We had big expectations.

Our pre-millennial pipedreams were always clear; “The Year 2000″ was to be splashed above our lives like a marquee of technological miracles: jetpacks, robot maids, holograms, hoverboards, cure for cancer, cure for ugly, no more woes.

Cut to 2007 and the best we’ve got are iPods, vacuum robots that bump into furniture legs like retarded pets, cars that use a little less gasoline than your 1976 Monte Carlo, and every genetic defect we’ve always had. We’re still a bunch of disgruntled bald guys that can’t do a fucking thing about our shiny pates but ingest pharmaceutical poison and rub lotion on our scalps that smells like burnt condoms. But we can do it while listening to iPods!

I need hairloss with a slow hand

Not much has changed since 1997 when Propecia (Finasteride) forked from its prostate treatment roots (Proscar) to combat baldness. That marked the last FDA approved drug to treat hairloss, and is still only the second product to ever be cleared to this day. The first product, Rogaine (Minoxidil), was approved almost twenty years ago in 1988.

The vast majority of hairlosers attempting to self-medicate will typically stick with a combination of these two, complimented with similarly acting natural supplements and off-label uses of other drugs.

There’s a palpable sense of helplessness that comes with losing one’s hair; this is clear in the adolescent expectations that carry each new treatment forward, a reckless faith that however dubious the source, says this may finally be the thing to free you from your affliction and self-loathing. Every year becomes littered with the remnants of uncertainty, lost hope and disappointment.

Some things are always certain; enterprising cunt wafers entrepreneurs still continuously capitalize on men’s desperation and put out product after product of pseudoscience nonsense that read like the ads for x-ray goggles and hovercraft plans in the back of a boyscout magazine. Here’s a few recent favorites:

• Lasercomb: a device that shoots Deathstar lasers at your head while you brush hope into the space where your hair used to be.
• Toppik: a glitter kit for grown men containing baldspot glue and a salt-shaker filled with black spacedust. Just don’t go swimming. Or lay on pillowcases. Or people.
• Avacor, Folliguard: Why pay $15 for a jug of Minoxidil, the twenty year old drug, when you can pay $350 for what amounts to Minoxidil mixed with elephant toenails and strawberry jam? Nice try, fucking Harry Potter marketeers.

Some success can be found with current treatments. The recurring theme among almost all successful therapies is suppressing DHT, but this will always be a losing battle. Some men have regrowth, some don’t respond well, most just slow down the inevitable. Sprays, creams, pills, shampoo, concealers, hats, hairpieces– it gets to a point where the burden of maintenance and obsession outweighs the trauma of losing your hair in the first place.

On the off-label drug front, Nizoral (Ketoconazole), a drug normally used to treat dandruff in shampoo form, has been a popular additional treatment for hairloss in the last few years. Finasteride’s successor, Dutasteride, is being used for hairloss, but it isn’t the knockout champion as initially hoped. Topical Spironolactone is popular too, and also makes the rounds in the transsexual circuit as a chemical castrator. “I rub anti-man on my head”; quite the conversation starter.

Naturalists tend to concentrate on various antiinflammatories, Saw Palmetto being the main exception, used as a pussy natural alternative to Finasteride.

More extreme experimentalists will go for homemade concoctions and grey market drugs from other countries, like RU58841. A different mixture containing boric acid and requiring a lengthy stovetop preparation was popularized by a Japanese forum user named Waseda several years ago.

In the world of hair transplant surgery, limited donor hair will always be a problem. You’re basically taking evenly distributed hair from one area and putting it in another area, balding Peter to pay Paul. Some doctors have resorted to using extracted body hair, which is great news if you’re Robin William’s knuckles, but probably not so great otherwise.

Hair on the horizon

There’s a joke amongst hairlosers about every good treatment being perpetually 5 years away. For the first time in history, this may actually be an overestimation.

Several companies have been developing techniques to extract the loss-resistant follicles at the back of men’s heads, duplicate the cells, then inject them into the balding areas. This is commonly referred to as Hair Multiplication. True, it isn’t the ideal, which would be a vaccination against your own natural loss, but goddamn if this isn’t good enough. It’s expected to be cheaper than existing hair transplant technology, but there are still some unknowns about quality.

Leading the pack is Intercytex, a UK-based biotechnology company. They released the results of their phase II trial recently. Make no mistake about it; this is an exciting time. Not exciting in the sense of not looking like “that bald asshole” to the women across from you, but exciting in that we can see a finite amount of time left until that is obtainable.

Stay tuned!