The business of baldness

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All the way back in 49 BCE, emperor of the known world Julius Caesar sported history’s first known combover — which tells you everything about how long people have been struggling to cope with hair loss. For as long as there have been men with power, there have been men terrified of losing the appearance of it. Baldness has inspired some of the oldest consumer products on record, from hippo-fat ointments in ancient Egypt to pigeon-dropping salves in Greece to tonics hawked by 19th century patent-medicine salesmen who promised lustrous locks and virility. 

In the long decades since, new medical breakthroughs have continually tantalized an eager public with dreams of a cure. The 1950s saw hormonal treatments take off and the 1990s brought hair transplants. The 2010s introduced us to laser helmets and DTC platforms that turn hair loss into a subscription service. Even more recently, one startup’s potential breakthrough ignited fresh excitement and set the internet aflame The best news? Scrolling down for more now won’t cost you strands or dollars.

By the digits

$1 per day: Approximate cost of generic hair-loss drugs through subscription platforms like Hims and Keeps, the direct-to-consumer platforms that have reframed hair loss as an Instagram-friendly subscription business.

8 weeks: Time it took for Pelage Pharmaceuticals’ experimental compound PP405 to show early clinical results, with about one-third of participants seeing at least a 20% increase in hair density.

25%: Percentage of men who have some hair loss by age 25, according to the American Hair Loss Association.

85%: Percentage of men who have some hair loss by age 50, also according to the AHLA.

$7 billion: Estimated size of the global “hair restoration services market” in 2024, spanning prescription drugs, transplants, devices, and over-the-counter supplements, and projected to grow by double-digits for years to come. 

Why the hair loss market never thins

Hair loss remains an enduring problem because it’s not just about hair. It’s about aging, sex appeal, and of course, the feeling that one is in control of one’s life. Thus every new remedy — Rogaine, Propecia, transplant surgery — has sold the same fantasy of reversing time, or at least slowing it down. What in the 1990s figured as late-night infomercials for the Hair Club for Men has quietly become one of the more crowded categories in healthcare: elective, recurring, recession-proof, “perfect for your busy lifestyle.”

Now, the dream of a real cure has once again returned — this time with data. In August, New York Magazine’s viral feature “The Great Unbalding” made waves across the 500,000-member subreddit r/tressless, spotlighting a new compound known as PP405. Developed by the biotech startup Pelage Pharmaceuticals, the drug showed startling results in early human trials: Within just eight weeks, roughly a third of participants with advanced baldness saw hair density increase by 20% or more. Even more remarkable, the new hair was described not as soft “peach fuzz,” but as “proper, thick, terminal hair.”

For the first time in years, the hair-loss community — usually defined by frustration and false hope — sounded genuinely optimistic. “Hard not to feel hope,” one Redditor wrote, echoing many others. If PP405 or a similar molecule holds up in larger trials, it could upend the current $7 billion global “hair restoration services market” and transform this ancient human insecurity into a biotechnological endgame. But not everyone is convinced: “Miracle ‘cure’ 7,300,298 that’s only five years away!” another Redditor joked. 

Quotable

“Dear God, give a bald man a break.”

—Homer Simpson, appealing to the hair-loss gods, in a now classic episode of the show, “Simpson and Delilah,” which poignantly satirized late ‘80s hair-loss breakthroughs. 

Brief history

1550 BCE: An Egyptian medical papyrus prescribes a mixture of hippo fat, crocodile fat, ibex fat, and tomcat fat to restore thinning hair, in history’s first recorded baldness cure.

1850s: Patent-medicine salesmen bottle “hair restorers” like Barry’s Tricopherous and market them nationwide. Some of the U.S. government’s earliest anti-fraud cases would later target false hair-growth claims.

1988: Big Pharma joins the fight, with Upjohn’s Rogaine (minoxidil) becoming the first FDA-approved treatment for male pattern baldness and Merck’s Propecia (finasteride) following a decade later.

2010s: Scientists publish early work suggesting that CRISPR gene editing might one day target pathways involved in hair follicle miniaturization, marking the beginning of “genetic cure” speculation.

2025: A New York Magazine story on the biotech firm Pelage and its experimental compound PP405 — subhead: “Fallen follicles, rise!” — goes viral, stirring optimism for a true cure. 

Fun fact!

One possible cure for male-pattern baldness? Castration. Hippocrates was the first to note that eunuchs don’t lose their hair, and in the 1990s, researchers at Duke backed up his finding with modern medical evidence. For some reason, this is the one cure that’s never quite taken off.