I am 26 yr female… have about 1 inch long vellus-like, light brown/blond hair all over my body including buttocks, breasts, everywhere… and I have coarse, black hair on my legs.
I have been on Spiro for 2 years. Some time before going on spiro, I had laser on my legs/bikini (which reduced some of the hair and made it easier to shave) and electrolysis on my upper lip/sideburns and lower arms. While I was still on Spiro, the facial hair seemed to be under control to the point that I actually stopped electrolysis for like 2-3 months and was still ok-looking.
4 months ago, I stopped taking Sprio and shortly after I noticed I got a lot more sweaty, my scalp hair got oily along with my skin and new breakouts on face and body (the way things were before I was on spiro). Then I started to notice that my upper lip hair seemed to be coming in like crazy (i thought electrolysis took care of that and i would only get a sparse hair here or there every few weeks).
Then I noticed the vellus hair all over my body was starting to look and feel more noticeable… like longer and maybe a little coarser in texture perhaps - I thought maybe I am just imagining things but I don’t know… my lower arm hair, which I had electrolysis on (not totally but it reduced it to a comfortable level where I wasnt embarrassed to bare my arms), came back full force worse than ever! It is so much long- like freakinshly long almost 2 inches some hairs… and seems a lot denser and goes all the way around my arm, elbow, etc etc – before Sprio, it did not go all around my arm and definetly not that length. I bleached my arms several days ago and I already see tons of brown colored hairs on my arms meaning new growth. What the hell is happening???/ My legs seemed to br growing coarser/darker hair and the hairs that were zapped by laser seem to be growing back in - i can really notice the differrence on my bikini area - I also have stubble 12-24 hours later. It seems that coming off of Sprio made me grow tons of new hair and made the situation worse!
Oh dear. How upsetting. I don’t take Spiro so I have no advice, but can I ask why you stopped taking it? Does your doctor recommend you continue it? I’m guessing some sort of hormone-shock jolted your system due to the changes. 
I’m sorry you’re having to deal with this though…
My thought is that, whatever was making you hairy, has gotten worse during the time you were on spiro, but the drug suppressed it. Maybe a trip back to the doctor for some more blood tests.
Hi Marrycotter, how long were you going in for electrolysis for the upper lip area? were you finished with that area before starting Spiro?
That’s what I’m dealing with at the moment (read my signature)!
NEVER GET OFF THE SPIRO lol That’s what I learned. The hair indeed gets worse by a) growing faster b) growing darker c) new growth and in new places. Get back on it straight away.
How much were you on before? I take 50mg but I’m wondering if I shouldn’t be taking more (145 pounds, 5’5)???
Any change in hormones can cause hair growth. Some women actually have a few new hairs triggered every month by their monthly cycle. If getting off Spiro was the only problem, it was just the change that occurred as your body was shifting to the new level.
I wonder if this is true for me- its hard to tell.
I don’t think coming off the spiro made it worse per se, but it can be really intense re-experiencing the full on effects androgen excess when you’ve been spared for a while.
I wonder: I keep reading that vellus hair should be unpigmented and short. Mine is neither but its not terminal. Is that “normal”?
My vellus hairs feel pretty long, I don’t know if they got longer after stopping spiro or if they’ve always been this long.
these are called "accelerated vellus hairs’…
I experienced shaving accelerated vellus hairs makes them turn into terminals…At least on my body…
Even though people will say it is crap that shaving has an effect, believe me it does with accelerated vellus on my body…
I know this is reviving a very old thread, but being transgender, I learned a tremendous amount about spironolactone. It’s bad news for males, females, and intersex persons who don’t have to have it for its original medical purpose, which is certain types of congestive heart failure disease. First of all, it causes your body to accumulate potassium, so if you don’t carefully watch your dietary potassium intake, you can end up with hyperkalemia and a bad episode of that can cause cardiac arrest and death. Seriously. Spiro plus bananas can kill you.
