I shaved my head in July.
Not because anything went wrong, and not because of the toppers, before anyone panics on my behalf. I’d been thinning for years and my ends were faded, tired, hanging on out of politeness. I got sick of growing hair out from a starting point I already hated. So I took the whole lot off and started from zero, which is either very brave or very impatient depending on who you ask (my money’s on impatient).
Which means right now I’m in wigs full time, my scalp is more visible to me than it’s been in my adult life, and I’ve become the kind of person who reads the back of a serum bottle in the middle of the afternoon.
And my hair grows slowly. Like, geologically. So anything I put on my scalp, I’m going to be waiting a long time to find out whether it did anything at all.
LOOKFANTASTIC are running a hair fall push right now, built around the line that hair loss affects over 15 million UK adults and is one of the most under-talked-about beauty concerns. Which, fine, they’re selling serums. But they’re not wrong about the under-talked-about bit, and it’s nice to see a big retailer say it out loud instead of filing us all under “volumising”.
So here’s the shelf. What I’m looking at, what I found when I actually read the ingredient lists, and the ones on their list that I think are lovely products with nothing to do with hair loss.
At a glance
Aminexil, listed on ingredient lists as diaminopyrimidine oxide, is the anti-hair-fall active in both the £52 Kérastase Genesis Sérum Anti-Chute Fortifiant and the £16.99 L’Oréal Paris Elvive Growth Booster Scalp Serum. The two also share niacinamide, ginger root extract and piroctone olamine, which stops being surprising once you know L’Oréal owns Kérastase. The NIOXIN Anti-Hair Fall Serum takes a different route, built on caffeine, niacinamide, lauric acid and Sandalore, and Nioxin’s own product page carries a footnote saying it is not a hair regrowth product. Redken Acidic Grow uses azelaic acid instead of aminexil. None of these is a medical treatment for hair loss.
First, the thing nobody selling you a serum will say
Almost none of this is a treatment.
There’s a real difference between a product that changes what’s happening at the follicle and a product that makes the hair you already have look thicker, behave better, and fall out less in the shower because it isn’t snapping. Both are useful. They’re just not the same purchase, and the packaging blurs it on purpose. I’ve been through two full bottles of a hair serum that did absolutely nothing, so this is not a theoretical distinction for me.
Here’s my favourite bit of evidence for that. Nioxin, the brand this whole campaign is built around, puts a footnote on their own product page that reads: not a hair regrowth product. They said it, not me. I have a lot of respect for that footnote and I wish more of them carried it.
If you want the actual medical route, that’s a GP, a dermatologist, or a prescription. I’ve been down part of it, and I’ve written about what happened months after I came off minoxidil. I’m not a doctor and I’ve never pretended to be one. What I can tell you is what it’s like to be the person standing there with a thinning scalp and a basket, trying to work out which of these is worth the money.
I have taken it to a GP, by the way. And for a long while it wasn’t taken seriously. I had to advocate for myself, repeatedly, before anyone treated it as a real thing worth looking into rather than something I’d get over.
I’m saying that out loud because I don’t think I’m unusual. If you’ve been sent away and told it’s stress, or that it’s normal, or that it doesn’t look that bad from where they’re sitting, you’re allowed to go back. Take photos. Note when it started and what changed. Be the person who doesn’t drop it, because nothing happened for me until I was. And if you have just been handed a name for it, this is the post I wish someone had given me at that point.
Which is also why I’m careful about what I say a serum can do. The gap between “this made my hair look thicker” and “this addressed why my hair is falling out” is the whole reason that appointment mattered.
NIOXIN Anti-Hair Fall Serum
The one the whole campaign is built around, and the most honestly named thing on the list. Defence. Not regrowth, not reversal. Holding the line.
The actives are caffeine, niacinamide, lauric acid and a fragrance molecule called Sandalore, and the claim is improved hair anchorage in eight weeks, from a double-blind study on 120 people. Anchorage, note, not growth. Hair staying put rather than new hair arriving.
Nioxin have been the name in this category for years and their whole thing is treating the scalp like skin, which is the bit most of us skip entirely. I spent years conditioning lengths I was about to clip a topper over and doing precisely nothing for the skin underneath.
I’m not using it. I want to say that plainly, because a lot of the hair loss content you’ll find has been written by people who never opened the bottle and I’d rather not be one of them. It’s on my list, not in my bathroom. What I can give you is what’s actually in it and what the claim honestly says, which is more than most roundups will bother with.
If you want to read the ingredient list yourself, the NIOXIN Anti-Hair Fall Serum is here.
The £17 serum and the £52 serum have the same active in them
Right, this is the bit I actually got annoyed about, in a good way.
Kérastase Genesis Sérum Anti-Chute Fortifiant is the salon option on this list. L’Oréal Paris Elvive Growth Booster Scalp Serum is the supermarket one. I sat there reading both ingredient lists off LOOKFANTASTIC’s own product pages expecting to find the gap that justifies the price, and instead I found this.
Both of them list diaminopyrimidine oxide, which is the ingredient the industry calls aminexil, as the active doing the anti-fall work. Both list niacinamide. Both list ginger root extract. Both list piroctone olamine for the scalp. Same four things, in the same order-ish, in two bottles at wildly different prices.
Which stops being a mystery the second you notice that L’Oréal owns Kérastase. Of course the actives are the same. It’s the same lab.
Am I saying they’re identical? No. Neither brand publishes its percentages, the textures are genuinely different (the Kérastase is a jelly, the Elvive is a thin liquid you dose out of the bottle), and the Kérastase is a nicer experience in the way expensive things usually are. If you love it and you can afford it, buy it, and I mean that without a shred of sarcasm. I’ve written a whole post on which Kérastase lines are actually worth it when you’re losing your hair, so I’m hardly the person to talk you out of it.
