Been using topical finasteride for over a year now! Just to give some background, I never wanted to use finasteride due to the side effects. however, after a hair transplant I got shock loss and my surgeon recommended oral finasteride to me. The shock loss stopped and I grew more hair than ever with the combo on finasteride + hair transplant. Eventually about 8 months after using oral finasteride 1 mg I started noticing a lot of brain fog. TBH I got the brain fog immediately but decided I wasn’t going to stop until I had issues with libido changes which happened around 8 months after oral
Since I didn’t want to lose my hair again and go thru a terrible shedding phase I looked for topical finasteride. The first solution I used was Morf 5%, I got it off eBay. It was extremely oily and has a weird smell to it. I used it for 2 months and I started shedding again. It wasn’t working for me. HOWEVER, I decided not to give up and thought maybe I need to get topical finasteride prescriped and so I looked online and found carefirst pharmacy. They’re a compounding pharmacy in the US and have a bunch of hair loss solutions. You can use any compound pharmacy! Solutions vary though, and are not all made the same. They even make 15% minoxidil. So I tried just their topical finasteride solution for a couple of months and to my relief the shedding that started after getting off oral ( happening for 2 months now at the time) stopped. I never regrew my hair to the density that oral finasteride gave me, to be clear.
With that being said I do believe topical finasteride works you just have to find the right solution. There are many studies on topical finasteride so look them up. I used morf 5% because I found a study that claimed it worked. Maybe I neeeded to give it more time, idk but to me it wasn’t working. The topcical finasteride that I get from the pharmacy doesn’t smell, and dries extremely fast. Faster drying than foam roaring or even lipogaine if you’ve tried that. Recently I added latanoprost to my finasteride solution. Their site has MANY hair loss solutions so feel free to get a script and expirement.