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reify

Oi! Baldy

Just accept that it is part of life and of being male.

Its because we have testosterone.

save yourself a small fortune in hair cuts

Buy yourself some decent hair clippers

No 1, job done

If you want hair on your head grow a beard

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I'm sick of these people telling others people just accept it and shave it up. Most people look better with hair, losing your hair is a drastic change, for most people it takes years to cope with it and if someone want to go to treatment it's ok.

Preach on. If I’m going to lose any part of my body I’ve had for the majority of my lifetime it’ll be by my own choice thank you very much.

This, especially if it is early onset. I had a friend who lost most of his hair by the time he was 20 and it absolutely destroyed his confidence for many years

Years to cope? I fully accepted it, as my father and my grand father. Fighting against nature seems pointless to me.

Fighting against nature is sort of the main activity of humans.

Also, don't project your own experience on others.

I have better things to fight against than hair loss.

This is literally what body positivity should be about. Not supporting people dying from diabetes in their 30s.

I've always held the position that the further back my hair recedes the shorter i will cut it.

what I discovered was, this means I spend MORE on haircuts. because shorter haircuts require more frequent haircuts to maintain their neat look.

I'm pretty much at a point now that I'm just going to buy one of those head shavers to run over my head every morning. If it can work for Picard i can make it work for me.

I agree. The more the balding, worse a longer hair looks.

Totally agree. Most people DO look better with hair, not bald. Any tool that can visualize a non-bald person bald reveals how the person look may change from good to bad, and a lot of such persons are not that masculine or attractive when they're bald as they or anybody else might think. I could not cope with being bald, and the only thing that really helped me was FUE, nothing else. I'm really lucky to look younger than I might look in my 38, and I still have my hair on top of my head, not underneath being more attractive than having premature balding issues in 25-33.

Image is really a lot more important than conventional wisdom would say it is (and people would hope, since judging people subconsciously on appearance isn't very fair), and a lot of people get a long way based mostly on image. People who are perceived as more attractive really are treated better for no real reason apart from that, and there are negative stereotypes associated with baldness.

In fiction there are tons of evil bald villains, but not that many bald heroes - you've got The Rock, Jason Statham, who else? And when the heroic character is bald, it's almost always combined with being jacked and tough - whereas being fat or skinny and bald is almost always a negative. Think Baron Harkonnen or Blofeld.

So you're essentially saying, baldness doesn't really matter, but posture and overall good shape do.

Presumably, add clothes and manners and you're set, no matter if you're baldy or not.

Well, that also limits you to basically one style of looks. And that style is kind of hard to sustain, so if you don't really like it, it's a major PITA. Kinda surprised that Captain Picard wasn't mentioned though. He actually is a hero who is bald and not steroid-levels of jacked.

It's who came to my mind first.

Also, there's this gem:

At a press conference about Star Trek: The Next Generation, a reporter asked Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry about casting Patrick Stewart, commenting that "Surely by the 24th century, they would have found a cure for male pattern baldness." Gene Roddenberry had the perfect response.

"No, by the 24th century, no one will care."

(Via https://boingboing.net/2015/07/08/star-trek-creators-perfect...)

Which is absolutely bullshit. You’re not going to change millions of years of evolution by going to star fleet academy.

I’m bald and although I’m blessed with a great skull shape, and being blonde haired also works to my advantage, I would lie if I said I wouldn’t be more attractive with hair.

If I understood it correctly humans in Star Trek are evolved. We found our way and went ahead as a, more or less, post scarcity society.

> Which is absolutely bullshit. You’re not going to change millions of years of evolution by going to star fleet academy.

The very premise of the show is that humans found a way to mostly move past the worst parts of their nature. Not just in Starfleet, but in general.

At least wrt. outside differences, I suppose it gets easier in a world full of "human with rubber forehead"-looking aliens.

Would be curious to know what that way is, because it’s not exactly made clear in the show.

It's left a little ambiguous because obviously they don't know what would really work, but the timeline was roughly: WWIII -> Post-Atomic Horror -> First contact with the Vulcans, then the whole push into space getting humanity to pull together over the following couple of centuries would be when this happened. It wasn't just cultural stuff like caring about baldness, during that later period all sorts of things were solved, like hunger and various diseases.

Basically we had to hit our lowest point before we could get better.

Also presumably various other facial features that are more or less immutable.

My appearance is carefully refined to disappoint and frustrate people who expect me to care about my appearance. This optimizes for my time, and connection with people who are more interested in what I say and do. Oh, and low carbon footprint.

I have male pattern baldness, long hair (ends unceremoniously chopped once a month for easier brushing) and silly facial hair shaved once a week. Random t-shirts, thrift shop jeans, and technical outerwear, all worn until they start to disintegrate.

preach, brother

Reading this, I can't help but think that you probably spend more time on and care more about your appearance than random person. I hope the equation works out for you.

