SOS — My Hair is Dying!

“Evil ferking stuff! Never touching it again!!” — The words of one well troubled punter … My words, in fact, as I cut my losses and kicked a RiUP hair-regrowth formula addiction that was starting to possess my life.

Oprah land

Ok, before I get sued, I should state that there is no evidence to suggest that Japan's RiUP, a clone of the internationally available Rogaine/Regaine, is physically addictive. What it and its siblings can be though is a precursor to varying states of emotional addiction, aka OBSESSION! (Yes, the voice of personal experience speaks.) Also, despite being government approved, for a significant number of people, these and other hair loss products can be physically dangerous. Potentially even lethal. Kind of sinister, huh?

Well, maybe I do watch too much “X-Files”, but the world of hair loss is a bent one; weirder maybe even than daytime chat show TV. Let me show you. So, everyone let's hold hands... and if we all wish really hard… Zap!… well, look, here we are magically at the top page of the General Hair Loss Discussion forum of Regrowth.com. You can find sites like this all over the Internet, but Regrowth is my long-term fave for its, uh, dis-medical attitude. My first tear-stained post from when I had my RiUP meltdown still lurks here somewhere among the thousands of interwoven threads.

Occasionally though, the posts can leave you kind of cold. It really chills you down when you read a plea from a seriously traumatised person nearing the end of his rope — and obviously thinking about swinging himself from one. Hesitate before reading posts under member names like DyingSlowlyMaybe, DemiseofSanity and Morrissey-Fan. Yep, human drama, disfigurement, death — it's all here. I had expected most listees to be like myself: Old geezers in their 30s having trouble gracefully letting go of their youth. However, many of these hair losers are actually in their early 20s, with posters as young as 16.

This is also not a little frightening. Many of these kids are using combinations of several potent treatments for which there is little long-term medical information. As well as RiUP/Rogaine/Regaine, these programmes usually include Propecia, the other big seller, which manipulates testosterone, an important factor in muscle formation and bone density. Recent criticism of the American Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval process by, for example, medical journal "Lancet" has also raised doubts about product safety.

The shed

So, I guess now you want to know about my personal showdown
with RiUP. I was really stupid. I splashed out the 4,000-odd yen for
a bottle, committed myself to the six months the package insert suggested it would take to regrow the halcyon locks of my youth
and started dousing my mildly receding front hairline with the sticky stuff. I witnessed dramatic results after just two weeks — the growth along my hairline started to rapidly fall out. I tried not to freak, mostly because I couldn't quite believe what was happening, and mounted the Web search which became my portal to the netherworld of hair loss subculture.

From the sages who replied to my SOS's, I learned I was going through the "shed". This is one of the dread truths that regrowth formula companies do not adequately disclose: When people start with these products, they often initially experience, not hair regrowth, but hair loss.

Sometimes massive hair loss. Don't sweat it, said the dudes from the sites. It'll grow back. You gotta keep at it. So I did. In fact, it was all I thought about. OBSESSION! Until I began to put it together that whenever I used the RiUP, I felt certain… sensations, such as this phantas-magoric crawling feeling on my scalp, a strange tingling in my extremities and a dull spatial feeling around about where my brain usually was.

That was when I learned through Net research what many RiUP/Rogaine/Regaine users apparently already knew from first-hand experience: Response to these products is highly individualised, and for many people, they can cause side effects ranging from scalp irritation to dizziness to heart palpitations to permanent lack of respiration. This last side effect, also often referred to as "death", was made semi-official in a 2003 announcement by the Japanese government in which it cited a possible casual link between RiUP and the premature retirement to Heaven of three older users.

That was when I finally kicked off the RiUP. The end result has been the complete loss of all growth, save a few forlorn strands, in a one to two centimetre strip along my hairline. But I figure, hey, I can live with that. I actually feel pretty fortunate. RiUP's active ingredient is only one per cent by volume; the Regaine I almost bought the last time I was back home to the Antipodes was five per cent. I don't even want to think about how that would have fried me.

Losing in Japan

In case you hadn't noticed, hair worship is a major sociological operator in contemporary Japanese culture, and many men (plus not a few women) here are ready to faito for every last strand. If you are not convinced by all the middle-aged barcode comb-overs, just watch television for half an hour. If you don't see multitudinous ads for hair loss treatments such as Innovate, Success Flavacyte, Propia, Adaransu, Rive Nijuichi, Art Nature and, of course, RiUP, then you are probably watching NHK. Just don't swallow too much of what you see — accuracy in advertising is still an area with virtually no official patrolling. Lion Corp., for example, touts its Innovate as a triumph of cutting-edge genetic research, but the potion has been almost totally panned outside of Japan.
That's not to say things are much better elsewhere. The FDA has investigated thousands of claims for regrowth products.

Ok, so, is there anything that does actually regrow hair? Unfortunately, there seems to be no universally effective long-term solution. Although many people have claimed good initial results from products such as Rogaine and Propecia, these gains usually tend to reverse over time. Which begs the question: What's the point? Well, apart from the outright entertainment value, the point is probably the hook up doctors have established between balding and a number of important health issues. For example, DHT, the acknowledged Dr Evil of male pattern baldness, also plays a key role in problems as diverse as erectile dysfunction, prostrate cancer and even acne.

With balding receiving more serious attention from the medical community, there have been some steps forward on the crinkley road to hair Nirvana. One being the discovery that many "natural" substances can neutralise DHT, with the bonus that the meds developed from them have almost no side effects. Of particular interest to folks in Japan is the finding that soy beans may yield a powerful but safe DHT blocker, and simply eating enough soy products can help out a whole lot. Green tea is also believed to have hair growth, and anti-cancer, properties. Then there's Japan's favourite sociale lubricant: Beer. Recent research showing ingredients in barley stimulate hair growth suggests you can drink yourself hairy. If you really try.

Text: Kym Hutcheon