My Facial Hair Started Growing Faster, Just as I Started Losing More Scalp Hair!
Dear Doctor.
I have been slowly losing my hair for some time now. I am 30 years old and have been on finasteride for a few years. I have always lacked a lot facial, chest, and back hair. Most of my peers have full beards and tons of hair on their chest while I have only a little bit.
In the last year, I have noticed that my facial hair has been growing in quicker (not thicker), instead of taking a week to 10 days to grow in, its been coming in at 3 days, and as a result of that I have been losing hair faster now. I am no doctor, but couldn’t there be a correlation between facial hair growth and hair loss?
Thank you kindly. God bless
I do not believe facial hair has any correlation of scalp hair in terms of growing or balding.
Finasteride does not affect facial hair. It only affects scalp hair (mostly on the top crown area). Rarely I have heard a few patients (under 10 in the last 10 years) report less body hair growth from finasteride use.
Finasteride definetly affected my facial & body hair growth.
I think the reason that it goes underreported is that it happens slowly & subtley so people don’t notice it (or perhaps don’t even care)
When I stopped Propecia it took about 3 weeks until I started to notice it growing back much thicker than before. DHT is clearly a very strong promoter of body/facial hair (even after the male body is fully developed) this is known. Surely almost every man taking a DHT inhibitor will experience some body hair reduction, so long as the drug is functioning correctly for them?
It would all depend on the sensitivity of the hair to DHT and the genetic level of DHT that interacts with these follicles I’d assume. You have men with very high DHT levels who have no hair loss and no particularly high level of body hair. I think most men, myself included, can see a slight softening of the beard hair during the first few months of propecia use. But I continued with propecia and my body seemed to adjust and my beard growth is the same as normal now.