That being said, appearance is a disguise we choose -- wittingly or unwittingly -- and I think that's just fine.

There is also the argument that we owe it the world to be our best selves.

Beautiful people makes the world more beautiful.

> people who expect me to care about my appearance

You seem to care about your appearance a lot, and also seem to be putting a lot of effort into cultivating a particular image. There used to be a lot of punk rockers in high school who "didn't care about fashion" but somehow all dressed exactly alike and had very similar haircuts.

> but not that many bald heroes - you've got The Rock, Jason Statham, who else?

Can't forget Aang!

He's basically a monk. That's basically another category of people where it's acceptable to be bald.

> ”bald heroes - you've got The Rock, Jason Statham, who else?”

Bruce Willis was pretty great, and pretty bald, back in the day.

I think there's biological proof that baldness with men isn't that bad "image" wise.

As far as I know, baldness is with women and men... And the reason why you don't see many bald woman is..

>> whereas being fat or skinny and bald is almost always a negative

Being fat or skinny is under you control. Losing your hair (absent miracle cures) really isn't.

Everyone that looks good bald has otherwise ridiculously strong features. Ignore the movie characters for a moment

There is a lot of truth to this comic: https://imgur.com/J3FHs7J

There is. Dad-bod guy is attractive to some people; hunky guy has more universal appeal. Bald guys can be hot, but they've gotta work on themselves (just like the rest of us) if they wanna get there. But it's weird, when I try to imagine Dwayne Johnson or Vin Diesel with hair, they do lose a few points of attractiveness!

I've got freckles; they really work the same way. Got bullied for them all through childhood. Hot girls with freckles are hot and people love their freckles. Drab girls with freckles get picked on and their freckles are gross. In adulthood, nobody's picking on me for having freckles, but I hear how other adults talk about their attraction to other people. Fortunately I'm firmly middle aged so my prospects tend to be less focused on appearances by definition.

> “not that many bald heroes - you've got The Rock, Jason Statham, who else?”

Samuel L. Jackson (Nick Fury), Patrick Stewart (Picard, X-Men), Bruce Willis (Unbreakable), Tilda Swinton in character as the Ancient One, James Avery (Uncle Phil), David Suchet (detective Poirot), Thing (Fantastic Four), Draxx (Guardians of the Galaxy), Dr Manhattan (Watchmen), Lawrence Fishburne (Morpheus, The Matrix), Vin Diesel (Riddick, Fast and Furious), Kratos (game God of War),

> when the heroic character is bald, it's almost always combined with being jacked and tough

When a heroic character has hair they’re also often jacked and tough; that’s part of the hero type not the hairy type; plenty of characters are haired and wimpy losers.

I've been bald for 20 years now. Started losing hair when I was 19. I couldn't really care less at this point and probably wouldn't reverse it even if I could. Just rock a 5 o'clock shadow all over my head and love it, but man those first 3 years were absolutely brutal. It's a hard thing to cope with for any man. I wish there was a treatment for young guys out there, but I also wish we spent more research on more important things instead.

Why though? I started taking Finasteride, and so far with zero side effects my hair loss completely stopped.

Costs basically nothing and I like my hair? I wish there wasn’t this stigma associated with it and I would have started sooner.

Finasteride is scary bro, too many firsthand accounts of issues for me.

Say more please.

took 1 pill, pp fell off

tl;dr While it can have undesirable side effects, these are long-term. But these side effects make it a powerful nocebo for some people to the point where they almost instantly get side effects (nausea, anxiety, sexual dysfunction), despite that being pharmacologically improbable.

It's mostly nocebo, they read about it online for weeks and then try it, and at that point they are so psyched out that they keep watching for every little thing, effectively making it a self fulfilling prophecy.

I started dutasteride when I was 20 and have been on it for many years and it really stops hair loss, because my hair loss was very fast and aggressive.

So if someone after two weeks had their semen consistency change to be completely watery, would it be their eyes that produced the nocebo effect or? Or how is the doctor who went on it for a few months, lost erections, then gained them back after quitting explained by a nocebo?

Again, I've heard at least 5 of these first-hand, which is kind of wild for a drug I've probably only talked to 20 people about in total.

We're terrible at detecting changes over long periods of time. If anything I'd think long term users would be much more liable to bias.

Be careful though. It's found to probably cause suicidal thoughts to some people (myself included).

How do you know it's from fin? And are you sure it was caused directly and not from another side effect? Eg sexual disfunction.

I don't know, could be, but it was too weird because they came out of the blue and when I stopped it, they went away too. There was no sexual disfunction IIRC.

Could be unlinked, but for me it just wasn't worth the risk.

