One paid link, and a list of the ones we turned down

One link on this site is paid. It goes to DS Laboratories, a shop that sells beard and eyebrow conditioning products alongside its scalp range, and it appears on the page about minoxidil on the face and in the reading about rollers. Every instance of it carries rel="sponsored nofollow", is labelled as paid in the sentence beside it, and goes through this site's own /go/ address so that it can be counted and audited.

If someone buys after following that link, this site is paid a share of the sale by the affiliate network. The price is set by the shop and is not changed by the link. No sentence on this site was written in order to make that happen, and the page carrying the link says in the same breath that there is no evidence here that any of those products grows facial hair.

What was turned down, and why

The generic over-the-counter programme

This is the significant one, because it is the money this lane is actually supposed to make. A large open affiliate programme covering generic over-the-counter products was available to this site. In this subject area that means one product: topical minoxidil.

It was refused. The central fact on this site is that the Drug Facts panel on that product gives its use as the top of the scalp and tells the buyer not to apply it on other parts of the body. Taking a commission for sending readers to buy it for their beards would put this site in the position of arguing one thing and selling the opposite, on the same page. Being paid for it is not a reason to change the argument; it is the reason to distrust anybody whose argument came with a basket beside it.

Clinics, surgeons and the people who book them

This is where the real money in facial hair restoration sits: a fee per patient who goes through with an operation, paid after the fact, typically by the clinic. This site takes none of it and names no clinic.

That includes the intermediaries — the marketplaces and booking platforms that sit between a reader and a clinic. Several of them are paid by the clinics rather than by the patient, which means their lists are not neutral even when they look like comparisons. This site links to none of them and is paid by none of them.

Aggressive-claim marketplaces

The large digital-product marketplaces carry a steady supply of hair-growth offers with claim styles that would not survive a regulator reading them. There is money in them and this site takes none of it. The same goes for pharmacy-style networks that pay on prescription products, where what is legal varies by country and a publisher is in no position to know which country a reader is in.

Anything with an income-promise recruitment pitch

One programme in this field recruits publishers with claims about how much they will earn. A company that markets that way to its affiliates is telling you how it markets to its customers, and neither conversation belongs next to a page about surgery on somebody's face.

The independent answers, which pay nothing

On most of the questions this site gets asked, the honest answer earns it nothing at all, and it is worth saying which ones those are.

• Seeing a doctor or a board-certified dermatologist about a patchy beard before buying anything at all. This is the most valuable recommendation on the site and there is no version of it that pays us.
• Checking a surgeon against a public professional register rather than against a clinic's page about that surgeon. Registers are free, independent, and not paying anyone for traffic.
• Reading the Drug Facts panel on the carton in your own hand, which is the only label that applies to the product you actually have.

How to check any of this

Every paid link on this site goes through an address beginning /go/, which is blocked in this site's robots file and marked sponsored and nofollow in the page source. Searching a page's source for /go/ will show you every paid link on it, and on most pages here the count is zero.