Taking your weekly scan
A scan is five photos of your scalp — one area at a time. It takes a couple of minutes, and you do it once a week.
The week between scans matters. Hair changes slowly, and photos taken a few days apart mostly show the difference in lighting rather than the difference in your hair.
Before you start
Three things make a bigger difference than anything else:
- Even, indirect light. Daylight in a room, not a bright lamp overhead and not direct sun. Harsh light casts shadows between hairs, and shadows read as gaps.
- Dry, unstyled hair. Product and water clump hairs together, which makes thinning look worse than it is.
- The same conditions each week. Same room, same time of day if you can. What is being measured is the change, so anything that changes alongside your hair makes that harder to see.
It helps to hold your phone above your head rather than trying to see the screen. You will not be able to watch what you are capturing for most of the shots, which is expected — the guidance on screen tells you where to aim.
Taking the photos
Start the scan
Open a scan from Home. You will be asked for one area at a time rather than all five at once.
Photograph the area shown
Follow the guide on screen for where to point and how close to hold the phone. You can take the photo with your camera or pick an existing one.
Wait for it to be accepted
Each photo is checked before you move on. When it is usable, the scan advances to the next area on its own.
Retake anything that was not usable
If a photo cannot be used you are told why — too dark, too blurry, too far away, or something in the way. Retake that one area; the ones already accepted stay.
Finish and wait
Once all five are in, the analysis runs. It can take up to a minute.
“Accepted for analysis” does not mean “your hair looks good.” It only means the photo is sharp enough and lit well enough to read. It is a comment on the photograph, never on your scalp.
Why you cannot skip an area
All five are needed to submit. Hair loss is uneven, and four areas plus a guess is not a picture of your scalp — it is a picture with a hole in it, and the hole is where change might be.
When a photo turns out unusable afterwards
Occasionally a photo passes the initial check but cannot be read properly during analysis. When that happens that one area is left without figures for the week, and your scan is still saved with the rest.
You will see it marked as unclear rather than shown as a low score. There is a real difference: a low number means “we read this and it is low”, and unclear means “we could not read this”. Showing the first when we mean the second would be inventing a result.
One unclear area in a week is not worth re-doing the scan for. If the same area is unclear several weeks running, it is usually the angle or the lighting in that spot — worth changing something about how you capture it.
What happens next
Your results appear once the analysis finishes. What they mean, and why the numbers can shift, is covered in understanding your results.
From there, tracking change over time covers comparing this scan against an earlier one, and your scan history is where every scan you have taken is kept.
A new scan unlocks seven days after your last one. If the option is not available yet, that is why — the countdown is shown next to it.