You can find various articles of you search the web for this btw.

Dutasteride is more effective and has less side effects :)

I'd be wary of claiming this. Dutasteride suppresses all three 5A-reductases, while finasteride only suppresses two.

I took finasteride for about 2 years then stopped as it did lower my libido. Which returned over time.

After another 2 years of stopping I haven’t noticed my hair loss starting again.

At least in my case it’s like a miracle drug with minimal side effects.

The side effects of finastetide can be pretty nasty, and you might not even notice you have them. You would expect it to suppress your natural testosterone production, which you’re not going to notice unless you ever stop taking it. It can easily reduce your fertility, which again you’re not going to notice unless you’re having trouble conceiving. The reduction in DHT can also have side effects that are far less visible than gynecomastia. It can cause ED, reduced libido, and mood disorders like depression and anxiety which you might not easily attribute to taking fin.

Unless you’ve had a lot of bloodwork and other testing done, it’s unlikely that you would know how you’ve been impacted by its side effects, and even if the impact to you is ultimately very minimal, a treatment that didn’t have these risks would be far superior.

Any exogenous hormone treatment (or treatment that interferes with the metabolism of hormones) is going to affect the natural functionality of your body in ways you probably don’t want it to. They’re all very risky and dependency forming. It’s almost not really true that these risks are side effects either, they’re just the expected outcomes of the treatment.

Finasteride does not suppress your natural testosterone production. Your free testosterone levels might actually be increased. As precursors are no longer converted into dihydrotestosterone but into testosterone...

I think you need to keep reading. Finasteride blocks the enzyme that converts testosterone to DHT, which initially raises your testosterone levels. Your body reacts to this by secreting less luteinizing hormone, which results in less testosterone production, and your test levels return pre-finasteride levels. This is the suppression of natural testosterone production, and is exactly the same reaction you’d get from directly taking exogenous testosterone. If you ever come off finasteride, your test levels will immediately drop, and may or may not ever return to normal. If you’ve been taking finasteride for a very long time, it would be unlikely for your testosterone levels to ever return to what they were pre-finasteride.

I see you added "which you’re not going to notice unless you ever stop taking it."

I didn't edit my comment if that's what you're saying...

Taking moderate doses of steroids is also massively beneficial in many ways, with the worst of the side effects typically occurring if you stop taking them. But a lifelong dependency on a drug with a long list of adverse side effects is not a good thing, especially when ceasing treatment has its own long list of potential side effects.

Finasteride does suppress your natural testosterone production. If you intend to take it every day for the rest of your life, and are happy to gamble that you don’t get any of the other side effects, then maybe you’re happy taking that risk. But this is clearly not an ideal treatment, and I suspect most people who are prescribed it aren’t properly informed about these risks.

I fully agree with the risk factor, I was even on it for some time and discontinued the use because of the risks involved. But the risks were (to my limited understanding) less associated with testosterone, but rather the decrease in dht. And the potential effect that it has on your sexual life

Yes, you're right about that. I'm just trying to note that there is no guarantee that ceasing treatment would reverse those side effects (if you happened to have them), or that it wouldn't create other also-bad side effects.

Hormone treatments are very scary, and I think people are far too casual about them. You usually take a hormone treatment to affect one thing that the hormone does, but it probably also does 100 other things that you might not want to interfere with, and those 100 other things probably also affect many other things downstream themselves. Your body probably also regulates production of that hormone in some way, so now you're also probably interfering with god knows what upstream from that hormone production. Some of these effects are well understood by medicine, but plenty of them aren't, and even for the ones that are, there's no way of predicting how you're going to react personally. They're a very blunt tool in that respect, and I think most people who take finasteride, or TRT, or birth control, or beta blockers, or even things like topical steroids aren't helped much to properly understand how they work, and all the ways the treatments can go wrong, including the ways that they can form dependencies on the treatment.

DHT is poison

If (adult) DHT was only bad, then you wouldn’t see any adverse side effects from blocking its synthesis. DHT is just an androgen receptor agonist, its effects in adult male biology are not understood very well, including the reasons why DHT blockers (absolutely do) cause a number of adverse side effects.

There have been a number of studies suggesting that DHT is neuroprotective.

Neuroprotection by dihydrotestosterone in LPS-induced neuroinflammation https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096999612....

Neuroprotection of dihydrotestosterone via suppression of the toll-like receptor 4/nuclear factor-kappa B signaling pathway in high glucose-induced BV-2 microglia inflammatory responses https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31876682/

Typo for DJT?

Sigh. I was hoping not to have to add a "/s", "jk", or smiley.

Idk what a DJT is.

Donald J. Trump.

