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• ALCOHOL BASED LOTIONS AND HAIR LOSS

• David Tse, HairSite Editorial - 8/27/98

• HairSite

Lately people have raised concerns about alcohol and hair loss. Alcohol (ethanol) is probably the world's most popular solvent. It is a very potent vehicle for dissolving both organic and inorganic substances and can act as an effective carrier that transports these substances to cells.  A study conducted by the University of Michigan in 1995 concluded that penetration of minoxidil increases with increasing ethanol fraction in the solution. Penetration peaks when solution is made up of 90% ethanol. For details, see HairSite's LIBRARY.

However, as Dr. Razack puts it: "everything in medicine is a trade-off". In fact, some have suggested that long term use of alcohol can have a drying effect to your scalp and perhaps even damaging to hair follicles as well as scalp tissues. Just like alcohol can dissolve any organic and inorganic substances, it may also dissolve the integrity of scalp tissues and hair follicles if used repeatedly over time. A perfect example would be the so called "minoxidil burn" associated with long term use of minoxidil topical lotion. "Minoxidil burn" are usually characterized by sypmtoms such as itchiness of the scalp, redness, excessive flaking, scabs and other scalp irritations. Many attributed these symptoms to the fact that topical minoxidil is formulated with at least 50% alcohol (ethanol) and long term use of topical minoxidil is bound to generate these undesirable side effects.

On the other hand, some argue that alcohol (ethanol) has been used in almost every fluid preparations in the world for many many years already and it has been known to be generally safe. My feelings is that while this is true, I have not known any other alcohol based products that would require such a constant and continuous application as topical minoxidil. People losing their hair are instructed to apply topical minoxidil twice a day for as long as they want to keep their hair, which of course means for life. We are practically putting alcohol directly on our scalps twice a day every day and I simply have a hard time convincing myself that such a frequent application of alcohol would not damage my scalp tissues at all.

I conducted a research on all topical treatments formulated for hair loss and not surprisingly, almost all of them contain alcohol. The only exceptions are 1) Crinagen -  their labels specifically indicated that it is not formulated with alcohol, and 2) Proxiphen - a cream based topical treatment for hair loss.

If you have any comments about this topic, please email me at HairSite@aol.com

Also, for more discussions about alcohol based lotions and hair loss, please check out DISCUSSION GROUP topic # 97.