A Chile Pepper Baldness Cure?

By Dave DeWitt

Alert readers will have noticed that I suffer from a tragic condition called alopecia, also known as hair loss, and specifically known as male pattern baldness. When I was a kid, my father would point out my bald maternal grandfather, David Austin, and warn me, laughing: "Your head is going to look like that some day." He was right, but what my father didn’t realize was that in 2004, buzz cuts and shaved heads would be in style, so I fit in just fine. Bald is beautiful, as the 20-year-olds say, heh, heh.

When I was researching The Healing Powers of Peppers, I read that chile peppers had a reputation for being a folk remedy for hair loss. Ever the skeptic, I wrote in 1998: "And chiles are reputedly a cure for baldness in the West Indies. Fiery hot chile oil is rubbed into the scalp and the resultant tingling is said to be the start of the hair-growing process. This makes some sense when we consider that capsaicin is an ingredient in a dandruff remedy called Denorex. Apparently the advertising agency for this product realized that the shampoo had to give the illusion of doing something when it was applied to the scalp. So, they suggested adding an irritant--in this case a small amount of oleoresin capsicum--and it produced the tingling sensation of the shampoo "doing something." But what is it doing? Are the capsaicin molecules gobbling up the dandruff flakes? I think not. And I don’t think that the capsaicin is growing hair, either." But maybe I was wrong.

Six years later, there are more claims involving capsaicin growing hair, especially when combined with minoxidil (brand name: Rogaine). Eager to go out of style and grow back a full head of hair, I began to do some research.

First, there are some products out there with dubious claims. The makers of Medici Wash & Grow Shampoo state: "In other laboratory tests, Dr. Caterina, MD, PhD, University of California, San Francisco, found that protons–positively charged hydrogen atoms–that are released by the cells in response to tissue injury as a result of an inflammatory response, amplified the effect of capsaicin on the receptors. As a hair growth stimulant, our Capsaicin PC formula has been found effective in not only cleansing the scalp, but stimulating existing follicles to grow." Observed Tom Haggerty of the site www.hairloss-reversible.com: "More scientific gobbledygook. The small amount of capsaicin in the shampoo probably wouldn’t be enough to stimulate the growth of one hair on a gnat’s head." Hmmm.

At the prestigious Graduate School of Medical and Pharmaceutical Sciences at Kumamoto University in Japan, an assistant professor conducted a study consisting of one person who had hair loss due to stress. This man ate six milligrams of capsaicin and 75 milligrams of isoflavone (an extract from bean curd) for two months and now his hair is "said to be growing normally." I’m certainly not a medical researcher, but I’ve never heard of a study conducted on just one person with no controls or placebos.

And researchers at the Department of Dermatology at the prestigious Wonju College of Medicine at Yonsei University in South Korea, removed the hair of the back skin of mice through "depilation" (hair pulling) and then treated the skin with a combination of capsaicin and monixidil for thirty days. Their study stated: "Therefore, it is concluded that the coapplication of capsaicin and minoxidil can grow hair quickly and steadily."

So, faced with the conflicting information, I decided to create my very own baldness cure in my laboratory–you know, the one with the stove and refrigerator--and do a study on myself. I used the following recipe.

Conclusion of the study: I’m going to need some heavy stress to get rid of all this hair.

Photos by Harald Zoschke, with a little help of Harald's favorite tool, Photoshop.

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