There are a lot of options when it comes to preventing, mitigating or even reversing hair loss, and whilst not every treatment will work for everyone, getting in touch with a pharmacist or trichologist will help you find the treatment you need to help.
One of the most commonly used hair loss spray products used today is minoxidil, often sold under the brand name Regaine but also available as a generic product as well.
Initially a treatment used to treat heart conditions much like sildenafil, it turned out to have a highly desirable side effect of helping to promote hair growth, to the point that for years it was one of the most popular off-label prescription medications in the world.
However, a remarkably large group of people first heard of minoxidil through, of all sources, an animated sitcom which had an episode dedicated to it.
Simpson And Delilah
The second episode of season two of The Simpsons, Simpson And Delilah is all about “Dimoxinil”, a suspiciously similar topical hair loss medication.
After bald patriarch Homer Simpson sees an advertisement for Dimoxinil and is immediately swept away by the prospect of reversing a bout of alopecia that has left him with just three hairs left at the age of 38.
In 1990, when the episode aired, minoxidil was only available on private prescription, was not available on the NHS and was extraordinarily expensive, particularly in the United States.
Sure enough, Homer finds out that the only approved non-surgical hair loss treatment available at the time was $1000 for six months’ supply, far too much for him and over ten times how much the equivalent treatment would be today.
He ultimately charges the Dimoxinil treatment to his employer’s medical insurance and starts to use it.
It works remarkably quickly, giving Homer a full head of hair seemingly within days. In reality, minoxidil takes around three months to start working, although this can vary between different people and some people have found it can sometimes take up to six months or as little as six weeks.
It also completely changes his life very quickly, and whilst some of this can be credited to the magic of television, feeling less self-conscious about your appearance and having higher self-esteem has been linked to greater performance.
The show heavily implies that this is the case, as whilst he got an executive promotion by chance due to a mandatory selection system at his workplace, he does start to impress people with the help of his assistant Karl (played by Harvey Fierstein) even if improvements at the Nuclear Power Plant are as much about Homer not causing any issues.
He even received a key to the executive washroom, becoming the favourite of his boss Mr Burns as a result of the confidence boost caused by his hair regrowth.
Unfortunately, Homer’s new “better life” quickly unravels as the “creative” insurance filing leads to Karl being fired after he takes the blame.
Worse, Homer’s son Bart plays with his Dimoxinil and accidentally spills it, meaning that he no longer even has the supply he used to. Without it, his hair quickly falls out.
This is not quite true; whilst you do need to apply minoxidil daily to maintain your new hair and continue stimulating the regrowth, missing a single day will not cause your hair to immediately fall out.
Then again, the episode had his hair grow to shoulder length in a day so either some creative licence was clearly taken or minoxidil formulations changed significantly after the drug patents expired in the mid-1990s.
Homer reluctantly prepares to give an executive speech, only to meet Karl again, who tells him that it was not the hair that made him successful, but the thick head of hair made him believe that he could accomplish all that he had in such a short space of time.
He goes into the auditorium, energised, and in a rather unfortunate twist, fails the speech, with executives murmuring that he does not even have hair and cannot therefore tell them how to run the Power Plant.
He ultimately keeps his old job due to Mr Burns’ sympathy as another person dealing with male pattern baldness.
The episode was remarkably influential, making a prescription treatment mainstream and letting people know that there was, in fact, an option for people managing hair loss that worked for many people despite having rather lofty promises.
Within six years of the episode, minoxidil became available as an over-the-counter topical treatment, generic formulations were approved and by 1998 it would become available without a prescription at all.
