I have tried everything to subdue it including: Aloe vera, tricomin, tea tree oil, ACV, Tgel, nizoral, H&S, many different conditioners, etc. However nothing seems to work.
NothingTopical
male pattern baldness with tingling crown itch; tried alongside aloe, tea tree, ketoconazole and other scalp products
Users report
Too few reports to judge. Tricomin has been on sale since the late 1990s, but on Reddit it mostly appears in lists of add-ons beside finasteride and minoxidil, from users who had just started it. The only first-hand outcome found is a balding man who used it, among aloe, tea tree, ketoconazole and others, against a burning crown itch, and none of them helped. Older hair-loss forum regulars rank it as possibly mild scalp support, not a regrowth treatment. Felt nothing: 1 of 1 first-hand report; too few to judge.
Best effects
Claimed: higher hair count at 24 weeks (2.5% PC1358 in a 33-person trial, unpublished) · scalp conditioning
Downsides
Did nothing for scalp itch (one report) · commercial spray holds less copper peptide than the trial's 2.5% dose · slow; cannot be separated from minoxidil or finasteride
Watch
Contact irritation or allergy to the spray (alcohol, menthol, botanicals) or to copper
Evidence
Small human studies — One 24-week double-blind phase II of ProCyte's copper peptide PC1358 in 36 men (33 evaluable), announced in a 1997 press release and never published: 2.5% raised total hair count over vehicle, hair weight did not change. Animal work on a related compound (PC1031) and one in-vitro study of AHK-Cu, the copper peptide now named on the label.
Caveat
Read with AHK-Cu (topical) and GHK-Cu (topical): Tricomin is the finished, preserved, retail way to put AHK-Cu on the scalp, without the DIY-powder contamination issues, but the only human efficacy evidence is an unpublished 33-person trial of a stronger formula from 1997. Topical copper peptides raise VEGF in fibroblast culture; at cosmetic strength on intact scalp that is not a credible harm route.
Typical use
Spray onto towel-dried scalp and hair once daily, leave in (manufacturer); the 1997 trial applied 2.5% solution twice daily.
Getting it
An over-the-counter cosmetic line (spray, shampoo, conditioner) from ProCyte, later sold under Neova and now Tricomin Clinical; the leave-in spray lists alanine/histidine/lysine polypeptide copper HCl (AHK-Cu), and a newer '1% AHK-Cu Treatment Spray' states its concentration. It was never approved as a hair-loss drug: ProCyte released it as a cosmetic instead of running phase III.
Stacked with
Minoxidil: The usual pairing; users and the original forum advice apply them at different times rather than mixed. · Finasteride and ketoconazole shampoo: Tricomin is almost always a fourth or fifth add-on to the established treatments, so its own share is invisible.
I have tried everything to subdue it including: Aloe vera, tricomin, tea tree oil, ACV, Tgel, nizoral, H&S, many different conditioners, etc. However nothing seems to work.
NothingTopical
male pattern baldness with tingling crown itch; tried alongside aloe, tea tree, ketoconazole and other scalp products
Safety
Tier by safety barStrict CautionBalanced CleanEvidence only Clean
No formal cosmetic safety assessment found for AHK-Cu, and the only human study is a single 33-evaluable-person, 24-week phase II of PC1358, released by press release and never published; decades of niche retail sale add reassurance but no data. BioCentury 1997: Tricomin PC1358 phase II ↗
Silent harm 0/3
The plausible harm is scalp irritation or contact allergy, obvious within days and gone on stopping.
Known allergy to copper or to any ingredient of the spray (patch-test first) · Broken, inflamed or freshly microneedled scalp · Pregnancy or breastfeeding (no human reproductive data, though absorption is expected to be minimal)
Studies 4
ProCyte 1997 press release: phase II results of PC1358 (Tricomin solution) in male pattern hair lossrct · n=36 · 1997 Men with early to mid-stage androgenetic alopecia applied 1.25% or 2.5% PC1358 or vehicle twice daily for 24 weeks; 2.5% significantly increased total hair count in a 1 cm² area, with no appreciable change in hair weight and no serious drug-related adverse events. Single centre, press release only.
