What is licensed here, what it is licensed for, and who may hand it over

Three licences, three distances from the shelf

Start with the legal category, because in the UK it is printed and public. A Summary of Product Characteristics on the electronic medicines compendium gives, for every licensed medicine, the indication it holds, the licence number, who holds it, and its legal category. These were read on 24 September 2026.

Regaine for Men Extra Strength Scalp Solution 5% w/v is indicated for the treatment of alopecia androgenetica in men, holds marketing authorisation PL 15513/0365 in the name of McNeil Products Limited, and its legal category is General Sales List. The matching foam, Regaine for Men Extra Strength Scalp Foam 5% w/w, is PL 15513/0366 and is also GSL, indicated for the treatment of male pattern baldness.

Finasteride 1 mg film-coated tablets are indicated for the treatment of men with male pattern hair loss to increase hair growth and prevent further hair loss. The licence read here is PL 49445/0009, held by Amarox Limited, and its legal category is Prescription only medicine.

Minoxidil 5 mg tablets are Prescription only medicine too, and the licence read here — PL 49578/0016, held by Roma Pharmaceuticals Ltd — is indicated for the treatment of severe hypertension. Not for hair. That distinction is the whole of oral minoxidil in the UK.

General sale is a legal category, not a verdict

"General sale" describes who may sell a product, not who should use it. It means a shop may put the box on a shelf without a pharmacist standing behind it. It carries no opinion about whether the thing works for you, and the licence itself is blunt about who it is not for.

The Regaine for Men Extra Strength solution licence excludes women, and people under 18 or over 65, on the grounds that safety and effectiveness have not been established in those groups. It also tells readers not to use it where there is no family history of hair loss, where the hair loss is sudden or patchy, where it follows childbirth, or where the cause is unknown.

That last set of exclusions is the most useful thing on the carton and the most frequently ignored. Sudden loss, patchy loss, loss after an illness or a birth, loss you cannot account for: those are reasons to be looked at, not reasons to buy something. An NHS GP appointment costs nothing, diagnoses the several kinds of hair loss that are not pattern baldness, and pays this site nothing whatsoever.

Prescription only, and what the prescriber is holding

A prescription is not an administrative hurdle placed in front of finasteride; it is where the warnings live. The UK Summary of Product Characteristics records that mood alterations including depressed mood, depression and, less frequently, suicidal ideation have been reported in patients treated with finasteride 1 mg, and that sexual dysfunction that may contribute to mood alterations, including suicidal ideation, has been reported in some patients. Patients are to be counselled to report such effects, and a patient reminder card about them goes out in every pack.

The card is there because of a regulator's decision, and the record is dated. The MHRA's Drug Safety Update of 29 April 2024 introduced the patient alert card after its safety review. Its Drug Safety Update of 11 May 2026 — volume 19, issue 10 — tightened the wording again: the product information for finasteride 1 mg now says that sexual dysfunction may contribute to mood disorders, and that sexual dysfunction has also been reported without mood alterations. A precautionary note was added to dutasteride, saying that depressed mood, depression or suicidal ideation has been reported in patients receiving another medicine from the same class.

The same document gives the Yellow Card counts to 31 May 2025: 170 reports of suicidal ideation for finasteride, including 19 fatal reports of suicide, and 5 reports for dutasteride, none fatal. Two things have to be said about those numbers. Yellow Card reports are spontaneous reports of a suspicion, not a measured rate, and dividing them by any population figure to produce an incidence is arithmetic that the data cannot support. And the MHRA's own summary of the wider picture is the honest one: "the literature data showed mixed outcomes."

None of which is a reason to take or not take anything. It is the reason the conversation happens with a prescriber, who can weigh it against you rather than against an average.

What the NHS pays for, and what it does not

The NHS page on hair loss, last reviewed on 24 January 2024, says that finasteride and minoxidil are the main treatments for male pattern baldness, that minoxidil can also be used for female pattern baldness, and that women should not use finasteride. About all of it, the page says the treatments do not work for everyone, only work for as long as they are used, and are "not all available on the NHS, so can be expensive if you have to pay".

In practice, for pattern hair loss, expect to pay. The longer version, including what the NHS will do for free and why that part matters more, is in what the NHS does and does not fund.

What a UK advert is allowed to say

This is the part of the UK system that most changes what you will see while you shop. The Advertising Standards Authority's advice for hair-loss advertising states that prescription-only medicines must not be advertised to the public — CAP Code rule 12.12 — and that prescription-strength finasteride and minoxidil fall inside that. A clinic may advertise a consultation; it may not advertise the treatment.

The ASA's guidance for the sector, published on 9 July 2026, adds the rest. A claim that a product can prevent, cure or reverse hair loss or baldness is likely to be seen as medicinal, and a medicinal claim requires MHRA authorisation. A non-medicinal claim such as "reduces hair loss" does not need authorisation but does need robust evidence, and the ASA says it assesses the overall quality and relevance of that evidence, not just the volume of it. Before-and-after images must reflect genuine, typical outcomes and must not exaggerate results, and testimonials do not replace clinical evidence. Since November 2021, CAP rule 12.25 has also barred cosmetic-interventions advertising from being targeted at under-18s.

Read a UK hair-loss advert with those rules in mind and most of it decodes itself. That reading is done line by line in reading a UK hair clinic advert.

Cosmetic products, and one paid link

Everything above is a medicine. Most of what is actually sold for thinning hair in the UK is not: shampoos, serums and scalp routines are cosmetics, they hold no marketing authorisation, and the advertising rules above are precisely why the good ones are careful about what they claim.

The honest alternative is cheaper and pays nothing. A generic ketoconazole shampoo from a UK pharmacy costs a few pounds. A GP appointment costs nothing. Regaine sits on an open shelf in most large chemists, at whatever the shop charges, and no one here is paid a penny when you pick it up. Where the free option is the right one, this site says so, and it says so knowing what it gives up by saying it.

The routes to a prescription in the UK

There are three, and they differ in who examines you, not in what the drug is. A GP can prescribe, though pattern hair loss is not an NHS-funded indication, so expect a private prescription. A dermatologist can, and is the right call when the diagnosis is the open question rather than the treatment. An online prescriber regulated in the UK can, and the questions to ask there are about the prescriber, the pharmacy and the cancellation terms rather than about the molecule. That is set out in getting finasteride in the UK.

What none of them will do is hand you a dose off a webpage, and neither will this one. There is not a milligram, a frequency or a "how to use it" anywhere on this site, on purpose: those belong to the label in the box and the person who wrote the prescription.