Here's the thing that tends to get lost while you're busy keeping an eye on it: your hair is going in a shape. That shape is the most useful piece of information you have, because it tells you which treatments have a chance of working on you and which ones never could.
Why male hair loss follows a map
Nearly all of it is the work of one hormone, called DHT. Your own body makes it, and it travels across the whole scalp. Wherever a follicle happens to be sensitive to it, it shrinks that follicle a little further with every cycle of growth. So what comes back is always a touch finer and a touch shorter than what went before, and the hair carries on standing exactly where it always stood, just thinner every time round.
Now, the part that decides everything else. The follicles at the back and sides of your head are genetically resistant to DHT. Same hormone, same head, and they simply don't mind it. Which is why male loss arrives with an outline to it: the temples go first, the front works its way back, a patch opens at the crown, and that band round the back and sides carries on exactly as it always has.
It has a clinical name, male pattern baldness, which you'll also see written as male pattern hair loss, and the word doing the work in both of those is pattern.
Picture two rugs in the same sunny room, one dyed with something that holds its colour and one dyed with something that doesn't. The same sun crosses both of them every afternoon, year after year, and one comes out pale while the other looks much as it did the day it arrived. The sun never chose between them. The dye did. Your scalp is that room, your follicles are the rugs, and DHT is the sun coming through the window.
The fork in the road: thinning, or gone
Every hair loss treatment for men sits on one side of a single line, so the first thing worth knowing is which side each part of your own head is on.
Look at each area of your head the way you'd look at a fire burning low. Where hair is still coming through, finer and shorter than it used to be, you've got embers. Something is alive in there, and embers respond to a bit of air and some fresh fuel. Where an area has gone smooth and stayed smooth, that grate has gone cold, and encouragement does nothing at all for a cold grate, because there's nothing in there for it to work on. The only way to have a fire in that grate is to bring one in.
So one kind of ground wants feeding, and the other kind wants hair brought to it. Every treatment there is belongs to one or the other.
Where the hair is still thinning: two ways to encourage it
The first of the two starts with a small sample of your own blood. PRP stands for platelet-rich plasma, and platelets are the part of the blood that handles repairs, so the sample is concentrated down to those platelets and put straight into the thinning ground. Follicles that have spent a long time under pressure find themselves surrounded by your body's own repair crew. It's painless, there's nothing to recover from, and £250 covers a session.
The other one works by light. Red light therapy appears on the price list under its clinical name, photodiode therapy, and it goes after the hormone rather than the follicle. A session is you and a specialised lamp, and its light breaks DHT apart right across the scalp, which lifts the pressure off every follicle still growing under it. Painless too, no downtime either, and £500 covers a course of six. It stands on its own perfectly well, and it sits beside PRP without any fuss, so either way round is a real option.
Both of those numbers live on this website rather than in an envelope handed over at the end of a meeting, for the simple reason that you can't weigh up a figure nobody has told you.
Where the hair has gone: what a transplant actually moves
Surgery asks three things of a head, and all three are questions about your map. It wants an area with an edge to it, because what a surgeon rebuilds is a defined shape: a hairline, a temple, the crown. It wants that area to have finished moving, because loss still travelling will simply carry on travelling around whatever new hair goes in. And it wants a good band of hair round the back and sides, because every follicle a surgeon moves is lifted out of that band.
Then think back to the rugs, and to the one thing you could actually do about them, which is move them around the room. Lay the colour-fast one down where the pale one was, in the same sun as ever, and it still doesn't fade. It brought its dye with it. Follicles behave in exactly that way, and it's the whole reason a hair transplant works at all: hair taken from the back and sides carries its resistance to DHT into its new position, then keeps growing there permanently, as your own hair.
That happens in one surgical day at our CQC-registered Leeds clinic, six to eight hours of it under local anaesthetic, with follicles lifted one at a time and set one at a time, somewhere between 3,500 and 4,000 of them, at angles matched to the way your hair already grows. It costs £2,500, and everything sits inside that figure: the grafts, the PRP that follows, the aftercare kit and the review at twelve months. The hair page lays the day out in full, and what sets the price explains why UK quotes for the very same operation land so far apart.
When you're standing at both ends at once
This is the part of the map that catches men out, because male loss almost never arrives everywhere on the same schedule. Your temples can have settled years ago while the crown is still thinning away quietly behind you, and those two areas want two different things on the same head.
Happily, they go together well. PRP is included with the surgery anyway, because it helps the moved follicles heal and settle in, and the light sits alongside it just as easily. So for a good many men the honest plan comes in two halves: encourage the ground that still has something growing on it, and rebuild the ground that hasn't.
Why the thinning stage is the one worth catching
You may have spotted the asymmetry in all this. Encouragement only has something to work with while the follicles are alive, and surgery only has somewhere to put hair once an area has settled into a shape. So the ground where hair is still coming through is the ground where your choices live, and it stays that way for exactly as long as something is still growing there.
There's no rush in that, only a reason to look properly while looking still tells you something useful. And looking properly includes the entirely real possibility that you like the map you're on. Plenty of men have a good look, decide they're happy as they are, and get on with their lives, and nobody here is going to try to talk them out of it.
So what is the best hair loss treatment for men?
The honest answer is that it depends which part of your own head you're asking about. For an area still thinning, PRP and red light have something to work with. For an area settled and bare, moving follicles is what puts hair back on it. And for the very common case of both at once, it's some of each, in a sensible order.
All of which starts with somebody actually looking at your scalp: how far the front has travelled, whether the crown has opened, and how thick that band round the back and sides still is.
That's what the free consultation is for, and it happens on video: around thirty minutes, any evening from 6pm, with the team that would treat you. They'll put a name to what's happening in each area and tell you straight which path suits it, and if nothing needs doing yet, they'll say so rather than find you something.
You've almost certainly been running your own quiet survey for a while now: the hand pushed back through the front, the extra second spent under a different light, the shampoo you switched for reasons you didn't say out loud. Half an hour with people who look at heads all day will tell you more than another year of that, and the half hour is free.
Book the free consultation and have your own map read properly.