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1/🧵Let's talk about the rosemary oil hype for hair growth. Many like @bryanjohnson & NootBro include it in their stack, but we think they could be wasting their time...

Network State solving hair loss💈👉 Join us on Discord: https://discord.gg/sNAm9QbfAz

2/🔍 A widely cited study compared rosemary oil to 2% minoxidil over 6 months. The catch? It used an undefined concentration of rosemary oil, a lower-than-standard minoxidil dose, and no placebo group.

3/📊 Let's look at the actual numbers from the rosemary oil study:

Rosemary Oil: Grew 6.8 hairs/cm² in 6 months
 
Minoxidil: Grew 2.3 hairs/cm² in 6 months  

Fwiw, factors like seasonality can be responsible for greater regrowth than this, which is not cosmetically significant.

5/🚩Even worse, we have reason to question the validity of the study’s methodology given they found no minoxidil regrowth after 3 months.

This contradicts numerous studies showing minoxidil achieves peak regrowth around 3 months.

6/🧪 What about rosemary oil's ability to inhibit 5-alpha reductase (5-AR)? One study showed 82.4% inhibition at 200 µg/mL in vitro. Sounds impressive, but... its oral bioavailability is only about 22.3%, meaning much of it doesn't even make it into your system.

7/⚠️ The concentrations you would need to ingest are unrealistic for human use. As one discord member put it: To achieve such 5-AR inhibition in the body, you would need to inject 1-10g per day. "Such doses could kill you”

8/🔬 Even if rosemary oil could inhibit 5-AR enough in follicles, it has lower specificity than finasteride, making it potentially more toxic, as it binds to several enzymes besides 5-AR.

9/🌱 This highlights a common issue with natural treatments: strong in vitro effects, but low potency, bioavailability, and potential toxicity make them unviable. It's why we develop targeted small molecules.

10/😂Don’t believe us? Hop into our Discord server full of hair research pros and ask around for yourself. Rosemary oil has become a joke of sorts…

11/🔚 The bottom line: While rosemary oil might have some minor benefits, it is ALAS not the hair growth miracle we’re searching for. 

Thanks for reading! Follow for more threads on hair loss treatments and promoting science-backed solutions.

4/⚖️ Context from a meta-analysis of 23 trials:

2% minoxidil: 8.11 (men) & 12.41 (women) hairs/cm² increases
5% minoxidil: 14.90 hairs/cm² increase in men

Given most AGA patients use 5% minoxidil, Rosemary oil's 6.8 hairs/cm² is an unfair comparison.