It’s painful and expensive – but can platelet-rich plasma therapy really cure baldness?

Name: Baldness cures.

Age: Hundreds of years old.

Appearance: Suspiciously hirsute.

Wait, they’ve cured baldness? For the sake of argument, let’s say yes.

This is huge! Tell me everything. Well, a recent piece in the Cut detailed the rise in platelet-rich plasma (PRP) therapy – a treatment where balding men can have their blood centrifuged and injected into their scalps.

Amazing! And it works? Again, for the sake of argument …

This sounds ominous. Sure, according to Harvard Health the treatment is painful and expensive. And you usually need to supplement it with a daily regimen of pills. And you need to be injected every six months. And if you stop either the injections or the pills, your hair will fall out again. But still …

So you have to enter into an expensive lifetime contract to get your hair back? Well, about that. PRP doesn’t so much make your hair grow back as stop you from balding any further. Anyway …

This sounds awful. Hey, there are always transplants.

Are they better? That depends on your definition of cure. A transplant doesn’t make your hair grow back either, but instead painstakingly moves follicles from the part of your head that does have hair to the part of your hair that doesn’t. Again, it’s very expensive, but this time there’s the added risk of you ending up on a TikTok compilation of bald men with bleeding heads stumbling around Turkish airports.

I thought you said they’d cured baldness. Oh please, you must be wise to this by now. Every few years we say that we’re on the brink of curing baldness with some madcap new technology, and every few years insecure men hand over the entire contents of their bank accounts to try it out.

Every few years? Sure. This publication alone heralded upcoming baldness cures in 2023 and 2018 and 2016 and 2011 and 2007 and 1999 and …

OK, OK, I get it. But why are men so keen on finding a cure? Because nobody wants to be bald, do they? If you have hair you’re still young and virile, but if you’re bald you look like an old, angry potato. Plus, study after study points out the negative impact that baldness has on men, from their self-confidence to their romantic and career prospects. Wouldn’t you do something about it if you could?

Not if it was painful and expensive. Shh, there’s money to be made here. As one PRP provider put it: “The hair-growth industry is almost like where skincare was 10 to 15 years ago.”

You mean they’ve figured out how to panic people into overspending on products that don’t actually work very well? Now you’re getting it. Welcome aboard!

Do say: “I’m going to try PRP.”

Don’t say: “Because my common sense died with my follicles.”