In the spirit of saving the best news for last (don’t we always choose the bad news first?), we’ll cover these out of order for the big reveal. Don’t skip ahead, I see you.
The Ugly:
Overconsumption!
While there are many great ways caffeine can help your hair, there are also some precautions to take. Caffeine is good for your hair in moderate quantities. If you consume too much caffeine, you may find that your hair isn’t growing very fast.
Excessive caffeine consumption can cause dehydration and affect the hair growth cycle, making it more difficult to grow at the desired pace. It can also interfere with nutrient absorption and can increase stress levels, another common cause of hair loss.
Remember that caffeine can be found in many sources in our daily lives, including energy drinks, sodas, coffee, tea, chocolate, some medications, energy bars, and even some candies. So keep that in mind if you are monitoring your intake for general health reasons or to track any effects on your hair growth.
The Good:
Specific Instructions
If you are electing to have hair restoration with Dr. Williams, he will eliminate the guesswork when it comes to caffeine consumption. Patients prefer specifics when it comes to getting the best results, instead of rolling the dice.
He will provide instructions for caffeine intake before and after surgery. You’ll want to see amazing results, and your cooperation in following his advice is crucial. He will ask you to avoid caffeine for at least 24 hours before your procedure. And he will also advise avoiding caffeine and alcohol (and strenuous activities) during the healing post-op time. Again, optimal results come from giving your body what it needs and avoiding what it doesn’t need at the right times.
If you’re having trouble growing your hair, even with the help of caffeine or caffeine products mentioned below, you have other options. Dr. Joseph Williams is a hair restoration specialist who performs the latest state-of-the-art hair restoration techniques that can help you grow your hair faster and achieve the results you’re looking for. He has hundreds of articles in the blog section covering the various methods he uses to help his clients get permanent, natural results.
The Best:
Caffeine Stimulates Follicles
Some of us have a cup of joe every morning … and afternoon … and evening. That might put you in a good position to grow your hair faster and longer. In moderation, caffeine is great for stimulating follicles and speeding up the process of hair growth.
Caffeine products can help increase the circulation to your follicles. This stimulates the follicles and increases blood flow, allowing more nutrients to reach your hair and helping to speed up the growth cycle.
Caffeine Can Increase The Length Of Your Hair
While moderate caffeine consumption can help your hair grow, it’s the hair products that include caffeine that show a lot of promise. These products claim to increase hair growth by a significant margin. These products are available for both men and women, but are really in the early stages of development. These early developments have both positives and negatives, kind of like research on alcohol consumption.
Ongoing Research:
Over the past few decades, there have been many studies completed on alcohol and whether or not it’s good for you or bad for you. Early studies focused on that black or white, binary answer. It turns out there was no easy answer; it was somewhere in the middle, depending on a lot of factors. The answer was a very grey area.
Those early answers created two distinct groups of people.
- “Drinking is fine.”
- “I never touch the stuff.”
It didn’t take too long to realize the grey area still had a lot of information in it, as long as the right questions were being asked.
- HOW MUCH alcohol is okay?
- WHAT TYPE of alcohol is better?
- Are there any actual health BENEFITS to consumption?
This led to all kinds of deeper discussions like red vs. white, do brain cells regenerate or are they lost forever, does alcohol interact poorly with medicine or certain situations, and the big question – How will drinking affect my ability to operate this heavy vehicle?!
All this to say that caffeine research has gone through this same set of debates and studies. We’re at the place (in 2025, at least) where caffeine is a daily part of most Americans’ lives. And while debates will always rage on, we generally have accepted that (for general health) caffeine consumption IN MODERATION has some health BENEFITS, especially when sourced from coffee beans or teas (like black or green). Herbal teas are naturally caffeine-free.
Benefits include reduced fatigue and increased alertness, help with weight management in some people, and potentially reduced risks of heart disease and type 2 diabetes. The risks of overconsumption mainly cover overstimulation and an increase in heart rate and blood pressure, withdrawal symptoms, and physical pain like headaches, nausea, and diarrhea, to name a few.
What About Caffeine’s Studies in Relation to Hair?
Research has shown that caffeine can stimulate hair follicle growth and extend the anagen (growth) phase of the hair cycle. It also seems to block the effects of DHT (dihydrotestosterone), a hormone implicated in pattern baldness.
Caffeine is thought to work by inhibiting an enzyme called phosphodiesterase, which can decrease cell growth, and by potentially reducing the follicle-damaging effects of DHT.
These lab findings have led to the development of caffeine-infused shampoos and other topical treatments for hair loss. Shampoos do not need FDA approval, unless they contain dyes, before being marketed.
These results should be taken with a grain of salt (not literally) because they represent early progress in lab studies and will be re-studied and fine-tuned to verify the results in the upcoming years and decades. So, while it looks promising, there’s a long way to go. We don’t advise washing your hair with Red Bull just yet.
