Do beard oils / minodoxil actually work?

[farmerteds]

I would love to have a mustache, want the freedom of having a good bear if possible.
I don't grow hair on my cheeks, but grow a decent bit on my neck and sideburns. Absolutely not rocking that style.

I can grow long mustache hairs, but they're so spread out that there is more skin than hair even after months. Eventually I need to shave it because it looks rough.

I'm 21. Not sure how much this is going to change. Would beard oils help at all? Does minodixil help with mustaches?
How is beard club's products? I've been seeing them everywhere.

 

[silverlifter]

Not sure this is the best place to ask about growing whiskers, as most of us are devoted to removing them...

One thing I can tell you is that, as you get older, hair will grow everywhere but where you want it to. Ears, nose, all of the places you don't see on Insta

Welcome to B&B!

 

[TOVT]

Back in my big beard days, I had a big beard and long hair like a movie character.

A few younger men asked how I grew such a big full beard.
They asked if I used a special beard oil or took special supplements.
I told them and anyone who asked about how I got such a big full beard, 'I just don't shave.' Are you growing a beard? 'No, I'm just not shaving.'

Sounds like you are not very hairy, which is good, but bad, if you want to grow a beard. Your spread out hairs are unlikely to fill in close to as much as you desire.

I'd advise taking up being clean-shaven, regularly. You could probably obtain marble-face perfect shaves easily.

If you think there is a supplement or product some company is selling to help your beard fill out, ask yourself why they don't market that stuff to bald men. Would there be bald men if there were a pill, cream, oil, or supplement to reverse it?

 

[BigJ]

Not sure this is the best place to ask about growing whiskers, as most of us are devoted to removing them...

One thing I can tell you is that, as you get older, hair will grow everywhere but where you want it to. Ears, nose, all of the places you don't see on Insta

Welcome to B&B!

+1! Yes indeed! My goal is to remove whiskers!!

 

[emwolf]

Not sure this is the best place to ask about growing whiskers, as most of us are devoted to removing them...

One thing I can tell you is that, as you get older, hair will grow everywhere but where you want it to. Ears, nose, all of the places you don't see on Insta

Welcome to B&B!

Also as you grow older a lot of hair turns gray in places you'd never expect.

 

[farmerteds]

Dang.

It is easy for me to be clean shaven. I shave once or twice a week and look just about clean shaven all the time.
Really think a mustache would improve my look. I'd rather be bald with a beard than the other way around.

Guess it just ain't meant to be.

One more question though. I let my mustache grow for about two months, are there hairs that take longer than two months to notice? Wondering if I suck it up and just let it go for 6 months or so, what are the chances more hair would fill in? Probably not enough to satisfy, but i heard some people comb it over and make it look thicker.

 

[bakerc7]

Not sure this is the best place to ask about growing whiskers, as most of us are devoted to removing them...

One thing I can tell you is that, as you get older, hair will grow everywhere but where you want it to. Ears, nose, all of the places you don't see on Insta

Welcome to B&B!

Sometimes I look like I have a beard. Nope, just haven't trimmed my ear hair! I can handle all the other excess hair.

 

[C Elliot]

I would love to have a mustache, want the freedom of having a good bear if possible.
I don't grow hair on my cheeks, but grow a decent bit on my neck and sideburns. Absolutely not rocking that style.

I can grow long mustache hairs, but they're so spread out that there is more skin than hair even after months. Eventually I need to shave it because it looks rough.

I'm 21. Not sure how much this is going to change. Would beard oils help at all? Does minodixil help with mustaches?
How is beard club's products? I've been seeing them everywhere.

Biochemically speaking, yes, they work.

But they need hair follicles to act upon, that's why, for instance, you can't recover hair in the head areas that have gone bald for a long time, only recent losses, as those still have functional follicles to stimulate.

