Shedding hair with whispy tips and hicker roots [PIC]

I don't know the answer to your question; I would *think* that it's always best for the root to be thickest, since that's the newest growth, but I just don't know.

Did finasteride alone work for you to halt/improve regrowth? At the moment my problem is thinning roots (still miniaturizing I think!) and thicker tips.

I'm giving up hope that it's working. Did it somehow work for you or did you start minox because it didn't work at all?

My situation was kind of complicated. Everything was fine and dandy for the first 6 months.. I seemed to be maintaining no problem. Then, I came back to school after Christmas and got my first haircut real short. I noticed some thin patches on the top of my head. Over the next three months or so I felt like the hair on the top of my head had thinned out a fair amount. During this time, most of the hairs I would shed in the shower had thinner and less pigmented roots and normal looking tips. I am sort of convinced it was a kind of TE because just prior to this period of "thinning" I had started a crash diet where I reduced my daily calories by about 40%. I had also been on and off a number of medications, and I had a ton of stress from my professional school and this girl I was after.

So in March I started minoxidil and in May I upped my dose of generic fin to 2.5mg at the request of my doctor, who told me that generics generally do not work as well. He told me to take half a pill of the generic each day until I run out, and then to start taking a quarter of brand name Proscar a day from then on. He said "Every time I switch a patient from brand name to generic, they lose hair. Every time. They just don't seem to work as well". This actually SAVED me a ton of money.. I only spend $12 now for an entire year worth of brand name Proscar, where as before I'd spend about $100 for a years worth of the generic fin. Win win situation for me. Canadian prescriptions work so weirdly sometimes.

Fast forward to today, my hair is practically normal again. I seemed to have recovered 100% of whatever thinning I had seen in those three months starting in january. I hope it was a recovery from the TE, as I started eating my normal diet (I'm bulking again), I'm off all those extra meds, I bagged that girl after all (she's my gf now, **** yeah), and school is out for the summer. Everything has just lifted off my shoulders. The density is back up top and the corners of my hairline are filling in with a ton of little dark hairs. I still shed some hairs that are thin and less pigmented at the root.. but I'm shedding a lot more hairs that are thicker at the root and thinner at the tip! I honestly am not convinced the thinning root hairs demarcate miniaturization (my hair didn't miniaturize in those three months.. the hairs all looked normal but there were just less of them it seemed. As though I'd lose hairs in the shower every day and they wouldn't grow back in!). I have a feeling that in some people, as hairs transition out of their growing phase there is less pigment activity. I have looked at the root of these hairs under a microscope and they are not THAT much thinner than the rest of the shaft.. they are mainly just less pigmented!

Here is proof! I shed this hair in the shower today. From naked-eye inspection, the root looked much thinner and less pigmented than the tip! Well, let's take a look at the hair under 500x digital USB microscope. I've bent the tip around so that it is right next to the root in the picture:



What do you notice? The root and tip are the SAME thickness. The shaft diameter has not thinned, even though it looks like it has at first glance. What has actually happened is that the pigment has completely drained from it as the hair entered resting phase! So I do not think this is miniaturization. I think it is just a fact of our physiology.

Now look at this. Here is another hair that I shed in the shower today. This is the kind of hair I was talking about in my original post at the top:



What do you notice? The root is both THICKER and MORE PIGMENTED than the tip now! This is a fairly recent kind of hair that I am shedding. I am hoping this is a good sign.