Long term use leads to accumulation of visceral fats around your internal organs, which takes a Mahatma Ghandi-like hunger strike starvation diet before your body will burn if after depleting all other body fats and muscle tissue which is easier for your base level metabolism to access and burn to stay alive. Visceral fat leads to permanent fatty liver disease as one likely outcome. Spiro also modifies brain chemistry, interfering in neurosteroid production and usage inside the brain… maybe permanently. Persistent brain fog is commonplace as a side effect, and there’s suspicion that long term spiro use can lead to early-onset dementia. Spiro alters the behavior of androgen receptors in body tissues for males, females, intersex, and everyone in between. It upregulates their sensitivity, and after being on spiro for a while (4-6 months or longer) at doses of more than 25mg/day, if you suddenly quit it cold turkey, very often will cause hypersensitive androgen receptors, particularly in dermal tissue cells like hair follicles, sweat and oil glands, this phenominon is sometimes called “reflex hyperandrogenicity”, and even with the typical cisgender female testosterone levels from the small amount of testosterone produced by the adrenal glands in all healthy adult humans (ranges from a low of approx 10ng/DL to a high of perhaps 50ng/DL as tested in the bloodstream for andrenal-sourced testosterone), those small levels of the 2nd strongest androgen hormone, testosterone, are enough to activate hypersensitive androgen receptors and cause robust masculinized hairs to grow. An enzyme called 5-Androgen Reductase (5-AR) exists inside the cells of most dermal tissues of everyone, to varying degrees depending on genetics, and 5-AR turns testosterone into DHT, 400 times more masculinizing than testosterone alone, and DHT at sufficient levels is known to cause androgenic alopecia (male pattern baldness) in individuals genetically predisposed to DHT-induced miniaturization and fibrosis of hair follicle cells. Testosterone and DHT aren’t the only androgen hormones in the human body. Females, males, intersex, every human body makes other hormones with androgenic properties as it processes food, takes in and also manufactures cholesterol, which serves as a raw ingredient for processes which turn it into pregnenolone, allopregnanolone, progesterone, DHEA, androsterone, androstenedione and androstenediol. Ladies, progesterone is a weak androgen and can bind to (weakly) and activate hypersensitized androgen receptors, like those in follicle cells. How do I know?. I took spironolactone as part of my transgender hormone replacement therapy for the first year, When I quit HRT via pills and upgraded to intramuscular injected estradiol, I quit the spironolactone. I tried tapering down instead of cold turkey, but tapered much too quickly. Dropped from 100mg/day to 50mg/day for two weeks, then 25mg/day for two weeks, then zero…l and I paid the high prices and suffered from the hypersensitized androgen receptors for a full year before my body finally began recovering back towards normal pre-spiro androgen sensitivity. I also began taking injected progesterone prescribed by my new hormone doctor since progesterone is necessary for the proper maturing of breast tissue starting at about the Tanner Stage 3 of development, and a trans girl wants her new hormone-grown sweater puppies to grow as big and fast as possible… not being lewd, here, just factual! Well, the progesterone had some unpredicted effects. It turned my formerly salt and pepper facial hair, many of the white and grey hairs back to dark brown again from the roots onwards with growth… it made them young again! That helped them be susceptible to laser hair removal, but it made ALL my facial hair grow robustly since that for a while I had to shave my face and neck 3 times a day. Exactly the opposite of what I’m trying to achieve. It made my arm and leg hair grow 2-3 times faster than it ever did before I began transitioning. Fortunately I never had back hair and very little chest hair but the chest hair growth increased too, and lemme tell ya, having to shave yer boobs is not something a transgender gal enjoys at all. My prolifically boosted body hair growth has never really returned to what it was before I ever took spiro. I had to stop taking progesterone too, for at least a while, because it ended up starting to remasculinize my skin and facial features too much, despite having an estradiol level as high as a pregnant 19 yr old girl in her first trimester. With progesterone I was on my way to possibly growing full C cups on hormones… in my mid-late 50s, something which usually only transgender women who begin hormones before age 30 are ever able to achieve since breast growth depends not only upon sufficient estradiol levels and proper estrone to estradiol ratio (1:2) but also sufficient HGH and IGF-1 levels, which plummet towards nothingness after around age 30. So without high doses of progesterone I have a visit to a plastic surgeon in my near future for implants, which I’d hoped to avoid, since that’s money I could’ve spent on more frivolous and fun things… like rent, food, utility bills, etc.
So TL;DR — Spiro is very bad for you long run. It’s body hair reduction properties don’t last forever, after midnight the clocktower bells ring and that Spiro carriage and horses turn into a hairy pumpkin and hairy rats that follow you around for a long time, and there ain’t no prince with a fancy shoe coming to look for its owner. Instead you get stuck with a mean evil stepmother who tries to turn you into a werewolf if she doesn’t kill you with french fries and banana pudding. Got it?
When a client starts electrolysis I recommend they stop taking Spiro. When they do, all the hair that Spiro suppressed will come raging back, but it’s the only way for the electrologist to see all of the hair follicles that need to be treated.
I recommend anybody taking spiro for any reason other than a doctor’s prescribing it for its official on-label purpose, to taper off of it slowly enough to not cause the reflex reaction of hypersensitized androgen receptors and the destabilized brain chemistry that cause months of brain fog, short term memory impairment and bouts of extreme mood swings and depression. I learned the hard way about those things, when I believed all the people and information sources that said all those bad things about spiro were either unsubstantiated or so rare that the chance of getting such side effects was so small it could be ignored. Spiro has a dark side to it when used off-label as an anti-androgen or a hormonal/systemic body hair growth reducer. Some people don’t experience the adverse side effects as badly as others, but you have to consider that the anti-androgen and body hair reduction actions of spiro are side effects themselves. I could have saved myself a lot of grief if I’d tapered off it over a longer period of time. Now I feel obligated to warn all who’ll listen, about the bad things that it can do. Spiro can too easily become a roll of the dice while making a deal with the devil… for what seems like a nice short term benefit, but can have a heck of a price tag with compounded interest
added on when it’s time to pay the outstanding bill.