In general, we all have hair follicles almost anywhere in the skin, though they vary greatly between individuals and between body zones (think how nearly all men grow some kind of beard and most everybody grows hair in the head/armpit, respectively). The lip region is one of those regions that has a denser distribution of follicles, and the product should act on them. If you already have a thin number of whiskers, the medicine will help them go from the thin facial hair we have in places like our foreheads, to actual thick beard hair. But there's a limit to what you'll achieve, with some people responding better than others. That varies due to how the cells in the skin/follicle interpret the signal (minoxidil), some respond vigorously, while others do weakly (like with any medicine, some people can respond to treatment or not, with some drugs being effective in more people, others only on select individuals, while some people are allergic to well accepted drugs). It is hard to predict how well it will work for you specifically, even though in general minoxidil tends to work on everybody, to different degrees.

Moreover, the stimulus must be supplied constantly. So, if you grow the moustache you like, you can't stop applying the cream, or new hair that grows will gradually revert to the original appearance, and once the hair falls off (and all hair naturally falls off, even beard) all you'll have is the hair you would normally produce in the zone.

I would recommend you check with a dermatologist for them to look at your skin and see if, and how much, you'd benefit from the use.

Also, you're 21, believe it or not, your body is not quite fully done with the changes of puberty, so there's still the possibility that your beard will thicken up. In fact, even setting puberty aside, the male hormonal make-up ensures an androgenic effect on the beard of most men throughout their lives. This is easily observable and easily misinterpreted, as people tend to say that if you shave often your beard grows thicker. That's not the case, all that happens is, you cut the hair in the middle, so the tip is already as thick as it was when it points out of the follicle, plus the continuous stimulus these cells receive make the hair they produce ever thicker. Even someone who never shaved a day in their life will have a thicker beard hair when they're 40 vs when they were 20 (in most cases anyways).

Again, I cannot stress enough, before trying any solution in your face, consult a dermatologist (or multiple, some doctors are utter morons that only know how to follow the same formula for everybody) make sure you find someone who addresses your particularities and is able to explain to you what they are prescribing, why they recommend X or Y, and why not Z, and makes you aware of all the avenues available for you to achieve what you desire. This is super important, because if you put something in your face that causes you serious damage, you're likely to regret it for life. I am not a doctor, and even as a medical student I have not taken dermatology yet. I'm sharing what I studied of minoxidil when my friend and I wanted to use it years ago and I did some research (plus his dad is a dermatologist, hence why we had easy access to tons of free samples of the product, enough to consider the possibility of using it for prolonged periods as it would be at no cost).

(Anecdotally, I didn't use it for more than a month, not enough to see results, and I was just trying to cover patches in an area I don't grow hair in the back of my head, so not a place I see much. He used it for longer, and said he stopped because he couldn't be bothered to wear gloves, and the follicles in his fingertips were starting to respond as well)

 

[C Elliot]

Back in my big beard days, I had a big beard and long hair like a movie character.

A few younger men asked how I grew such a big full beard.
They asked if I used a special beard oil or took special supplements.
I told them and anyone who asked about how I got such a big full beard, 'I just don't shave.' Are you growing a beard? 'No, I'm just not shaving.'

Sounds like you are not very hairy, which is good, but bad, if you want to grow a beard. Your spread out hairs are unlikely to fill in close to as much as you desire.

I'd advise taking up being clean-shaven, regularly. You could probably obtain marble-face perfect shaves easily.

If you think there is a supplement or product some company is selling to help your beard fill out, ask yourself why they don't market that stuff to bald men. Would there be bald men if there were a pill, cream, oil, or supplement to reverse it?

