The answers to those questions depend on a few different factors. Several hair growth treatments on the market today have aggressive regrowth claims, while others have excellent customer reviews and success stories. Many even offer results that give drug-based solutions to hair loss a serious run for their money. The trick, however, is finding the right product for your needs and avoiding the low-quality products that flood the market.

Getting Results with Drug-free Hair Growth Shampoos

Several drug-free hair growth shampoos have been shown to work nearly as fast as their drug-based counterparts, but with several added benefits. The most obvious: if/when you discontinue use, you do not revert your gains. With drug-based solutions, once you stop the treatment, you’re likely going to lose all of your hard-earned results. A drug-based solution becomes a lifelong commitment whether you like it or not. Why invest so much time, money and energy into something that isn’t going to last?

On the other hand, with an effective drug-free hair growth shampoo, when you’ve achieved results you’re satisfied with, you can decide to stop using the product and know with confidence that the progress made towards thicker, healthier hair will not be unwound. Drug-free hair growth shampoos work almost as fast and just as well, and the results are sustainable.

How Drug-free Hair Growth Shampoos work

In looking to reverse or at least pump the brakes on your hair loss symptoms, it’s important to understand how your hair grows in the first place. There are three phases in the hair growth cycle: anagen, catagen, and telogen. The anagen phase is when your hair first starts to grow, and continues to grow around half an inch a month for an average of three to five years. Then, your hair enters the catagen phase, a short transitional period of around 10 days, before entering the telogen phase, when your hair eventually falls out. Each hair follicle goes through these three stages at different times. That way we don’t lose all of our hair at once!

Drug-free hair growth shampoos focus on hair that hasn’t grown yet, versus your existing hair. That’s why you’re not going to see results on the first day of use. Instead, you’ll need to wait until the next anagen phase of your hair growth cycle, typically  four to eight weeks, before you start to notice any change. You’ll need to ensure you’re using the same treatment regularly and exposing your hair to the active ingredients. An effective hair growth shampoo should produce functional and cosmetic improvements to the scalp and to the quantity and quality of your hair within four to eight weeks. You may start to notice reduced shedding after two to four weeks of use, but look for new hair growth in under eight weeks.

Key Active Ingredients to Look For

One to two months is the average amount of time an effective, drug-free hair growth shampoo should begin to work, but effective is the key word. A high-quality shampoo only works as well as the mix of active ingredients it contains. The higher the concentration of key active ingredients, the faster you’ll get results. There are a vast range of active ingredients in hair growth shampoos, some of which are more effective than others. Here are three growth compounds to look for on your next bottle of hair growth shampoo if you want to see real and fast results:

• Trichogen: This activates oxygenation and cellular metabolism to improve skin and scalp microcirculation;
• Follicusan: This improves the vitality of hair follicles and stimulates dermal papilla cells, which leads to better hair thickness and density;
• Pronalen: This improves both mitochondrial respiration and oxygen consumption.

There are many natural DHT blockers, such as L-Cysteine, Azelaic Acid, and Saw Palmetto extract that have been proven effective in fighting the male hormone that causes hair loss, while other natural ingredients are known to support healthier hair, including ginseng, amino acids, and vitamins B and E. Make sure to look for hair growth shampoos that contain these items. Critically, avoid any shampoos that have sulfates, parabens, phthalates, and silicones: these are cheap, harsh ingredients that can easily cause scalp irritation and diminish overall hair and scalp health. Any good shampoo will ensure that your hair and scalp regain their health. Non-drug solutions focus on creating a healthy environment for your hair follicles and thus, growth.

In a crowded marketplace with so many products claiming to assist in hair regrowth, you have to do your research. Legitimate sites will have disclaimers saying that drug-free shampoos are not regulated by the FDA, so the benefits cannot be guaranteed. However, that takes nothing away from their effectiveness.

If you see a hair growth shampoo that promises to regrow your hair in compromised areas in anything less than four weeks, be cautious. Hair growth shampoos can only work by focusing on new hair in the next anagen phase. That means there is no way they can be effective in less than four weeks.

Products promising these quick results are typically purely cosmetic in nature, and use ingredients like wax to make your hair look and feel thicker. But once you rinse it off, your hair will return to its normal state after just a few hours.

Every hair growth shampoo will have its own unique formula to help improve your scalp health and stimulate your hair follicles. Do your research to make sure you’re using a high-quality shampoo with the right ingredients to target your particular scalp issue.

Fighting Hair Loss at Its Source

Hair loss can be caused by different things in different people. Lifestyle choices, along with your genetics, play a key role in when and how you may lose your hair. If you drink, smoke, or eat a generally unhealthy and unbalanced diet, you could be increasing your risk factors. Your stress levels and the environment in which you find yourself can be contributing factors. Chemotherapy, post-natal shedding, and certain medications can also lead to temporary hair loss.

Your first step to fighting hair loss is to understand what caused it in the first place. That way, you can address the problem at its source. For instance, if you struggle with your diet and proper nutrition, you could not only try to eat healthier, but also find a shampoo that gives back the nutrients you’re lacking to your scalp. Knowing the root cause of your hair loss may help speed up your regrowth results.

When looking for the right hair growth shampoo for you, understanding its relevance to your needs and what it targets is key. Find a product that addresses a range of hair loss and hair growth issues, and avoid ones that don’t mention your particular issue. If you don’t know what some of the ingredients are, do your research before you put them on your head. This will help you avoid any unnecessary chemicals, or even possible allergic reactions.

Use Customer Reviews to Make Informed Choices

Hair loss can be devastating for both men and women of any age. Try to resist the urge to grab the first product off the shelf that promises the quickest results without doing your research first.

One of the best ways to find the right hair growth shampoo for you is to look at product reviews by customers. You can typically find these on the product’s website itself, or on shopping sites like Amazon, which may be slightly more objective. Always look for reviews that are collected and published by a 3rd-party platform like Yotpo or Bazaar Voice. You want to be sure the reviews you see are impartial and unedited, outside of the brand’s control, in other words. Take the time to get a sense of the public’s reaction to the product. Understand how long the results will take by looking at past users’ experiences. Look for clinical studies and scientific research on the key ingredients.

Regrowth and positive results can vary by person and by the products they choose. But where a product has overwhelmingly positive success stories, you’re heading in the right direction. Where you see only a few examples of success and a range of negative comments, you will know to steer clear. In the end, the truest test of effectiveness will be to try the product for yourself.

Choose the right shampoo based on its healthy and all-natural active ingredients, such as those found in Veta. These products do work on thinning and shedding hair. And if you’re wondering, “How fast will I regrow hair with a hair growth shampoo?” Well, that again depends on the cause of your hair loss: genetics, lifestyle choices, environmental triggers, etc... but also on the product’s composition and concentration of active ingredients. Veta has the highest concentrations of both Follicusan and Trichogen, two of the most innovative and breakthrough hair growth compounds available to science. For this reason, it’s functional benefits and efficacy remain industry standards in the non-drug hair loss space.