Staving off incredibly insecure feelings in today’s culture of perfection can be a real challenge for hair loss men. When practically every picture that you see of men on magazine covers or sports celebrities on the NFL channel, everything is geared towards men being young and perfect unless they choose to shave it off entirely, but for most men shaving it off is not an option. Yet hair loss is a fact of life for most men 35 and up. And male pattern baldness accounts for 95 percent of men who are thinning.

Okay, so define male pattern baldness or MPB. What is it and how do I know that I have it? Well, fortunately it’s not that hard to tell. It’s is usually diagnosed visually, just as a doctor would diagnose that you have a head cold from your physical symptoms of a runny nose, swollen lymph nodes and tonsils and an inflamed throat. Another way you can tell is by looking at your family history. Did your dad or grandfather have MPB? If you have a family history of it and you’re are following the pattern which I will describe below, then you have male pattern balding.

There are several ways to determine if you have MPB. You can have your dermatologist examine under your scalp with a magnifying instrument called a densitometer. It assesses the the size of your hair follicle to see how much it has shrunk. Or you can visit a hair loss clinic for a scalp biopsy to diagnose the cause of your hair loss. But before you rush off to a clinic keep in mind that this analysis will only assess the possibility of poison-induced hair loss such as lead or arsenic which is very rare. Poisoning does not cause male pattern hair loss.

You can also determine for yourself if you are following thinning according to MPB by testing it against the Norwood Scale. This is a great tool for diagnosing male pattern baldness and avoiding misdiagnosing it. The Norwood Scale is a series of depictions as follows. In the beginning your hair will start to recede along the front of the hairline at the top and on the sides. As that continues, you will notice another bald spot starting from the other end, at the crown of your head. So as your hair at the top of your scalp continues to recede, there will be a thin band of hair separating the hair loss in the front of your scalp from the bald spot at the crown until you are totally hairless from end to end. Picture one giant horseshoe-shaped bald region at the top of your head which will leave you with hair only around the sides and back.