth than minoxidil alone. But even the best studies (like this one from Seoul National University College of Medicine) indicate that the only benefit of this combination is that a single dose of the minoxidil-tretinoin mixture works the same as a double does of minoxidil alone. So let’s say that this research works out, you could cut your minoxidil cost in half. But remember, Scalpmed is already charging you 5 times more plus the additional $120, so you’re still losing money with this product.

Finally, the other issue with the minoxidil-tretinoin combo, according to studies like this one, is that it causes scalp eruptions and irritation. So given the marginal benefit and the potential side effects, using the combination hardly seems worth it. Maybe that’s why none of the drug companies have pursued this approach.

The Beauty Brains bottom line

IF (and that’s a HUGE if) Scalpmed can produce clinical data that indicates their product is safe and that it works better than Minoxidil, then they might be worth considering. But I say skip Scalpmed, buy some Minoxidil, and tell your husband to take you to dinner with all the money you saved. (You could always try Toppik Hair Building Fibers!)

Click here to see how Scalp Med compares to another male hair loss treatment, Procerin.

Click here to get Men’s Rogaine Extra Strength 5% Minoxidil Topical Foam Hair Regrowth Treatment

Gail’s guard is up: My hairdresser assured me that Nioxin would make my thin, fine hair stop falling out so much and appear thicker. So far it just seems finer and thinner. (She insists that I need to use the Therapy conditioner as well as the shampoo.) What do you know about Nioxin?

The Left Brain responds:
Nioxin’s line of shampoos, conditioners, and treatments is an interesting example of a cosmetic product that has a reputation for having drug benefits. If you do a quick web search of Nioxin you’ll find numerous sites commenting on its ability to slow hair loss, increase hair growth, inhibit DHT (one of the causes of thinning hair) and make hair grow thicker. As we’ve blogged before, if a product really did claim to do any of these things it would have to be a drug and would require FDA approval.

Hair today, gone tomorrow

But if you go to the source and look at Nioxin’s website, there is no direct mention of any drug benefits. In fact, they are very careful to tell you that their product is NOT a drug and that it does not grow hair. What do they say? The Nioxin story can be summarized in three basic points: 1. DHT is linked to thinning hair. 2. Nioxin helps remove DHT. 3. The Nixon system reduces the appearance of thinning hair. Specifically their website says:

9 out of 10 people perceive a thickening effect
when using the daily 3-part system.*

*Independent Market Research conducted among consumers who perceived themselves as having fine, normal to thin-looking hair.

Deciphering Nioxin’s clams

What does this mean? They’re not claiming their product grows hair or even that it stop hair loss. They’re not even claiming that the product makes individual hair strands thicker. First, they’re just claming that DHT is linked to thinning hair which is true. Second, they say their shampoo removes DHT. This is true as far as any shampoo will remove any DHT that’s present on the scalp in sebum. Third, they are claiming that 90% of the people who used their shampoo, conditioner and treatment perceived a thickening effect.

Since the 3 part system includes a leave in treatment that contains various proteins, and glycoproteins and other film formers, it’s likely that people are perceiving a thickening effect just from the ability of the product to provide a mild styling effect. In other words, if the product leaves a coating on the hair that stiffens it, it will look and feel like it has more body and will therefore be perceived as thicker.

The Beauty Brains bottom line

Nioxin, like Scalp med, is a good example of why you have to read claims very carefully so you understand what’s REALLY being said and so you aren’t fooled by what the advertiser is implying. (You could always try Toppik Hair Building Fibers!)