But if you’re at the start of this and you don’t know yet whether you’ll stick with a daily scalp routine, spending £52 to find out you hate the texture is a rough way to learn. Start with the Elvive. See if you can actually keep it up for three months. Because that’s the real barrier with all of these, not the formula. It’s whether you’ll still be doing it in November.
Redken Acidic Grow Full System Scalp & Hair Serum
This one goes a different route. No aminexil. Instead it’s built on azelaic acid, plus caffeine and prebiotics, to rebalance scalp pH.
I made a small delighted noise when I read that, because azelaic acid is the ingredient I’ve written most about on this site, just never in a hair product. Once you accept that a scalp is skin it makes complete sense, and it’s a lot more interesting than another me-too aminexil bottle.
You can find the Redken Acidic Grow serum here if you want to compare the two approaches yourself.
The three on their list I’d skip
Color Wow Dream Cocktail. Genuinely lovely leave-in. Does nothing for hair loss. It’s a conditioning treatment that makes hair look glossier and behave, which is not the same job.
Dyson Supersonic Nural. It’s a hairdryer. A very good one that manages heat near your scalp, and if you’re already spending that kind of money on a dryer then the scalp-protect feature is a real point in its favour. But nobody’s density came back from a hairdryer.
Anything sold as “volumising”. Volume is a styling outcome. Density is what’s on your head. I’ve spent money confusing those two and I’d like you not to.
Am I being unfair lumping these in? A bit, maybe. They’re on a hair fall product list, so they’ve invited it.
What’s actually on my scalp
I should say this out loud because it changes how you read everything above. I like serums. I’m a big fan of them, I have several on the go at any one time, and I’m not going to sit here pretending I’m above the whole category.
None of the four on this list are what I’m currently using, though. It’s Philip Kingsley’s flaky itchy scalp toner, which I use for seb derm. The Ordinary’s Glycolic Acid 7% toner, on my scalp rather than my face, every so often when it needs it. And The Ordinary’s Multi-Peptide Serum for Hair Density and Scalp Support, which I keep buying for the caffeine and the peptides.
That last one is the bit worth sitting with. It’s £21.90, it’s a leave-in scalp serum rather than a face product doing a second job, and caffeine is right up the ingredient list alongside biotinoyl tripeptide-1 and acetyl tetrapeptide-3. Caffeine is one of the four actives in the Nioxin. I’m not claiming the formulations are equivalent, because I don’t know that, and neither does anyone reading an ingredient list at you on the internet. But if you got this far mostly because the prices made you wince, that’s where I’d start looking.
One more thing, and it only applies if you wear a topper or a wig, so skip it if you don’t. The single biggest change to how much hair I was losing had nothing to do with a bottle. I wore toppers near-daily from around 2020 and clipped into the same spots every single time. My scalp was sore. I lost hair from it, properly, before I caught what was going on. What fixed it was rotating where the clips go on every wear, and putting texturizing spray on the exact spots where they sit so they grip instead of sliding and tugging. That hair grew back. I got that from the topper community on Instagram, by the way. No hairdresser has ever raised it with me. Not one. The full version is in do hair toppers damage your hair.
How I’m shopping this
Everything above is on LOOKFANTASTIC, and my code LFTFNEVEEN gets 20% off full-price items, going up to 30% in their promo windows. It works on repeat orders, there’s no minimum spend, no expiry, and you don’t have to be a new customer. Full terms are on my LOOKFANTASTIC discount code page.
Worth knowing on timing: Redken, Kérastase and Color Wow all get 30% brand flashes at the Bank Holiday event from 26 August. If you’re not in a rush, that’s the week to buy.
FAQ
Do hair fall serums actually work?
It depends entirely on what you mean by work. Most of them reduce breakage and improve scalp condition, which means less hair down the drain. Very few change what’s happening at the follicle, and Nioxin’s own product page carries a footnote saying it is not a hair regrowth product. If the loss is hormonal or genetic, a cosmetic serum is not going to reverse it.
What is the difference between hair loss and hair breakage?
Breakage is hair snapping along the length, so you keep the follicle and the hair grows back. Loss is hair leaving from the root, and whether it returns depends on the cause. They look identical in the shower drain, which is why so many products blur the two.
What is aminexil in hair serums?
Aminexil is the trade name for diaminopyrimidine oxide, an ingredient used to help hair stay anchored in the follicle. It appears on the ingredient lists of both Kérastase Genesis Sérum Anti-Chute Fortifiant and L’Oréal Paris Elvive Growth Booster Scalp Serum, alongside niacinamide, ginger root extract and piroctone olamine, despite the large price difference between them.
How long does a scalp serum take to work?
Longer than you want. The clinical claims on these products run to eight or twelve weeks, hair grows around half an inch a month at best, and mine grows slower than that. Three months is the earliest you would fairly judge one. Take a photo at the start, because you will not notice gradual change on your own head.
Which scalp serum is best for thinning hair?
The one you will still be using in three months. Consistency beats the formula every time, which is why I would start with an affordable one rather than the most expensive bottle on the shelf, especially when the cheaper option lists the same active.
Does wearing a hair topper cause hair loss?
It can if the clips go in the same place every time. Rotating the clip positions on every wear and adding texturizing spray where they sit fixed it for me, and the hair I had lost grew back.
Does Nioxin work?
The NIOXIN Anti-Hair Fall Serum is built on caffeine, niacinamide, lauric acid and Sandalore, and the claim is improved hair anchorage at eight weeks from a double-blind study on 120 people. Anchorage means existing hair staying put rather than new hair arriving. Nioxin’s own product page carries a footnote saying it is not a hair regrowth product, so it is best judged as a cosmetic product for reducing fall rather than a treatment for the cause of hair loss.
