Norwood–Hamilton · Stage VI
Norwood 6 (VI)
Front and vertex have joined. The band is gone. Remaining hair is the horseshoe of sides and back.
No account needed, and nothing is stored.
What it looks like
There is no island, no band, no M left to argue about. The top is one bare area from the former hairline back through the vertex. Hair remains as a horseshoe: parietal sides and occipital back. The front third of the scalp has no midline hair to measure, so hairline height in H becomes infinite in this pipeline and frontal class saturates.
Typical measurements
Face-normalised units: H is glabella to chin, so the numbers do not depend on the phone or the distance. These are the anchors the pipeline uses; they are not a diagnosis.
- Mid-frontal height
- often unmeasurable (no midline hair)
- Temple bald-column share
- ≈ 100%
- Vertex vs occipital
- ≈ 0.12
- Scalp loss-area
- ≈ 0.66
Confluence is the staging event. The engine calls the bridge gone when mid-scalp density relative to the occipital reference drops through about 0.45, and then requires a deep front or a strong vertex before it will say VI rather than a messy V. Loss-area at this grade is about 0.66 in the 2025 set, a jump from 0.40 at V.
A useful check from the back photo: the occipital reference should still be dense. If the back of the head is thin too, the pattern may not be a clean Norwood horseshoe; the report already flags unreliable reference density and will not pretend the vertex ratio is exact.
VI is also where people reach for transplants and for systems, and where a signed number is less of a joke and more of a baseline. The product will still give you the index, the area, and a link. It will not tell you to book a surgeon. That conversation is with a clinician, and the measurements are meant to travel with you into it.
How it gets mixed up
VI is confluence. VII is a much narrower, sparser wreath (loss-area around 0.82, not 0.66). A shiny V photographed from above is still V if a remnant band exists; do not let overhead light promote it.
How to get your number
Five photos (front, left, right, crown, back), a sixty-second history, about three minutes. The report costs $7, needs no account, and stores nothing. You get the roman stage, a continuous index, a genetic vs. environmental split, levers ranked by evidence, 5- and 10-year paths, and a signed link. Look at a sample report first. Details of the geometry and the papers behind the anchors: Method & sources. The rest of the scale: Norwood I–VII.
FAQ
Norwood 6 vs 7?
Both are horseshoes. VI still has a relatively full wreath of hair on the sides and back (loss-area around 0.66). VII is the wreath narrowed and thinned (around 0.82). If you still have a solid band of hair around the sides, it is VI.
Can you still measure a hairline at Norwood 6?
Often not as a height in H: there is no midline hair to land on, so the scan reports an infinite hairline height and a bald-column share at or near 1.0. Staging then leans on vertex density, bridge class, and loss-area.
norwood.fyi is an informational tool, not a medical device, and not a substitute for a dermatologist. Staging between adjacent Norwood grades has about 65–78% agreement even among experts; the report shows its confidence and the measurements behind it.