The Best Shampoo for Balding: Top Picks for Thicker Hair

What’s the Best Shampoo for Balding Heads?

Shampoos can perhaps provide your hair with a little kick when you’re experiencing thinning hair or balding. But how do you determine where to look and which shampoo to use? If companies can promise you a miracle in a bottle, it is useful to understand what to look out for and what to steer clear of.

The main headline is that using a shampoo isn’t going to grow your hair back magically. Since it doesn’t have a long contact time with your follicles, they’re unlikely to have a major impact if you’re balding. The benefit of shampoos is that they can help cleanse your scalp, reduce inflammation, and support other therapies to treat hair loss, encourage results, and improve hair thickness.

In this article, we’ll take a look at some of the best shampoos for balding heads and how they can promote your hair growth. We’ll also let you know how Hairy Hair can help if you’re struggling with balding.

What to Look Out For in Shampoos for Balding Heads?

Finding the best shampoo for balding heads means knowing what shampoos can really do to help your situation.

Sebum Management

Shampoos are apple first and foremost to ensure your scalp remains clean. Keeping your scalp healthy is necessary to regulate your sebum (natural oil of your hair). Being at balanced levels is crucial to the healthy growth of the hair.

Too much sebum can not only make your hair look and feel greasy, but also clog the pores on your scalp, inhibiting hair growth. On the other hand, if there is too little sebum, your hair will be dry and more prone to breakage. Shampoos work to balance your sebum production, so knowing what kind of problems you’re having will help you choose an appropriate shampoo for the job. 

Even if your hair is on the greasier side, you don’t want to go for a shampoo that will be too harsh and strip your hair of all the benefits that sebum provides. A clarifying shampoo will help

maintain your scalp health without dehydrating it after washing. If your hair is on the dryer side, look out for milder formulas that won’t dry out your hair.

Thickening and Volumising Formulas

Alongside keeping your scalp healthy, some formulas temporarily boost thickness and volume after each wash. While they don’t offer a long-term solution to balding heads, they can improve how full your hair feels in the short run. They might sound similar, but volumising shampoos lift hair while a thickening shampoo aims to add width to each strand.

Dandruff Control

Hair loss can be accompanied by a variety of other conditions, including dandruff. Antifungal ingredients in shampoos, such as ketoconazole, not only tackle those pesky dead flakes of skin but also have anti-androgenic effects. This means that they work to inhibit the conversion of testosterone to dihydrotestosterone (DHT). But what is DHT?

The hormone is the one that shrinks your hair follicles so that your hair grows thinner and weaker. The follicles eventually stop growing hair altogether, causing permanent hair loss where the follicles cannot be encouraged to create new hair. Anti-DHT ingredients like ketoconazole prevent DHT from binding to our hair follicles, so that it won’t stick to our follicles.

What are the Best Ingredients for Hair Loss Shampoos?

The best shampoo for you depends on why you’re losing your hair or experiencing balding. However, there are some ingredients you should look out for when shopping around for a good hair loss shampoo that can help prevent hair loss.

Minoxidil

You’ve likely heard of minoxidil taken as medication for hair loss in a spray serum or foam form, but do you know it can be incorporated into shampoos as well? TGA-approved medicated minoxidil shampoo can treat male pattern baldness (androgenetic alopecia) and is often recommended alongside other medical treatments, which can likely be the reason behind a growing bald patch on your crown.

Minoxidil is applied in many treatments for hair loss. It widens scalp blood vessels as a vasodilator. Growth within resting hair follicles is stimulated by the increased blood flow, and they are nourished with more oxygen and vitamins to grow healthily. 

The shampoo has to be used frequently to take effect, but according to Drug Design, Development, and Therapy, most users begin seeing results in 3-4 months.

Medicated Dandruff Shampoo

Alongside the ketoconazole shampoo we mentioned above, other medicated dandruff shampoos can help tackle hair loss caused by seborrheic dermatitis and dandruff. Both of these scalp issues lead to itching, redness, and flaking, which can often be treated with proven ingredients in medicated shampoos.

This inflammation can lead to bald spots growing, and medicated shampoos containing ingredients like selenium sulfide and pyrithione zinc can boost your scalp health.

These over-the-counter shampoos can help improve your itching or flaking relatively quickly, within just a few weeks. Other benefits, like more voluminous and thicker hair, take a while. If you are fighting scalping or heavy flaking and the over-the-counter medicated shampoos are not successful, you may require a prescription-strength shampoo to correct the problem.

Natural Ingredients

Not all hair loss shampoos are laden with chemicals. A vast range of botanicals and herbs are used in hair growth shampoos to help support your scalp. These include caffeine, essential oils, and melatonin. The ingredients have shown positive results in studies like this one from Skinmed, which found that rosemary oil had a similar effect to minoxidil. 

But examining these studies, the ingredients aren’t tested within shampoos. That’s because they exist in lower concentrations than are used in the studies, so it’s not clear to what extent the shampoos are effective relative to ingredients taken in isolation.

Coal Tar Shampoo

Similar to medicated shampoos, coal tar shampoo will relieve inflammation, but it is intended for the treatment of psoriasis. While it will relieve itchiness, flaking, and redness, it also has side effects.

Side effects are irritation, sun sensitivity, and bad odour. Depending on how severe your condition is, 0.5% and 1% solutions are available, and according to Cutis, they can help both oily and dry-haired individuals.

What Should You Avoid in Hair Loss Shampoos

Not only is it good to understand what to look out for when choosing a hair loss shampoo, but it is equally beneficial to understand what to avoid. There are quite a few very potent chemicals that can irritate and inflame, thus worsening your balding problem, which is worth noting when selecting a shampoo. Some of these are:

• Sulphates
• Fragrances
• Formaldehyde
• DMDM hydantoin

How Can Hairy Hair Help with My Hair Loss?

A basic, overall shampoo will not do much for baldness. Being aware of the ingredients to search for, either to increase volume or the illusion of fullness, can conceal the hints of thinning. Other products may aid in the increase of nutrient delivery to follicles or interfere with DHT attachment.

Hair loss shampoos for balding do have their limitations as a treatment, however. Because they only touch your scalp briefly, hair loss shampoos for balding are best used as an ancillary treatment as part of a larger routine. This would mean that you need to get enough vitamins and minerals through nutrition and treat the root of your shedding by seeking advice from a board-certified dermatologist.

Call Hairy Hair when you’re ready to take action against your hair thinning today. Our unique solution provides you with a balanced answer to shedding by helping to improve nutrient delivery and inhibit DHT levels. Tackling hair loss in a balanced manner may give you a better chance to stop thinning, stop future shedding, and recover the hair that you’ve lost.

All you need to do when you’re ready to start is fill out a short online questionnaire. Once we have your information and know more about you and your baldness, we’ll pair you with an Australian doctor who is an expert in hair loss and create a customised treatment program for you. After they’ve reviewed your information, they’ll call you to review the plan with you, and your treatment will be prepared to be shipped right to your door.