I just started taking finasteride and it seems it has negatively impacted my arousal patterns. I am also transgender and taking estrogen (but no t-blockers, hence the finasteride) but I did not make any other med changes for a year when I started finasteride so the correlation feels pretty clear. I would rather not be taking it!

I wonder what the cancer rates are for people mixing up hormones like that?

I think estrogen increases my risk of breast cancer to that of a cis woman, but decreases some chances of testosterone related cancers. I really don't know much about this, but in general it seemed like I did not particularly have increased risks.

I hope it turns out well for you.

I thought after you take estrogen long enough you don't have to take t blockers or fin anyway? Once your body see's you have enough sex hormone doesn't it naturally stop T, even if the hormone is estrogen? (Sorry for the stupid question)

If you take a high enough dose of estrogen, generally referred to as estrogen mono therapy, it will knock down your T levels. But high estrogen levels have some risks as well, and different doctors have different preferred approaches. My doctor is willing to do estrogen monotherapy, but I would have to switch from oral pills to injections as the higher dosages taken orally would be hard on the kidneys. Before switching to injections, I just wanted to see how finasteride worked for me. It is okay, but not perfect.

It is hard to tell if what I am experiencing is a side effect of the finasteride unrelated to my T levels, or it is due to some reduction in the effects of testosterone because of the mechanism of action of the finasteride. If it is the latter, switching to injections and doing monotherapy to lower my T could have the same effects. The fact of the matter is the penis functions better with testosterone in my system but testosterone also leads to hair loss, so trying to get both is somewhat of an imperfect balancing act.

But hey, I'm having the best sex of my life and the people I am attracted to think I am hot as hell so I don't mind a little experimentation to see what works best! Actually its super cool what we can do with a little hormonal alchemy.

"High" E dosages enough to knock down your T are not that high at all. Also fin won't reduce your T, it might actually increase it, and by using fin instead of duta you still produce dht. Chances are you are still irreversiblly masculinizing if you are on a low dosage of E (including oral). Please consider an actual T blocker, and consider a suitable medication to help with erections.

Im not on a low dose, I take 8mg oral estradiol per day. It’s just not a particularly high dose, just the highest my doctor is comfortable giving someone orally. I don’t care about the testosterone in my system I only want to stop hair loss (I’m very genderfucked non-binary). It was my doctor from the UCSF Transgender Care center that suggested finasteride may have effects similar to that of reducing T (specifically a more estrogen dominant arousal style). I’m already on cialis and previously I’d take 5mg a day normally and 10mg on days where I would have sex, which is a pretty high dose. On finasteride I’ve noticed reduced erection performance even with 15mg cialis which is the most I want to take in a day (20mg is the maximum recommended daily dose).

Also I’m 39, so whatever masculinization I’m due for I suspect has all happened already.

Alternatively it might be worth trying sublingual, turning pills into stickies for extended-release direct absorption (https://stickies.neocities.org/stickies though I suspect the author dosed low), or switching/supplementing with other routes of administration (you mentioned injections).

> 8mg oral estradiol per day

You are never going to supress T with just oral E.

> Also I’m 39, so whatever masculinization I’m due for I suspect has all happened already.

It never ends.

If you feel like finasteride isn't helping much try dutasteride instead.

https://www.gov.uk/drug-safety-update/finasteride-reminder-o...

> Its because we have testosterone.

If you mean that men with baldness have more testosterone than men with hair and that due to the higher testosterone concentration men with baldness have lost their hair, I have to disappoint you: Men with baldness do not have a higher concentration of testosterone on average. The hair roots of men with baldness are more sensitive to testosterone, another cause of hair loss. In your context, men with baldness have another weakness. Sorry.

Some of us look more like Uncle Fester vs Patrick Stewart with our bald heads. Bring on the cure.

Despite hearing this feigned positivity forever, I have consistently been treated better rocking The Constanza than The Picard

Not quite so simple, sadly

I’ve been balding since I was 23 and trimmed my head for about 2 decades now. I can’t grow a decent beard for the life of it, but my eyebrows need regular trimming, so I am considering letting them grow for a magnificent comb over.

If you really want a beard, you can use minoxidil to PERMANENTLY increase your beard thickness.

If you combine it with microneedling, you can see incredible results in as short as six months.

Gonna be a decidedly "low-brow"(1) look. (Do it! :-)

(1): As in, very low forehead.

Agreed. Being self conscious about not having hair is much worse than the actual fact of not having hair.

how about no.

People do all kinds of things to look good. People dye their hair, put on makeup, wear lipstick, buy clothing that matches their personality whether that's high fashion or skater threads. You can usually tell every hippy by their clothing and often their hairstyle.

So why should hair be any different?

yeah, you almost definitely look worse without hair because almost everybody does, but just accept it and choose not to get it fixed. it makes all the other bald people feel better!

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