As for this: there are actually many treatments that work and are advertised towards bald men.
First, some people don't mind being bald. Lots of people don't care much about their appearance, especially within the male population.
Second, we have:
Pills - finasteride works at preventing hair loss for most men at a risk of alopecia (I myself have been taking it for 7 years), some report side effects, including impotence (especially after suspending the use after many years), but all related trials have been inconclusive.
Topic solutions (balms/sprays/oils) - that's minoxidil for you, as long as the hair follicle is still there, they can revert hair loss. If there's no follicle, they won't work. Besides that, we also have a variety of treatments including lasers (yes, they can be used to permanently shave or protect your hair, depends on type/frequency/intensity, light can do many things when you find the right kind).
Surgery - we have hair transplant for the people who can't be covered by the previous methods, as they both require people to have the follicle to begin with. Surgery involves getting skin with hair follicles from elsewhere (generally the lower parts of the head) and transplanting (grafting) them in the region where you wish to have hair growth again. Since the skin these follicles come from has a different cellular composition to the bald area, they respond to the balding stimulus (don't ask me to ellaborate on this, cause I really don't know what it is or how it works) differently. Basically since it didn't fall to begin with, it won't fall now in the new placement. Hair transplant surgery has become very sophisticated and good surgeons can provide a visual effect akin to natural, but that's a matter of skill, technique, and available resources.

What we don't have is a cocktail that stimulates new follicle growth, or, if we have anything that causes it, it's also highly carcinogenic, because growing new follicles involves creating thousands of new cells, through mechanisms of cell signaling that require minute precision, differ from person to person (often just in intensity and sensitivity, but sometimes also in the stimulating molecule altogether) and are not, as of yet, fully understood. But rest assured, as soon as scientists figure out how to do that without (extreme) side effects, you'll absolutelly see it marketed. (If medical marketing is allowed in your country, lots of places forbid certain services from publishing advertisement, like lawyers and doctors.) For now, this "miracle" cure doesn't exist, and I don't know how far along the knowledge [of the pathways involved in developing it] we are, but I'm sure there are millions of dollars going into its research, because the market for plastics/beauty is a highly profitable one.

 

[C Elliot]

Dang.

It is easy for me to be clean shaven. I shave once or twice a week and look just about clean shaven all the time.
Really think a mustache would improve my look. I'd rather be bald with a beard than the other way around.

Guess it just ain't meant to be.

One more question though. I let my mustache grow for about two months, are there hairs that take longer than two months to notice? Wondering if I suck it up and just let it go for 6 months or so, what are the chances more hair would fill in? Probably not enough to satisfy, but i heard some people comb it over and make it look thicker.

From a personal perspective: DON'T.
I know very few people whose looks improve by adding a moustache. Being clean shaven might not seem like your cup of tea, but that's human psychology, we are bound to want things that we cannot have. It actually seems that people want things precisely because they can't have it. I say it's part of what keeps us moving, makes us feel alive, for better or worse.

 

[NickCutlip]

Welcome to the forum !!

 

[Dave himself]

Hi and welcome to B&B. Some great information on this thread already.

 

[Eric_75]

Hello and welcome to B & B!

 

[psfred]

Nothing is going to make you grow hair in placed you are genetically not going to.

That said, I could not grow a beard until I was almost 22, had a bald patch on one side beside my moustache that went all the way down to my chin, but not on the other side. It evenually filled in, but I do not have a dense beard, and at 67, probably won't.

If there were a magic hair tonic I would not be bald, lol.

Be happy with what you have and what you are, trying to make yourself different that your genetic makeup doesn't work no matter how much energy you put into it.

 

[MrTiggywinkle]

There is a tiny amount of scientific research which shows that minodoxil can help with facial hair, and apparently the success rate increases significantly if you also use a dermaroller two or three times a week.

I know this because I thought about it recently and even ordered all the stuff from the big online supplier starting with an "A". However, when I read the instructions it said that you have to use minodoxil twice a day, basically for the rest of your life. It will take several months of twice daily treatments for benefits to be seen, and if you ever stop, all the benefit will be lossed, though again it will take a few months for that to happen.

In the end I thought it was too much effort, expense and commitment, especially if to get the best results you have to roll needles over your face every other day. Thankfully "A" has a very flexible returns policy!

I agree with others who say celebrate what you have naturally and find the best way to wear that.

 

[Dave himself]

Hi and welcome to B&B.

 

[gpjoe]

Nothing is going to make you grow hair in placed you are genetically not going to.

This^^^

Your beard density cannot be altered with lotions and potions. Have a look at your family members for a clue as to what you may expect. You may strongly favor either mom or dad's side. For me it was easy...I'm almost a clone of my father.