The Science Behind Alpha Serum: What's in It, and What Each Part Is For

Most hair serums are built around one active ingredient. Alpha holds five patented ones, and a long list of botanicals, antioxidants and peptides around them. Each one is there for a reason, and the reasons are worth setting out.

The five patented actives in Alpha were developed by specialist ingredient labs in Switzerland, France and Canada. Alpha is non-hormonal. It goes on the scalp, and it is not taken.

Thinning rarely starts in one place

Hair can thin because a follicle is genetically sensitive to a hormone, or because the growing phase is ending too early. Sometimes circulation at the root has fallen away. Sometimes the structure holding each hair in place has weakened, or the scalp has been under strain for years.

Thinning along the parting, thinning after a hard year and thinning where hair gets tied back tightly every day all begin in different places, and most people have more than one of them at once.

Some of what causes them is beyond what any serum can touch: what you eat, how well you sleep, how much strain you have been under. Those matter, and they are worth your attention on their own. What a serum can reach is the scalp itself, and everything the follicle does there.

That is the whole reason Alpha is built the way it is. A formula that reaches one of those causes leaves the rest exactly where they were.

In practice that means one step, not several. One bottle, once or twice a day. A routine that small is one you can actually keep.

A hormone called DHT, and what is in Alpha for it

DHT is a hormone the body converts from testosterone. Women have it too. Some follicles are genetically sensitive to it. In those follicles the growing phase gets shorter with each cycle, so hair tends to come back finer than it was.

That is one of the things behind a widening parting or thinning at the crown. In women the picture is less uniform than in men, and hormone levels are often normal. Sensitivity at the follicle itself is still the mechanism the research understands best.

The enzyme that turns testosterone into DHT is called 5-alpha-reductase. Ten of the compounds in Alpha are grouped in the formulation as DHT blockers. Capixyl and RootBiotec were both chosen for that enzyme, and Procapil carries a component aimed at it as well. Among the plant extracts, rosemary, red clover and polygonum multiflorum, also called he shou wu, have the most published work behind them on the enzyme itself.

The five patented actives

Each of the five is a named, patented complex, and each was chosen for something the others do not cover on their own.

None of the five was ever meant to carry the formula alone. Where two of them meet on the same pathway, they arrive by different routes, and that is deliberate.

Redensyl is the active people most often weigh against minoxidil. We have set that comparison out separately, including what the published evidence does and does not show.

See the Alpha Hair Serum

What holds a hair in, and what wears it down

A hair is held in place by the structure around the follicle. When that structure weakens, hairs come out earlier in the cycle than they should. You lose them faster than they grow back, and that gap is what the mirror shows.

Two of the peptides in Alpha have been studied for their part in that structure. Both sit inside the patented actives above rather than alongside them, working on more than one thing at once, which is true of several of the botanicals below as well.

Ordinary wear and tear works against that same structure. Pollution, heat and time all take a toll on living tissue, and the name for that damage is oxidative stress.

On the face, it shows as a loss of firmness. On the scalp, it affects the condition of the follicle and how well a hair stays put. It is slow and it adds up. Oxidative stress is part of why hair behaves differently at forty-five than it did at twenty-five.

Ten antioxidant actives are in the formula for that damage:

• a stable form of vitamin C
• green tea
• Chinese skullcap root
• centella, also called pegaga or gotu kola
• rosemary
• Japanese knotweed, for its resveratrol
• chamomile
• licorice root
• ginseng root
• Chinese arborvitae leaf

Ten of them, because the damage is slow and it never quite stops.

Seventeen botanical extracts, and why a plant rather than a molecule

Seventeen sounds like a number chosen to impress. It is worth explaining what those seventeen actually are, because the answer is more interesting than the count.

Four of those seventeen are inside the patented actives themselves. Redensyl is built around larch wood. Anagain comes from sprouted pea. RootBiotec is a basil root culture. Capixyl pairs red clover flower with a peptide. The plants here are not decoration around the science. In four cases out of five, they are the science.

The rest were chosen for three jobs.

Circulation: caffeine, butcher's broom root, escin from horse chestnut, ivy and ginseng root. Building a hair is demanding work. The cells that actually build the hair shaft divide faster than almost any others in the body, and that work runs on blood supply. Circulation to the scalp thins out with age. Carnitine is in there for the energy side of the same problem.

Comfort: centella, chamomile, and panthenol, which the body turns into vitamin B5 once it is on the skin. This matters more than it sounds. A formula has to stay comfortable enough to use every day, and people stop using things that sting.

History: he shou wu and Chinese arborvitae both have a long record of use in hair preparations in this part of the world. That is not evidence on its own, and we do not offer it as evidence. It is a reason to look at a plant closely, and both of these have since been looked at in published research.

So why use a plant extract instead of one synthesised molecule? An extract brings a family of related compounds where a synthetic brings one, and for several of these plants the work was done on that whole family rather than on one compound pulled out of it. An extract is harder to make consistently, which is why RootBiotec is grown as a root culture under controlled conditions rather than picked.

The base, which decides whether any of it arrives

An ingredient does nothing if it sits on the surface. A formula can look impressive on paper and still sit badly on a scalp. The base is usually the reason, and almost nobody talks about the base. Alpha is water-based rather than oil-heavy, so it absorbs cleanly and leaves hair the weight it was.

Meadowfoam seed oil is the one worth naming. It stays stable where most oils do not, and it carries the actives without sitting heavily on the scalp. It works alongside humectants, which draw water in and hold it there. Together they let a formula this dense go on every day without weighing hair down.

At once-daily use a 50ml bottle covers roughly two to three months, and there are larger and smaller sizes. You can read the full ingredient list on the Alpha Serum page.

It is lightly scented with santal, the sandalwood note. That is a decision about how it feels to use it every day. The work in Alpha is done by five patented actives and everything formulated around them.

Where Alpha does its work

Alpha works in the scalp, at the follicle and at the root. It is the ground a topical formula can cover, and a large part of where density is settled. One bottle, once or twice a day, covering several fronts at the same time.

If you are weighing the whole formula against minoxidil rather than one active against another, there is a side-by-side of the two products.

The rest of it stays yours: sleep, iron, protein, the strain of a hard year, how tightly you tie your hair back. A serum has no say in any of that.

One customer in Singapore put the shape of it better than we would:

Early-stage female pattern hair loss, along the parting line. Twice daily for two months, one bottle. Mild shedding in the first four weeks. Results differ from person to person.

There are more documented cases, sorted by the kind of hair loss.

Thinning has this many moving parts. That is the whole argument for answering it with this many.

See the Alpha Hair Serum and the full ingredient list