Many of today’s most popular hair growth supplements include essential vitamins and nutrients your hair and scalp can use directly, but for people on vitamin supplements, that creates a question about compatibility.
Many vitamins are only effective up to a certain daily dose before the body stops processing them, and some are even harmful at high doses. Understanding how topical supplements and oral ones interact is important.
Understanding the Essentials
Topical vitamins in hair and skin products are used directly by the skin at the application site. While it is possible for many to cross the blood barrier and spread throughout the body, the concentration in most topical formulas is nowhere near the potency required to have an effect that is comparable to an oral dose.
Oral vitamins, when metabolized properly, are put to use throughout the body with other nutrients.
It is possible for certain vitamins like biotin to have negative side effects if you already take a high dose orally and you add a topical dose. In the case of biotin, it is a skin irritation that resembles eczema in some ways.
It subsides with discontinuation. The concern about stacking doses is real, and it does mostly apply to a combination of high potency oral supplements and topicals, not multiple topicals. The chances are low if you only use a single over-the-counter multivitamin and an OTC hair growth serum for women, but they increase if one or both of those products is elevated to prescription strength.
Consulting With Healthcare Professionals
If you are planning on combining oral vitamins with topical products that have the same active ingredients, the best thing to do is to consult a professional. There are ways to determine if the combined vitamin dosage is still within safety thresholds, but that determination depends on the specific products you are using as well as your body mass and sometimes also other health conditions. There is no way to make a general recommendation that works for everyone.
The fact is, the vast majority of the time the combination will not be an issue, but for the few times it is, exercising caution is worthwhile. That does not mean tossing the whole prospect, though, it just means reviewing your plans with someone who is qualified to tell you whether they will work out for you or not.
It’s the same thing you would do if you were looking to add a new prescription medication that might interact with others you are already on. It’s the same thing you might do if you wanted to add 14 azelaic acid cream to an acne prevention routine that already includes other products.
Find Hair Growth Serum That Works for You
If you do not want to combine products that have the same active ingredients, you might also be able to find a hair serum that will work without stacking the same vitamins in two different products.
There are a couple dozen vitamins, nutrients, and compounds like organic acids that help encourage hair growth, so you might be able to find a supplement for your hair that does not overlap with any of the vitamins that concern you from your daily oral multivitamin. Start checking out your options today.
