Bald Rich People Get a Bizarre New Treatment

Olga Rolenko / Getty Images A new experimental treatment could transform how doctors treat hair thinning—and some wealthy clients are already undergoing it.

“Hair banking” is a technique used to “stop the clock” on hair aging by harvesting healthy hair and freezing it for future use.

Paired with an emerging cloning technique, it could make hair transplants less time-consuming while delivering better results.

The experimental technique is relatively simple: while a patient still has a full head of hair, a professional can harvest a small number of strands.

The hairs are then cryopreserved, multiplied, and inserted back once the patient’s hair begins to thin.

“Based on very early findings, this is a really good treatment for early-stage hair loss,” hair restoration surgeon Dr.

Carlos Wesley told The New York Post .

Although clients can already visit a professional to harvest hair before it starts thinning, the cloning technique is still under development and hasn’t been FDA-approved.

Right now, researchers send harvested follicles to facilities abroad to be cloned.

The U.K.-based biotech company HairClone began follicle cryopreservation and banking in 2019.

It is developing the cloning technique and started clinical testing in March 2026.

Typically, a hair transplant may require 1,000 to 4,000 hair grafts.

People harvesting hair now in hopes of cloning later need only around 100 hair follicles extracted individually with the Follicular Unit Extraction (FUE) technique.

This minimal extraction requires shaving only a small area and takes around 30 minutes with topical numbing.