Affiliate disclosure

Right now, nothing on this site earns us anything. There are no affiliate links, no advertising and no sponsorship. The product links that exist are ordinary links and we get nothing if you use them. This page will say so plainly if that changes — it is generated from what the site actually does, so it cannot drift out of date.

The rule we hold ourselves to

A page may not earn from a claim it cannot source, and may never earn from a product it advises against. That is not a promise, it is a build step: every product we link carries the article code and the verbatim sentence its verdict came from, and the site refuses to build if that sentence is not really there, or if a product we recommend against acquires a paid link.

What we deliberately do not link

The test of a policy like this is what it costs. These are the products we cover and do not monetise, and they include every one of the items here that would pay the most. Each row is what our guide concludes about the product; where the reason we do not link it is something else — a statute, or a provider nobody has checked — the sections below say which:

• Hair transplant surgery — it moves the hair you have, and most patients stay on medication afterwards (DP10)
• Scalp micropigmentation — an illusion of density rather than hair (DP05)
• Spironolactone — not approved for hair loss, and prescribed for it anyway on good evidence (T04)
• Biotin supplements — no evidence of benefit in people who are not deficient (LN02)
• Blood tests you can order yourself — you can order these without a doctor, and that is the costly way to do it (DL02)
• Nutrafol — trials exist, funded by the manufacturer (LN06)

Prescription medicines

Finasteride and oral minoxidil need a prescription, so the money in them is a referral fee from a telehealth service rather than a sale. Referral fees are larger than product commissions, which is exactly why our doctor-first advice is printed above any such link and is never itself a link. For most people a generic prescription from their own doctor is the cheapest route, and the treatment cost tool shows the arithmetic.

Those referral links are addressed to readers in the United States, and they say so beside the link. In the UK it is a criminal offence to advertise a prescription-only medicine to the public, every EEA country is required to prohibit the same thing, and a paid link to a prescriber is advertising even where the guidance around it is not. This site is static, makes no external request and counts nothing, so it has no idea where you are and will not guess — the guidance stays visible to everyone and the two links carry the limit on their face. If you are outside the US, your own doctor prescribes the same medicines, usually for less.

Spironolactone, the medicine most often prescribed off-label for female pattern hair loss, carries no referral link at all. We have not confirmed which telehealth services actually prescribe it, and we will not name one on a guess on the page where being wrong costs you a consultation fee for nothing.

Blood tests

Our guides ask you to have ferritin, thyroid and vitamin D measured before you treat anything. That advice creates demand for a test, and for a while these pages carried links to three companies that sell one. They are gone. A US federal statute, 18 U.S.C. 220, makes it an offence to take payment in exchange for someone using a laboratory's services, and its safe harbour at 220(b)(2), for bona fide employees and contractors, is written so that it does not cover payment varying with the number of people referred — which is precisely what an affiliate commission is. There was no version of those links we could have kept, so the links went and every word of the advice stayed: test before you treat, ask your own doctor first because a test ordered with a diagnosis code is usually covered and one you order yourself usually is not, and check that whatever you buy measures ferritin, TSH and 25(OH)D by name. We are paid nothing whether you test or not.

Hair transplants and micropigmentation

A reader deciding whether to have a transplant is the most valuable click on this site by a wide margin, and it is the one we are most certain we will never sell. Paying or accepting a fee for delivering a patient to a clinic is a crime in the three largest US markets for the procedure: under Tex. Occ. Code 102.001 it is an offence to agree to accept remuneration for securing a patient, and that provision binds any person rather than only licensed clinicians, so it would be us committing it; under Florida's Patient Brokering Act, Fla. Stat. 817.505, the offence rises to a first-degree felony at twenty patients, which means the volume an affiliate programme exists to produce is what makes it worse; and Cal. Bus. & Prof. Code 650 makes the paying clinic's side of it unlawful. So the six guides covering surgical routes carry a block with no link in it, and the build fails if anybody adds one. Treat any "best clinics" ranking you find elsewhere as advertising unless it tells you otherwise.

What a commission never buys

An affiliate relationship never determines what a guide concludes. Several guides here recommend against products in categories we could earn from — most of the supplement aisle, and most devices sold for hair growth — because that is what the evidence supports. If a commission and the evidence ever point in different directions, the evidence wins and the link goes.

Advertising

There is no display advertising on this site. If that ever changes, this page changes with it in the same build.