this post was submitted on 29 Apr 2026
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I was replying to @Quokka@quokk.au earlier but seemed to make sense to ask everyone here:

Is anyone on a hair regrowth journey here? Is anyone taking the combo in the title? I'm curious about a few things.

  1. Did you start finasteride at the same time as starting hrt? Given that I'm about to start HRT, I feel like i should wait to start fin for a few months ago I can tell what emotional changes come from HRT and what come from fin.

  2. Did you get the dreaded depression side effect from fin?

  3. How do you take them and how do you take your E? Is there any worry about hepatic stress from taking all of these orally?

  4. Any increased body hair growth? If so, even after laser / electro?

  5. How careful do you have you have to be with hair care? Are you sleeping in hair covers? Using expensive conditioners etc?

  6. Are you getting the results you want?

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[–] applebusch@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 19 hours ago

I'm taking all three. I started with valerate 5mg intramuscular once a week and progesterone 100mg orally daily. Switched prog to rectal after a month or two.

  1. Started finasteride and minoxidil orally after about 4 months. I get mine from hims.com because I hate going to the doctor. They have a compounded version that has both plus some supplements they claim help with hair growth. Other people I know started them even before HRT so it's really up to you when to start.

  2. It's really hard for me to tell if I got any depression from it. I was going through some really bad times at work in the months after I started and got some of the worst depression I've ever felt as a result. It got dramatically better after I quit, so I don't think it was really the finasteride causing it, just a shitty situation. I suspect its more of a cis man issue, like the lack of dht causes them to get depressed the same way we do from the lack of estrogen, but thats barely a hypothesis at this point because no one really knows why it causes depression.

  3. As I said intramuscular E, rectal prog, oral fin and minox. Not really worried because most of the stuff I take bypasses the liver. Highly recommend injections.

  4. I noticed a small increase in body/facial hair in the months after starting, but it was nothing major. I'm doing electro on my face so it doesn't really matter for that. minoxidil doesn't give you new hairs just enlarges the existing ones so if the hair is properly treated with electro the minoxidil wont matter. For body hair it seemed like just a minor setback for laser, which I'm doing on pretty much my whole body below the neck at this point, at least everywhere with hair dark enough to treat. I didn't really notice much shedding on my scalp but my hair wasn't very long when I started so there was less to notice anyway.

  5. Like the other person, I'm really not doing anything special. I use nizoral shampoo every once in a while when I feel like my hair is getting too greasy but otherwise I just rinse it with water. I get dandruff sometimes, but I also found a research paper that found ketoconazole shampoo promotes hair growth in combination with minoxidil. I doubt it's a huge effect but it's something.

  6. Pretty much yeah. My hair is much thicker than it was and has filled in a lot on the parts that had started balding. I know a lot of that is just estrogen so it's hard to tell how much is fin and minoxidil. I still have a bit of a widows peak and the formerly balding areas are still somewhat thinner than the surrounding hair. I got a Dr. Pen microneedling pen recently that I'm hoping will help thicken the thin sections and reduce the widows peak, but even if it doesn't work I'm very happy with the results I've gotten so far. Once it gets longer it will be hard to tell I have thinning at all unless you're looking for it. I used to buzz my hair and stopped at about the same time I started hormones so it will take me a while to have actually long hair. Both fin and minoxidil sre supposed to achieve full effect after about a year, and I've been on them about 4 months now, so there's still a lot of potential for improvement.