Hair Today (or soon anyway)?

I don't need this. I have more hair than all four Beatles combined during the height of Beatlemania, but you, you poor bastard, you might have a use for this. The promise is of a "natural treatment for hair loss".

A cursory glance at the Norwood hair-loss scale is a sobering experience for many men of a certain age. Things look bad at stage two and go seriously downhill by stage four.

Don't even consider looking at stage seven, it's ghastly. Men retaining some semblance of sensitivity to what wider society thinks of them will have turned to the hair clippers long before they reach that depressing point.

Yet heads need not be exposed in this way.

...


That, at least, is the promise being proffered by a young biochemist called Thomas Whitfield, who has been on something of a mercurial entrepreneurial journey to take his Oxford PhD thesis from the university lab to the shop counter.

The Kirkcaldy-born 29 year-old's sales pitch is that his TRX2 pills are a natural treatment that works as well, if not better, than the existing treatments based on man-made compounds. These have well-documented side-effects. Whitfield is hoping that, as the body already makes his compounds, TRX2 will not.

Even a small share of the international hair-treatment market would be significant for the start-up. "Of the two US Food and Drug Administration approved market leaders, Johnson & Johnson's Rogaine lotion and Merck's Propecia generate over $1bn in combined sales each year," says Whitfield.- Thomas Whitfield's German roots help hair loss product launch

If it doesn't work, there's always the hairpiece option, or even, to look like a pale imitation of myself, the Beatles wig.