One paid link, and the longer list of what was turned down

The one paid link

Scandinavian Biolabs. A company selling cosmetic scalp products direct to consumers, which ships to the UK and runs an open affiliate programme. Its link appears on hair loss treatment in the UK and on the entry about UK hair-loss shampoos, in both cases inside a marked box, and it earns a commission if somebody buys after following it.

The link is written as /go/scandibio, carries rel="sponsored nofollow", and the redirect layer is excluded from search engines. It is a cosmetic product and not a licensed medicine, and no claim about what it will do for anybody's hair appears beside it — which is both an editorial rule here and, as it happens, roughly what the advertising rules require of the seller.

What a payment does not buy

It does not buy a placement inside a recommendation. The pages carrying that link also name a generic pharmacy shampoo and a free GP appointment as the cheaper, more sensible options, and say in the same breath that neither pays a penny. If a paid link and an honest answer ever pointed in different directions, the honest answer would stay and the link would go.

It also does not buy a number. No score, rating, rank or "best" list appears anywhere on this site, so there is nothing for a commission to move.

The things recommended here that pay nothing

• The CQC, Healthcare Improvement Scotland, Healthcare Inspectorate Wales and RQIA registers.
• The GMC register.
• An NHS GP appointment, which is the step recommended most often on this site.
• Generic ketoconazole shampoo from any UK pharmacy.
• Regaine, which is on general sale in ordinary shops and is not linked here.
• Generic finasteride on a private prescription filled at a local pharmacy.
• legislation.gov.uk, the electronic medicines compendium, the MHRA's Drug Safety Updates and the ASA's published advice.

That list is longer than the paid one, which is a fair description of this site's economics.

What was available and refused

Hair loss is a well-monetised subject and there were more options than were taken. These were turned down, and the reasons are recorded so that a future change of mind would have to be an argument rather than a quiet edit.

Clinic referral schemes. Two UK clinic programmes pay for a completed surgery. Neither is linked, and no clinic is named anywhere on this site, because a page that tells readers to judge providers by a public register cannot also be paid per patient delivered to one. That is a structural conflict and no disclosure sentence fixes it.

Unvetted clinic networks. One international clinic network runs an open partner portal. It is not linked. Recommending a network this desk has not inspected would contradict the entire method of these pages.

HairClub. An open programme, and not used. On 24 September 2026 hairclub.com carried the statement "Bosley and HairClub are uniting to create North America's largest hair restoration company" — and Bosley's own affiliate programme is discontinued. Beyond the commercial muddle, it is a North American service being offered to a site written for UK readers, which settles it.

Capillus. No link, on a standing fleet decision.

Closed, ended or dormant programmes were checked and left alone: Bosley, Elithair, Medigo, Fly&Health and Medical Departures.

Medical-tourism facilitators — Bookimed, Qunomedical, WhatClinic and similar marketplaces — are paid by clinics rather than by publishers, and compete for the same readers. They may be described as a fact of the market; they are never linked.

Flymedi and Medigance were refused as unverified facilitators.

Luviacure was refused over an ambassador model built on income claims.

ClickBank and Digistore24 hair-loss offers were refused outright. Aggressive-claim information products about baldness are the exact thing the ASA's rules exist to restrain, and selling one from a page explaining those rules would be indefensible.

HealthTrader was refused: pharmacy-style offers carry per-country regulatory risk that a UK page has no business taking on.

Prescription medicines are not advertised here

Not a commercial position but a legal one, and worth stating on this page too. UK advertising rules bar prescription-only medicines from being advertised to the public, so there is no affiliate arrangement anywhere on this site for finasteride or for any prescription treatment, and there never will be. Where those medicines are discussed, they are discussed as licences and regulator documents.

If any of this changes

A change to the commercial arrangement means rewriting this page first, before the link goes live, naming what was added and why the reasoning above no longer holds. The refusals listed here are published so that reversing one is a visible act rather than an invisible one.

Questions about any of it go to [email protected], and the method behind the rest of the site is described on who keeps this record.