Each bead is one amino acid in the peptide's chain, coloured by its side chain: grey for non-polar, cyan for polar, blue for positively charged and fuchsia for negatively charged. Length and mix tell related peptides apart at a glance, from a two-residue dipeptide like carnosine to a 43-residue protein like thymosin beta-4. The colours describe chemistry only and predict neither effect nor safety.
non-polarpolarpositivenegative
Report grades
Every first-hand Reddit or X report is graded on its own, from glowing through positive, mixed, nothing and negative to bad reaction, and the bar shows how those grades split. Posts that look vendor-adjacent stay on the peptide's page but are left out of the counts.
GlowingPositiveMixedNothingNegativeBad reaction
% positive
The share of a peptide's graded Reddit and X reports that are glowing or positive, vendor-adjacent posts left out. A peptide with few reports is pulled toward the average of all reports, as if it had eight average ones besides its own, so two glowing posts cannot top the list. Kept peptides rank by the same reports' mean grade, shrunk the same way, and excluded ones follow in that order.
Researcher estimate
No first-hand report of this peptide has been graded yet, so the figure is the researchers' own rating out of 10 from what they read about it. It ranks alongside the computed scores until reports arrive.
Safety tier
Each peptide is tiered clean, caution or excluded from its five risk axes under the chosen safety bar. An excluded peptide has a plausible route to serious harm, so it stays listed with the reason but ranks behind every other entry, however good its reviews.
Safety bar
The safety bar sets how much risk it takes to exclude a peptide. Strict: out on any serious mechanism with little human data, or any documented serious harm. Balanced: out on documented serious harm (unless it is obvious, reversible and from a regulated product), or a serious mechanism whose harm would be silent with no human data at all. Evidence only: out only on documented serious harm in humans that is lasting, delayed or from grey-market product.
Seen harm
Documented serious adverse events in humans, from 0 for none despite real exposure to 3 for deaths or several well-documented serious harms. Serious means a hospital or emergency visit or harm lasting weeks, so a headache or a bad night does not count.
Mechanism
A plausible biological route to serious harm at the doses people use, such as growth-factor signalling, hormone-axis suppression, heart or blood-pressure effects or immune activation. It runs from 0 when none is known to 3 when a dangerous pathway has been shown in living animals.
Data gap
How little human safety data exists for the molecule actually sold, from 0 for an approved drug with large trials and years of use to 3 for no human safety data at all. A modified analogue does not inherit its parent's trials.
Silent harm
Whether the feared harm would show quickly or stay hidden, from 0 when it is obvious and goes on stopping to 3 when it is silent and delayed, like tumour promotion or slow organ damage. User reports cannot reveal a harm that takes years to appear, so a high score here limits what good reviews can tell you.
Product
The risk of what people actually buy, from 0 for a regulated pharmacy or supplement product taken by mouth or on the skin to 3 for a grey-market injectable. In one dataset of 6,441 grey-market samples, 42–71% failed basic quality criteria and 15% carried endotoxin.
Evidence
The strongest kind of study behind the peptide's effects, from an approved drug through human controlled trials and small human studies to animal work or nothing of its own. Animal results often fail to carry over to people.
Access
How people get it: as an approved drug, a compounded prescription, an over-the-counter supplement or from the grey market, where nobody checks the vial. The channel decides both the legal position and the risk of a bad batch.
Price per month
Thirty days of the typical dose, from its low end to its high end, priced at the listing a careful buyer would choose: in stock, from a shop scoring 4 of 5 on trust (third-party tested where no score is set), failing that 3, a pure pack before a blend, a European shop first, then the cheapest per mg. The range is the dose's, not the shops'. A per-dose amount counts once a day unless the dose says otherwise. Prices are in euros at ECB rates of 2026-10-29, before shipping; the shop table keeps each listing's price per mg, per gram for bulk supplements. Where no listing can be priced the researchers' own estimate stands in, and says so.
Dose users report
The middle half of the daily doses stated in at least five first-hand reports, vendor posts left out. Where its middle sits more than twice above or below the declared dose, the month is priced at it as well, since what people take is what they pay for.
Testing
Whether the shop publishes lab results: third-party tested means an independent lab checks each batch, own COA means the shop's own certificate of analysis, and no public tests means neither. A certificate shows purity, not safety.
Added peptide
Some packs sold under one peptide's name hold a second one, such as 5 mg GHK-Cu in a nasal kit, stated only in the description. Sprayed in the nose or injected it reaches the blood like an injection, so it carries the risk of that route and is tiered as the injectable form, whatever its tier on the skin. A pack whose page gives no contents list may hold more than its name.