By DAN HURLEY
Published: June 15, 2004

With little fanfare, the science of hair restoration has in the last few years undergone vast changes. Hair plugs, infamous for their artificial appearance, are becoming a thing of the past, as scientists refine techniques of transplanting individual hair follicles rather than circular scoops of skin, giving the hair a more natural look. At least one new hair-growth drug is in the pipeline. The cloning of individual hair cells is only a decade away, experts say - an advance that, by providing an unlimited source of replacement hair, could give even the baldest head a luxuriant thatch, while at the same time making hair transplantation surgery safer. The market for such developments is sizeable.

The Food and Drug Administration estimates that some 40 million men and 20 million women experience hair loss. Sales of Propecia, one of the most popular hair-growth potions, totaled $111 million in the United States in 2003 alone, up 13 percent from 2002. Close to 32,000 hair transplants, 88 percent of them in men, were performed in this country last year, according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, up from 29,000 in 2002. With the typical transplant running upward of $10 per follicle, and the average procedure involving about 1,000 follicles, that translates into nearly a third of a billion dollars.

"How many movie stars have I transplanted?" said Dr. Jon Gaffney, a plastic surgeon in Beverly Hills who recently became a partner in Hair Club. "Over a dozen." But, Dr. Gaffney said, he cannot name names.

"Men in general are pretty close-mouthed about any cosmetic surgery," he said. "Women will share their surgeons with their friends. The ladies are all waiting back home to see how it went. But some men, they don't tell they wives, their mothers, their best friends, their brothers."

The only men who seem eager to talk about their transplants to anyone who asks - or even to those who don't - are the ones in the transplant business. Twice in the first minute on the telephone, Mike Smith, vice president of marketing for Hair Club, the nationwide network of hair replacement clinics, told a reporter that he was "also a client."

The man who coined that catch phrase of the 1970's ("I'm not only the president, I'm also a client") is the founder of Hair Club, Sy Sperling. Although he sold the company a few years ago, he is glad, he says, that the company has recently begun offering transplants in addition to its stock in trade, hairpieces.

"I never wanted to do transplants, because they always had that doll's hair look," said Mr. Sperling, 62, reached at his oceanside home near Boca Raton, Fla. "But today there's so much new technology, it looks absolutely fantastic."

He added: "I would do one myself at this point, but I can't. I don't have enough density to work with. If you try to cover a whole football field with a little bit of sod, it's not going to work."

But Mr. Sperling said he would be the first to sign up if a technique for cloning hair cells was available. "That I would do in a second," he said.

In the meanwhile, Propecia and Rogaine, the two medications already approved for treatment of hair loss remain the foundation of any treatment plan for both men and women, even those who opt for surgery. "In the old days, we had to plan for extended hair loss," Dr. Gaffney said. "Surgery was like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Now we can hold the line with agents that, together, will have a 90 percent response rate."

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Propecia is a Registered trademark of Merck & Co.
Rogaine is a registered trademark of Pfizer.
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