How to read a label

What the label actually promises

Hair-growth products are sold in a language built to sound like a promise while carefully not making one. Once you can read it, the shelf gets much easier to navigate — and much cheaper.

“Helps reduce hair fall”

Helps, with something unstated. Reducing hair fall can mean the product conditions hair so less breaks off while combing, which is real but is breakage, not hair loss. If your hair is coming out at the root with a small white bulb, a conditioner cannot change that.

“Promotes” and “supports” growth

These are the words used when a claim cannot be substantiated. A cosmetic that could actually regrow hair would be regulated as a drug. If a label says promotes, supports, revitalises, stimulates or nourishes, read it as: not proven to grow hair.

“Clinically tested”

Tested is not proven, and it does not say what the test showed or who ran it. Look instead for a named ingredient at a stated concentration and a published trial. Almost nothing on a supermarket shelf will have both.

Before-and-after photographs

Different lighting, different parting, dry versus wet, a fresh cut, and hair pushed forward in the first picture and back in the second. None of that is necessarily dishonest, but none of it is evidence either. Photographs taken months apart also cannot separate the product from the natural recovery that was happening anyway.

What is actually proven

For pattern hair loss there are only a small number of treatments with real evidence behind them, and they are medicines rather than cosmetics — which means a doctor, not a shelf. For shedding after illness, childbirth or a crash diet, nothing needs to be bought: it resolves once the trigger passes. For a deficiency, correcting the deficiency works and nothing else does.

Everything else on the shelf is hair care. Good hair care is worth buying — it makes the hair you have look and behave better. It is simply not treatment, and the label is written so that you will not notice the difference.

A fair test

If you want to try something, take one photograph in the same light and the same parting each month, and give it six months. Buy the small size. And be suspicious of any product whose evidence is a testimonial from someone who was paid to give it.