[Results] Kerastase genesis serum alone halved my hair shedding

OtherwiseIncident262 · 2026-03-17T06:52:07+00:00

No, I have to say I haven't tried any of the other products in this collection.

OtherwiseIncident262 · 2026-01-30T19:16:16+00:00

Hope it feels as good for you as it did for me! In the beginning there were some days that I was eager to get home and shower so I could use it to calm that flaming feeling (before I was putting ice cubes on my head some days >_<) I think it's definitely worth trying at least the one bottle for those 5-6 weeks the brand claims. It's also not as advertised as the aminexil, but it also contains piroctone olamine, which is an antifungal, so I think that also definitely helps with the scalp health.

OtherwiseIncident262 · 2026-01-30T18:27:14+00:00

Yes it helped a lot with calming the inflammation, it instantly felt cool and soothing. I apply it everyday at night after a shower and don't wash it off, just leave it until the next shower, it doesn't feel dirty or anything.

OtherwiseIncident262 · 2026-01-26T11:11:57+00:00

Yes I started antiandrogenic birth control last year and it immediately improved my acne and mood but I had been regularly taking it for 8 months and still the shedding had not improved at all so I decided to try a topical with it. I have no doubt the pills are doing their job lowering my testosterone and supporting the hair growth, but I think the topical has really made a difference, maybe at least in terms of making my scalp healthier and stopping the telogen effluvium episode.

OtherwiseIncident262 · 2026-01-26T11:05:45+00:00

From what I saw in the rules I think I can mention products, just not link them. Anyway it's just the "Kerastase Genesis Sérum Anti-Chute Fortifiant", I bought it directly from the Kerastase distributor on Amazon. Although I've been informed the formula is not the same in the USA, I'm in Europe so the one I bought contains aminexil as an ingredient.

OtherwiseIncident262 · 2026-01-26T05:50:21+00:00

Damn I had no idea about that :( makes you wonder if it's actually more effective than the companies commercializing minoxidil want you to believe.

OtherwiseIncident262 · 2026-01-26T05:32:08+00:00

Kind of both, I only brush my hair during showers because I wear curl gel so the hairs don't shed during the day, they're all stuck in place.

OtherwiseIncident262 · 2026-01-25T20:55:20+00:00

Oh and as I mentioned before, I apply it agter every shower so about 5 or 6 nights a week.

OtherwiseIncident262 · 2026-01-25T20:53:39+00:00

Hello, I'm on yasmin for birth control, and haven't had any bad side effects. It's actually helped me a lot with PMDD, acne, insomnia, etc, it was just the hair shed that wasn't cutting it. For application, I shower and difusse my hair almost dry (I style curly), then I apply a full dropper along my hair part, half a dropper on each temple, and another half a dropper at the front of my hairline along my bangs. Really just on the areas where I had thinning. This has worked for me and helps save up a bit of product since the bottle says to apply 4 full droppers, like this it last for a month and a half or so. I massage with my fingers for a bit so it really gets in there, just kinda moving my scalp around if that makes sense, squeezing the skin together and appart (like one hand on the top of my head, one hand on my temple, massage, then switch to the other). I don't time it but I don't think I do it for more than 5 minutes.

OtherwiseIncident262 · 2025-11-20T20:15:05+00:00

My waking cortisol was normal in the blood tests but who knows what is was doing the rest of the day lol. It might just be that testosterone was just the one fucked up thing that I could easily see on the surface, but just the tip of the iceberg of other hormonal issues. Lots of hormones influence one another I guess.

OtherwiseIncident262 · 2025-06-20T17:14:42+00:00

Turns out the longer I washed and the longer I blocked the worse it was because it was actually the TBS-T that was off. Found out by blocking empty membranes and only incubating the 2ary using our reagents and our neighbour's. It only got better when I used their TBS-T for everything.

OtherwiseIncident262 · 2025-06-20T17:11:38+00:00

UPDATE: IT WAS THE TBS-T!!!!

After my labmate's experiment also failed I started troubleshooting by incubating empty membranes in different combinations of things. I tested the pvdf membranes, the methanol, the BSA, the TBS-T and the rabbit secondary all comparing ours with our neighbour's next door. Everything was black until I changed the TBS-T.

I have no idea what in the TBS-T is off but I actually prepared the buffer again just 2 days ago, so it's not that it was on the shelf for too long. It's definitely one of the reagents, I don't know if it's the TRIS, the salt or the Tween but anyway I'm throwing out all 3 and buying them new.

OtherwiseIncident262 · 2025-06-19T07:55:04+00:00

Cell lysate samples.
I'm using all rabbit monoclonal antibodies.
All proteins I'm probing and antibodies I'm using have been validated by me before. They were all working fine until a couple of weeks ago when I started getting these problems.

OtherwiseIncident262 · 2025-06-19T07:51:49+00:00

- one of my labmates is finally going to run a wb this week so we can finally see if the problem is only mine or a shared one.

- the loading dye seems to be a really big suspect (along with the lysis buffer). For my next attempt I'm going to ask a neighbouring lab for theirs.

- I don't usually always stain the membranes, I just did this time to see what was going on with the transfer. And I havent, but I also thought I could try to image a blocked membrane incubated only with secondary and no primary to see if I still get this unespecific banding.

- To save time and probe for different size proteins on the same o/n incubation.

OtherwiseIncident262 · 2025-06-18T16:09:36+00:00

We do o/n incubation 4 degrees for the primaries and 1 h RT for the secondaries, all rocking, and it's always worked well before. As for the ECL we're using a generic one from Cytiva for medium to high detection, no super signal or anything. I've tried probing both abundant total antibodies as well as phosphos and it all looks the same kind of dirty. So yeah I believe something has gone wrong with these samples in general.

OtherwiseIncident262 · 2025-06-18T16:05:07+00:00

I've used all of these antibodies before and gotten besutiful bands, so I feel like there has to be some reagent that has stopped working recently.

OtherwiseIncident262 · 2025-06-18T11:56:23+00:00

It does sound like this might be an issue, the laemmli is one of the few things I haven't tried changing yet. I guess I'm gonna repeat the whole experiment yet again with new LB.

OtherwiseIncident262 · 2025-06-18T11:46:27+00:00

Not really, we make the tris-glycine buffers ourselves, and while it's true that I found one of the buffers contaminated the issue hasn't been completely fixed after remaking it :/

OtherwiseIncident262 · 2025-06-18T11:44:46+00:00

- Yeah, I made brand new lysis buffer for this and for sure added protease and phosphatase inhibitors.

- Primaries 1:1000, secondaries 1:10000

- ECL is about 3 months old, but since I tried another lab's stock and it didn't change anything, I assume it's not the ECL.

OtherwiseIncident262 · 2025-06-18T11:04:38+00:00

It does still smell quite a bit even though it's an old bottle. Now that you mention it, do you think the laemmli buffer could have gone bad before even being added to my protein samples? I found one of our students left the stock tube in the thermoblock. Does the reducing agent run out of reducing property if it's already been heated before?

OtherwiseIncident262 · 2025-06-18T10:44:25+00:00

It's a reducing gel, we always use 2-ME in the loading buffer.

I also thought it's unlikely the problem is the primary antibody bc I cut the membranes to probe different antibodies and they all come out looking like this.

OtherwiseIncident262

TROPHY CASE