ScalpMED is a company that makes a wide range of products claiming to help users of both sexes regrow their hair. They sell everything from dietary supplements, to shampoo, to topical spray solutions.
In this article we’ll review the ingredients in various ScalpMED products to determine whether they’re likely to be effective for regrowing hair.
Grow My Hair For Men Review
ScalpMED’s dietary supplement for men is primarily composed of a blend of vitamins and minerals.
Riboflavin, niacin and biotin are all B-vitamins. The first two are not commonly included in hair loss supplements, and we can’t find any research suggesting they’re effective.
Biotin actually does have some research backing its efficacy for hair loss as we referenced in our Prose review, but only in patients with documented biotin deficiency.
For those patients, the 900 microgram (mcg) dose in Grow My Hair does appear to be effective, based on a medical review of biotin supplementation for hair loss published in the Skin Appendage Disorders journal.
Zinc is another active ingredient in Grow My Hair, and it’s been proven to aid hair regrowth in patients with zinc deficiency but not in healthy adults. The above-linked clinical trial used a dose of 50 milligrams (mg) per day, which is significantly higher than the 15 mg in this supplement.
We can’t locate a medical study suggesting a 15 mg dose of zinc is effective for hair growth in any population, so we’ll consider this an ineffective ingredient.
Similarly, we can’t find any medical studies suggesting selenium is effective at all for hair regrowth.
The final listed ingredient in this supplement is a PhytoComplex Blend at a total dose of 435 mg. This is a relatively low dose for a blend with 10 ingredients, meaning each ingredient only averages 43.5 mg.
Saw palmetto, one of the ingredients in the PhytoComplex Blend, was found to demonstrate modest hair regrowth ability in a medical review. However the minimum dose was 100 mg, and doses ranged up to 320 mg, which is higher than the average ingredient dosage in Grow My Hair’s blend.
Overall, while some of the ingredients in this supplement appear effective for hair loss, we find that it’s overall poorly formulated and wouldn’t recommend it. Several ingredients appear to have no demonstrated efficacy for regrowing hair, and even the effective ingredients appear underdosed.
Grow My Hair For Women Review
ScalpMED’s product targeted to women contains the exact same ingredients at the exact same dosage as the Grow My Hair For Men supplement.
This is a really strange marketing decision; we’ve never actually seen a company sell two individually-branded supplements with the exact same formulation.
This shows that ScalpMED isn’t critically examining medical research to formulate a targeted solution based on sex, because the biological causes of hair loss between the sexes can differ.
Several high-quality hair loss supplements we’ve previously reviewed had different formulations for men and women. The Nutrafol ingredients examined in our recent review of that supplement brand had a higher dose of saw palmetto in the product for men than that for women due to the antiandrogenic effect of this ingredient.
We would not recommend ScalpMED’s Grow My Hair For Women product, since it has the same formulation as their product for men which we already reviewed as ineffective.
Questionable Medical Research
ScalpMED has a page on their site called “ScalpMED In-Vitro Study” highlighting research they’ve apparently funded. They do not publish the full research document, nor do they state where users can access it, nor do they even state the company they hired to conduct the research, mentioning only that the study was “performed by one of the largest Dermal and Transdermal testing laboratories in the world”.
We find this to be a huge red flag for a few reasons. First, we always find a lack of transparency to be ethically questionable. If you actually funded this research, why not publish it in full and detail the company you partnered with so consumers and researchers can analyze the full set information?
Second, by only showing the conclusion of the research which is favorable to their brand, but not sharing any of the research methodology, the page looks more like marketing material than true clinical research. It’s marketing under the guise of “science” and “research” which we disagree with ethically.
We recommend avoiding companies that claim their products are proven to work, without publishing any legitimate proof their products are proven to work.
Lack of Published Ingredients For Various Products
ScalpMED’s website fails to publish ingredients list for various products at the time of writing this article, including their “Thicken My Hair” shampoo, their “Repair My Hair” conditioner and their “Cortex Enlarger” hair spray.
Not only is this another ethical issue, but it’s truly a consumer safety issue. It’s totally unacceptable for cosmetic brands to fail to publish ingredients, because consumers can have allergies or other health concerns that require them to be aware of the ingredients in a product prior to purchase.
In our opinion, failing to publish an ingredient list on their website for many of their products is a total failure of basic business responsibility, and another reason to avoid this brand entirely.
Better Alternative
We recently reviewed a cosmetic brand called Prose which we would recommend over ScalpMED. We have no affiliation with Prose nor do we make any money for recommending their products.
Prose has a hair supplement called Root Source which is backed by medical research and which we find to be a superior formulation to ScalpMED’s supplements.
We also found in our Prose review that the ingredients the brand used for their cosmetic products were high-quality, and were listed transparently on their website unlike ScalpMED.
