Before you can deal with hair loss properly, it helps to know exactly what you're dealing with. Most male hair loss follows one of three patterns, and each one tells you something slightly different about what's happening, how it's likely to progress, and what to watch.
It also stops you misdiagnosing yourself, which is more common than you'd think and occasionally means men spend two years treating the wrong thing.
Pattern 1: the receding hairline
The classic. Recession starts at the temples, carving the hairline back into an M-shape while the middle holds on longer.
On the Norwood scale, the standard 1 to 7 grading of male pattern loss, this is the Norwood 2 to 3 territory where most men first notice something is genuinely happening rather than just changing.
Cause: DHT sensitivity concentrated in the frontal follicles.
What to know: the front of the scalp is generally the most stubborn area to regrow, in every treatment category. Frontal follicles respond less reliably than crown follicles. That's not a reason for despair, it's a reason for urgency: the hairline rewards early action more than anywhere else, because holding what you have is far easier than getting it back.
Pattern 2: crown thinning
Loss starting at the vertex: the spiral point at the back of your head.
The particular cruelty of crown thinning is that you can't see it. Most men discover it via a photo someone else took, a changing-room mirror at a bad angle, or a barber saying something with the best of intentions. It can be well advanced before you know it exists, which is why so many men end up taking overhead phone photos every few weeks with the front camera and a look of grim concentration.
Cause: the same DHT sensitivity, concentrated at the vertex.
What to know: here's the good news. Crown follicles tend to respond comparatively well to treatment across most categories, better than the hairline does. Catching it early via those monthly photos is genuinely useful rather than just anxiety-inducing. Monthly, same light, then put the phone down.
Pattern 3: diffuse thinning
No dramatic recession. No obvious bald spot. Just density falling gradually across the whole top of your head.
Diffuse thinners get taken least seriously, by other people and often by themselves. Your hairline looks intact. Your crown has no hole. From the front you look fine, and everyone tells you so. Meanwhile your overall volume has quietly halved and you can see scalp under any bright light.
Signs: scalp visible under overhead or bright lighting. Hair that won't hold styles it used to hold. Ponytail-thin texture if you wear it longer. Photos that look fine head-on and alarming from above.
The important caution: diffuse shedding is the one pattern that genuinely might not be androgenetic. It can also be caused by telogen effluvium (stress, illness, surgery, crash dieting, typically kicking in 2 to 3 months after the trigger), thyroid problems, iron deficiency, vitamin D deficiency, or certain medications.
So if you're diffusing, get bloods done before assuming it's pattern loss: ferritin, thyroid function, vitamin D, full blood count. It's the one pattern where a GP visit genuinely changes the answer, and treating hormonal thinning when you're actually iron-deficient means fixing neither.
A note on the Norwood scale
Useful shorthand, and worth not treating as scripture. It maps typical progression, not your progression: plenty of men skip stages, stall at one for a decade, or don't fit the pictures at all. Diffuse thinners in particular are badly served by it, since the scale was built around recession and vertex loss.
Use it to communicate with a doctor or a clinic. Don't use it as a countdown clock. Nobody's hair reads the diagram.
Why the pattern matters less than you think
Here's the reassuring bit, and it's the actual point of this article.
All three patterns of androgenetic hair loss share the same underlying driver: genetically sensitive follicles miniaturising under DHT. Different postcode, same burglar.
Which means the core response is identical whichever pattern you have. Reduce the DHT pressure. Support the follicles. Act while miniaturisation is still early, because shrinking follicles recover and dormant ones largely don't.
The pattern tells you what to photograph, what to expect in terms of response, and whether you should get bloods done first. It doesn't change the mechanism you're fighting.
That's what our Hair Growth Softgels are built for: 300mg saw palmetto, shown in research to help reduce DHT levels by up to 30%, plus 400mg pumpkin seed oil, the exact dose linked to a 40% increase in mean hair count over 24 weeks in a 2014 randomised placebo-controlled trial.
Whether you're a Norwood 2 watching your temples, squinting at your crown in a changing room, or a diffuse thinner nobody believes, the mechanism is the same, and so is the earliest and easiest move against it.