Can Minox stimulate vellus hair growth in areas where there were seemingly no vellus hairs before?

31M. I've got a somewhat scraggly chin beard and mustache, but other than that, I basically just have individual beard hairs growing on my cheeks (20 max; not kidding). Additionally, I've got a small patch of beard hairs growing on both sides right where the jaw bone starts bending upwards, and a small cluster of beard hairs going down the neck right below the chin beard.

I normally trim my chin beard and mustache and shave the rest of the hairs daily. That looks somewhat okay. My brother, who's 4 years older than me, has pretty much the exact same beard pattern as I do, but my father and grandfathers all have/had full beards.

I started using Minox foam twice daily about a month ago, and obviously I know that most people don't see any change at that point. What I'm worrying about, though, is that I have the feeling I might not have any vellus hairs growing on my cheeks at all (regardless of Minox).

When I shine a flashlight on my face in front of the mirror in the dark, I can basically see no vellus hairs on my cheeks; only around the chin and mustache area. (It's also difficult to tell, I guess, because I shave that area pretty much every day.)

As far as I understand, Minox mainly helps existing vellus hairs develop further, right? Or is it also possible that I have hair follicles that currently aren't actively producing vellus hairs, but Minox can stimulate those follicles to start producing vellus hairs, which can then gradually mature into transitional and eventually terminal hairs?

Has anyone here actually experienced this — meaning you could clearly see that an area previously had basically no vellus hairs, and later developed vellus hairs or even terminal beard hairs?

(When you use the search function on this sub, you can find plenty of posts from people saying that they finally got vellus hair growth, but then they upload photos of transitional hairs. So I assume that in many of those cases, they simply hadn't inspected their face closely enough beforehand and didn't really notice the vellus hairs until they became darker and longer and became transitional hairs.)

Posted Aug 11, 2026, 11:15 AM UTC

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